The Supreme Court today handed down its judgment on Massachusetts v EPA, the first case the Court has heard regarding climate change. At issue in the case is the EPA's role in monitoring and regulating automobile emissions. Section 202(a)(1) of the Clean Air Act, 42 U.S.C. § 7521(a)(1), requires the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency ("EPA ") to set emission standards or "any air pollutant" from motor vehicles or motor vehicle engines "which in his judgment cause[s], or contribute[s] to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare." The EPA and the Bush Administration,...

With Animal Liberation (1973), Peter Singer launched the animal rights movement. Twenty years later, a professor at Princeton and one of the most influential philosophers of our time, Singer continues to play the traditional intellectual in a flagrant, almost obtuse way. He does not miss an opportunity to unsettle our ‘self-evident’ truths and challenge our thought processes. In sum, his writings will not leave you indifferent and I highly recommend them. On January 26 Singer wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times in favor of medical intervention to keep a severely mentally impaired 9-year old girl, Ashley, from...

A North Dakota farmer serving in the North Dakota state legislature as a Republican has submitted the paperwork needed to make himself the nation's first industrial hemp producer. Rep. David Monson (R-Osnabrock) filed an application with the state's Agriculture Department to cultivate about 10 acres of the crop. Included in his application were his fingerprints, and $37 to cover the cost of a criminal background check.

Advocates of industrial hemp production laud the crop for its wide-ranging industrial applicability - which ranges from nutrition to paper products to textiles - as well as the relatively low environmental impact

Attempts to operate intelligence gathering and sharing systems in obscurity put the entire homeland security mission at risk. Since 9/11, several scandals have suggested that public backlash can scotch programs. The solution is not to tighten the secrecy around these programs: almost nothing the government does is kept secret for long. Rather, federal and state officials must bring legislators, civil liberties groups, and the public into a wide-ranging political discourse on the appropriate level of domestic surveillance in a time of terrorism. Robust public debate, legislative oversight, and checks on agents will give our domestic intelligence efforts—which most observers consider necessary—a certain level of trust and resiliency to weather the snafus inevitable with new or newly-tasked bureaucracies.