Slate

Len Nichols, the economist who dreamed up this "level playing field" variation on the public option, says CBO's wrong—the public option won't charge higher ...

Shepard Fairey may have hoped to teach something new about art and copyright with his iconic "Hope" poster of Barack Obama. Instead, he is accused of lyring about which Associated Press photo he used. (He says he made a mistake.) But if Fairey's lying has probably made a hash of his case and lost him a lawyer, it has also raised that pesky question yet again: Just what is fair use? Was it legal for Fairey to take an AP photo and turn it into… more

... economics into account when assessing health care reform," says Marc Goldwein, policy director of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. ... and more »

A book conversation, with Reihan Salam and Sam Tanenhaus, on The Death of Conservatism ...

There is a movement afoot to kill the Google Book Search deal. That's the settlement between Google, American publishers, and the Authors Guild to relaunch Google's book search, which would allow for new digital access to out-of-print books, free of legal problems. Microsoft warns that Google and America's publishers are "misusing the judicial system" to create a "monopoly in digital books." It is joined

Earlier this summer, the Taliban released a DVD that suggested Baitullah Mehsud was losing his mojo. Unlike other propaganda videos, which show Taliban cadres conducting real ambushes in Afghanistan or firing rockets in the heavily forested hills along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, this one made me think that the Bad News Bears had landed in South Waziristan. A couple dozen guys jogged in circles, ran through some military drills, and fired their Kalashnikovs into the dirt, before forming a circle and dancing a traditional Pashtun jig.

Joel Garreau, a longtime Washington Post writer and editor who regularly works with GBN, explains that the scenario matrix is a framework for thinking ...

Declaring Mexico a "failed state" has become the new mantra in Washington and among the media. Over the last two years, the country's drug wars have claimed 10,000 lives, many in grisly beheadings reminiscent of Iraq or the Afghan-Pakistan border regions. But we have been bad neighbors, too: American narco-dollars have made Mexico the main conduit for Colombian cocaine, and an estimated 90 percent of the weapons used by Mexican drug cartels come from the United States.

The other day, my 4-year-old son asked me what a border is. It was a simple question, and yet I found myself stammering until his eyes narrowed intently. He does that, as if to say, "Aha, it seems I have stumbled upon something juicy here." He might as well have been asking where babies come from. In fact, I was merely struggling to figure out whether to emphasize that borders are shared, thus bonding either side, or whether to emphasize… more