Free Republic

By now, the story has made the rounds. Back in June, Oklahoma’s superintendent for public instruction, Ryan Walters, ordered every classroom in the state to teach the Bible between fifth grade and high school. Three months later, when he released the guidelines for companies bidding to supply the Bibles, they included some unusually specific terms. The Bibles had to contain not just the King James Version of the Old and New Testaments, but founding documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as well as the Pledge of Allegiance. And they had to be bound in leather, or some...

It seems bizarre that financial policy would get decided in a bill to repair roads and bridges and mass transit, but that’s the whole point of the Christmas tree strategy: If a bill is deemed “must pass,” then adding ornaments to it comprises a good strategy for getting things into law that otherwise might not receive a vote. Ryan touted this process as a positive example of new leadership. In recent years, House bills written in secret sped to the floor without the ability for alterations. But on the highway bill, over 80 amendments got a vote on the House...

I have been out of the country twice this year. The first time, I was in Mexico when protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, over the shooting death of Michael Brown; more recently, my two weeks in Argentina coincided with nationwide demonstrations against the lack of grand jury indictments in the cases of Brown and Eric Garner, the Staten Island police chokehold victim. Witnessing a nascent anti-police brutality movement from a distance has given me a different perspective on it, because the novelty of getting out in the streets in America and demanding justice stands in stark contrast to the...

The following 65 names are confirmed members of the now-defunct JournoList listserv. 1. Ezra Klein 2. Dave Weigel 3. Matthew Yglesias 4. David Dayen 5. Spencer Ackerman 6. Jeffrey Toobin 7. Eric Alterman 8. Paul Krugman 9. John Judis 10. Eve Fairbanks 11. Mike Allen 12. Ben Smith 13. Lisa Lerer 14. Joe Klein 15. Brad DeLong 16. Chris Hayes 17. Matt Duss 18. Jonathan Chait 19. Jesse Singal 20. Michael Cohen 21. Isaac Chotiner 22. Katha Pollitt 23. Alyssa Rosenberg 24. Rick Perlstein 25. Alex Rossmiller 26. Ed Kilgore 27. Walter Shapiro 28. Noam Scheiber 29. Michael Tomasky 30....