Washington Post

Anyone who lives in Los Angeles can tell you in gruesome detail what it’s like to sit in traffic. Though crisscrossed by a maze of freeways, L.A. annually leads the nation in time spent idling. And while the city’s air pollution has visibly diminished over the years, smog, like traffic, remains an axiom and a curse of L.A. life.

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Suppose Mitt Romney ekes out a victory in November by a margin smaller than the number of young and minority voters who couldn’t cast ballots because the photo-identification laws enacted by Republican governors and legislators kept them from the polls. What should Democrats do then? What would Republicans do? And how would other nations respond?

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If D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray and Jeffrey Thompson had just been hip to the latest wrinkles in shadowy campaign finance, they might not be in trouble today.

Gray unseated incumbent Adrian Fenty in a hard-fought Democratic primary in 2010. Thompson is widely believed to have funded a $653,000 secret campaign on Gray’s behalf. Prosecutors haven’t alleged that Gray knew about the campaign at the time but say that at least some of those working for his election did. Three members of the D.C. Council, including one who supported Gray’s candidacy, have called for his resignation as shoes have continued to drop.

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What good are shareholders? Not much, say Jay Lorsch, a Harvard Business School professor, and Justin Fox, the editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, in whose current issue they outline the shortcomings and tally the surprisingly few benefits of shareholder capitalism.

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On the 236th anniversary of our nation’s birth — squalling to the world in our very first utterance that all men were created equal and endowed with unalienable rights — the essence of our politics remains who exactly are those men who are self-evidently equal and inherently vested with those rights. Over the subsequent two-plus centuries, we’ve invoked the spirit of our primal shout every time we’ve expanded our definition of equal men — when we moved to popular elections, abolished slavery, gave women the vote, enacted civil rights legislation and today, when gays and lesbians are winning the equal status and unalienable rights that heterosexual Americans take for granted.

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On the eve of the Supreme Court’s much anticipated ruling on Obamacare, here is a simple test for detecting the politics behind a decision: When reading the rulings, look for the double standards and answers to questions not posed by the cases themselves. By those measures, the Supreme Court’s record in the past week fairly reeks of the justices’ politics.

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