The great difficulty with Guantanamo is it was perceived correctly as being a place where people were not being detained subject to rules. I don't think the world thinks that you can't detain suspected terrorists - the world thinks you can do that, but you have to do it pursuant to rules and to clear charges.
The core idea that underlies all of our democratic states, the core political idea, is this idea that it's not that one person is the sovereign; it's that all of the people are sovereign.
Mormonism was born amid secrecy, and throughout its existence as a religion it has sustained a close yet complex relationship to the arts of silence.
Our post-denominational age should be the perfect time for a Mormon to become president, or at least the Republican nominee. Mormons share nearly all the conservative commitments so beloved of the evangelicals who wield disproportionate influence in primary elections.
From a constitutional standpoint, the religion of a candidate is supposed to make no difference. Even before the founding fathers dreamed up the First Amendment, they inserted a provision in the Constitution expressly prohibiting any religious test for office.
FDR's justices were allies while he was alive, but after he died, they developed four totally different theories of what the Constitution is, two of which are considered conservative and two of which are considered liberal.
The Chinese public is deeply nationalist, which matters to China's unelected political leadership as much as U.S. nationalism does to American politicians. As China becomes the world's largest economy, there is meaningful public pressure for its power status to advance in parallel. Any alternative would be humiliating.
Cyber attacks are not what makes the cool war 'cool.' As a strategic matter, they do not differ fundamentally from older tools of espionage and sabotage.
Prisoners, according to the law, who are non-U.S. citizens and are detained outside the U.S. - including in Guantanamo Bay - are denied 'habeas corpus.' They are also denied the right to claim the Geneva Conventions confer certain rights on them.
The modern presidency, as expressed in the policies of the administration of George W. Bush, provides the strongest piece of evidence that we are governed by a fundamentally different Constitution from that of the framers.
The 1994 elections that brought Newt Gingrich to power in the House decisively shaped the remaining years of Bill Clinton's presidency, pushing him further to the right and bringing out his latent tendency to govern every day as if an election were being held the next.
Given the pervasive secrecy of the Bush-Cheney administration, and the sorry consequences of that disposition, President Barack Obama's early emphasis on openness in government seems almost inevitable.
Like many great world faiths, Mormonism has an important strand of sacred mystery. Mormon temples have traditionally been closed to outsiders and designed with opaque windows.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the major international question was the relation between Islam and democracy.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the major international question was the relation between Islam and democracy.
Given the pervasive secrecy of the Bush-Cheney administration, and the sorry consequences of that disposition, President Barack Obama's early emphasis on openness in government seems almost inevitable.