Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion, by Seth Stern and Stephen Wermiel, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010, 547 pages, hardcover.

On April 18, 1906, a devastating earthquake struck the San Francisco Bay area, sending shockwaves from southern Oregon to points south of Los Angeles. Exactly one week later, on the other side of the continent, William Joseph Brennan, Jr. was born. Judicial conservatives might well consider Brennan the greater disaster.

“The road is always better than the inn,” said the great Cervantes, who was no doubt wrong about other things as well. The road is not always better than the inn. The traveler who was robbed and beaten on the road to Jericho probably didn’t think so. Even absent the brigands, there are a lot of variables, including the condition of the road, the weather conditions, and, most importantly, where the road leads. There is, according to an authority greater than Cervantes, a broad way that leadeth to destruction and many travel it. There is also a road to salvation and, because it is narrow, few find it and fewer still take it.

The destruction of the American Republic will not come at the hands of terrorists nor, in all likelihood, from any nation or coalition of nations arrayed against us. It will be done by us, and we are making great progress at it, as Thomas E. Woods, Jr. amply demonstrates in his latest book, Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse.

If candidate Barack Obama thought in 2007 or 2008 that America's military forces were overextended in wars, humanitarian interventions, and nation-building around the world, President Obama in 2011 apparently does not.

Voters who are hoping for a more bipartisan approach to problem solving in Washington, D.C. might not like what they hear from Congressman Ron Paul.

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is among the critics of President Obama's Libyan intervention who would like to know just whom we are defending with the imposition of a "No fly Zone" in that African nation. "Libyan President Moammar Gadhafi is every bit the madman Ronald Reagan said he was, but are the rebels adherents to Jeffersonian democracy or bin Laden's radical jihad?" Paul asked in a response to the President's address to the nation on the Libyan crisis last evening. Paul, a Tea Party favorite and a rapidly rising star in the GOP ranks, also raised the issue of constitutional authority for the President's military intervention.

Bestselling author Thomas E. Woods, Jr.  told the 250 to 300 people attending the "Nullification Now" tour in its stop at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester on March 19 that he was pleased to see people outside the building picketing the event. For one thing, it made it easy for him to find the right building among the various structures on campus, he said. For another, "It shows we're being noticed."

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney raised $4.7 million last year for his political action committee, Free and Strong America, and he shared some of that wealth through contributions to candidates for Congress committed to repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 — familiarly, if not affectionately, known as “ObamaCare.” Yet few have missed the irony of Romney campaigning now for repeal on the national level of the kind of healthcare reform he worked so hard to enact in Massachusetts. Romney has repeatedly been grilled about the similarities between “ObamaCare” for the nation and “Romneycare” for Massachusetts.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has taken sharp exception to President Barack Obama's criticism of the Republican Governor's proposed emergency legislation that would limit collective bargaining agreements affecting most public employees. Obama called the plan an "assault" on unions. Walker has said the legislation is made necessary by the state's runaway deficit. The governor told Fox News Friday morning that the President would be well advised to concentrate on budget and deficit problems in Washington, D.C. rather than Madison, Wisconsin.

When John McCain announced his choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate on August 29, 2008, the only foreign policy experience or expertise the Republican vice presidential candidate could point to was her 20 months as Governor of the only state between Canada and Russia.