Features
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Harder Than Soft Money
The explosion of issue advocacy -- money spent by individuals and independent groups to support political causes -- threatens to make even an outright ban on "soft" money irrelevant. Worse, much of what passes for "issue advocacy" is really covert campaign financing. Still worse, it can't be regulated.
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Why States Can Do More
It used to be that leaving states to their own devices meant rampant pollution, as each state relaxed regulation standards to attract business. No longer.
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Can Cities Escape Political Isolation?
As federal funding dwindles, we need new economic arrangements and political coalitions to unite city and suburb.
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Below the Beltway: Activist Trouble
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Apologists Without Remorse
Most leftists have accepted that the Soviet Union was an evil empire after all. Such contrition is conspicuously absent, however, from conservatives who defended apartheid.
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Shoot the Messenger
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Of Our Time: Rescuing Democracy From "Speech"
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Of Our Time: The Loophole We Can't Close
There may be no way to limit spending that is both constitutional and effective.
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How Low Can You Go?
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State of the Debate: The Chicago Acid Bath
A skeptical inquiry into the work of Richard Epstein and Richard Posner.
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Essay: A Multicultural Nationalism?
Cross-national group loyalties can neither be wished away or erased. Yet the idea of the American nation is worth defending against multicultural attack. Herewith some ground rules for a culturally diverse nation.
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Behind the Numbers: When States Spend More
Surprisingly, even without federal mandates, the states have both increased and equalized school outlays. There is a political lesson here -- about coalition building and grassroots activism.
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Screening a La Carte
Instead of a single TV rating system, why not let the PTA and the Christian Coalition -- and anyone else -- create their own?
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Will Free Speech Get Tangled in the Net?
When the Supreme Court struck down the Communications Decency Act, cyberlibertarians breathed a sigh of relief. But keeping government out of the censorship business may not be enough to assure freedom online -- censorship may now be privatized.
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Watch What You Wish For
In pursuit of campaign finance reform, many seek to reverse the precedent established by the Supreme Court in 1975, protecting campaign expenditures as free speech. But if the Court's ruling is overturned, the general protections of the First Amendment might be severely narrowed.
