For most Americans, crime deterrence and prisons go hand-in-hand. The belief that we can make ourselves safer by locking up vast numbers of our fellow men has held special sway as an argument in our criminal justice discourse and policy for the past four decades.

To listen to most pundits, in contemporary America, perceptions of governmental regulations generally break along predictable political lines.

By now, you’ve seen the photos, read the news stories, and heard the measured—and not so measured—opinions of experts focusing on the April 20 BP explosion at the Deepwater Horizon rig, where oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico.

Hurricane Katrina made the U.S. remember New Orleans. Prior to the storm, the city’s proud citizens and talented musicians kept alive the unique and irreplaceable local culture, while bead and booze-craving college co-eds never missed an opportunity to stop in the Crescent City. But the U.S. government had seemingly decided that if it closed its eyes, clicked its heels, and wished New Orleans away, the city’s failing school system, poverty, faulty levees, corrupt political apparatus, and rampant crime would just disappear into the Mississippi. Katrina made it impossible to ignore those problems any longer.

Tom Frank is a well-respected journalist and Wall Street Journal columnist, whose 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas? gained notoriety for positing that Republicans had duped those in the Red States to vote against their economic interest in favor of hot-button social issues like abortion and gun-control.

After nearly eight seemingly interminable years, we are finally coming to the end. In six months, President Bush and his entire administration will leave office. And even if the next president has the last name McCain and not Obama, many American liberals will most likely feel some cause for celebration when George, Dick, and Condoleezza finally depart the White House for good.

Every day it seems there’s news of a fresh kill. Turn to any major publication’s arts section lately and you’ll probably find an article about a full-time film critic losing his or her job.

Dreams have consequences. The common American desire to recreate ourselves, if taken too far, can destroy the link between our identity and reality.

Even taking into consideration Pastor Mike Huckabee’s quixotic run for the presidency, the 2008 presidential campaign has been noticeably devoid of discussions about religion and so-called moral values. For many Americans (and especially many New Yorkers), the change has been a welcome one.

According to Jonah Goldberg’s new book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, the world’s first true fascist leader was Woodrow Wilson.