The Time’s The Caucus blog reports that Kucinich got an injunction against MSNBC excluding him from their debate airing now (which was a change from their initial position of including him), which was subsequently (of course) protested by MSNBC. I don’t know where things stand now except that the debate is happening now without Kucinich.
I […]

I’m reading Politics in Time by Paul Pierson (link), and am struck by how little academic political science seems to affect government policy and political discussion. I find political and social analysis incredibly stimulating, especially given how tiresome I find the current presidential punditizing.
I’m particularly interested in Pierson’s purportedly novel conception of how political […]

A little out of the scope of this blog, but I wrote previously about how the previous two democratic presidential debates were proportioning out speaking time to the candidates based roughly (if not entirely) on their poll numbers. In the 10/30 MSNBC debate, the correlation between speaking time and poll numbers was near perfect (a, […]

The following is an update of what I’ve been up to recently, in several different areas…
Transcript Pledge and Letter:
Even if the leadership in both parties make a priority of publicizing committee proceedings, the committee chairs in their variable discretion (as we called it in the report) still need to make it a sufficient priority for […]

Even though that video centers on intellectual property issues, Lessig talks about how his focus came to shift away from hoping Congress would pass rational policy. He remarks that the "economies of influence" that dictate congressional policy are fundamentally corrupt, as a system. That made me reflect that Sunlight’s mission is, […]

Here’s Lawrence Lessig’s excellent recent speech on his new work on corruption:

Certainly also worth our attention is this page on his wiki, where he lists resources and research.

Among my favorite blogs lately has been Future Perfect, apparently a Nokia researcher’s personal brainstorming repository. I enjoy it so much because it reminds me of how I take notes, through either practical categorization or an off-the-cuff to-be-revisited kind of personalized conceptual banter that “Future Perfect” offers frequently. I find this refreshing because […]