"If we had a true nationwide policy of self-deportation, I believe we would see our illegal alien population cut in half at a minimum very quickly," Kobach told Salon in a recent intervew. With an estimated 11 million undocumented residents in the country, Kobach is hoping to force 5.5 million people to leave the country by 2016

Kobach, elected to statewide office in Kansas in 2010, advocates "self-deportation" but says  he does not want "to do it at gunpoint." Undocumented residents, he said, "should go home on their own volition, under their own will, pick their own day, get their things in order and leave. That's a more humane way."

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The antiseptically titled “Abuse Standards 6.1: Operation Manual for Live Content Moderators” (along with an updated version 6.2 subsequently shared with Gawker, presumably by Facebook) is still available on Gawker. It represents the implementation of the Facebook’s Community Standards, which present the social media site's priorities around acceptable content, but stay miles away from actually spelling them out. In the Community Standards, Facebook reminds users that “We have a strict ‘no nudity or pornography’ policy. Any content that is inappropriately sexual will be removed. Before posting questionable content, be mindful of the consequences for you and your environment.” But, an oDesk freelancer looking at hundreds of pieces of content every hour needs more specific instructions on what exactly is “inappropriately sexual” — such as removing “Any OBVIOUS sexual activity, even if naked parts are hidden from view by hands, clothes or other objects. Cartoons / art included. Foreplay allowed (Kissing, groping, etc.). even for same sex (man-man / woman-woman" (sic).

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I happened to be in New York at the apogee of Lin hysteria, and I stopped into a sports store near Times Square in hopes of scoring his jersey as a Valentine’s Day present for my husband. After swimming through a chaotic but amiable crowd, despite it being near midnight, I was dismayed to find only unwanted XXXXXXXL sizes. A clerk confirmed there were no more; in fact they’d just gotten their first shipment -- and it had been decimated by feral shoppers.

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The age old rivalry between Russia and the West is being played out in the Middle-East, pitting the largely Sunni Muslim Arab states against Russia’s ally  in the region- Iran. An important player bridging the gap between Shi’ite Iran and the Arab Sunnis is Lebanon’s Shi’ite resistance movement known as Hezbollah (Party of God.)

Hezbollah has enjoyed enormous popularity across the entire region, perceived by many as the champions of the Arab world, successfully standing up to the bully in the playground, Israel. There was a time when the portrait of Hassan Nasrallah hung on the walls of homes and cafes from Baghdad to Casablanca. Yet, following a relatively cool reception of Nasrallah’s speech on the 16^th of February , one got the distinct impression that the Lebanese resistance leader may not enjoy the same popularity he once did with the Arab masses.

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Straightforward as this hypothesis is, I don’t buy it — I believe the longer the Republican primary battle continues, the more the GOP’s most extreme proposals are given a mainstream platform,  the more their ideas are granted public credibility and the more conservative propaganda is invisibly woven into our most basic political assumptions. In other words, I believe in the Goldwater Principle, which suggests that while the eventual nominee may fail to win the cycle's general election, the elongated nomination contest --  with its news cycle dominance and hardcore ideological edge -- will help permanently shift the supposed mainstream “center” of our public debate to the fringe right.

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The move is supposed to be “revenue neutral” – meaning the administration is also proposing to close assorted corporate tax loopholes to offset the lost revenues. One such loophole allows corporations to park their earnings overseas where taxes are lower.

Why isn’t the White House just proposing to close the loopholes without reducing overall corporate tax rates? That would generate more tax revenue that could be used for, say, public schools.

It’s not as if corporations are hurting. Quite the contrary. American companies are booking higher profits than ever. They’re sitting on $2 trillion of cash they don’t know what to do with.

And it’s not as if corporate taxes are high. In fact, corporate tax receipts as a share of profits is now at its lowest level in at least 40 years. According to the Congressional Budget Office, corporate federal taxes paid last year dropped to 12.1 percent of profits earned from activities within the United States. That’s a gigantic drop from the 25.6 percent, on average, that corporations paid from 1987 to 2008.

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The repellent reality television personality has recorded robo-calls for Romney, because nothing makes a person more excited to vote than the sound of Donald Trump invading your personal space and hectoring you for no reason. Citizens across Michigan can look forward to unsolicited phone calls from a recording of the guy who tells D-list celebrities that they're fired, only instead he will be telling them that the former governor of Massachusetts is "a good man" and former Sen. Rick Santorum is a "career politician."

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But the bird -- specifically the flipping of it -- has managed to make worldwide headlines twice now in the past month. First, there was M.I.A.'s apparently unscheduled additional choreography during her appearance at the Super Bowl halftime show, a move that occasional finger-giver Madonna "wasn't happy about." M.I.A.'s off-book version of double dream hands swiftly proved the power of a gesture to shock, as NBC – the same network that features "penis cleavage" gags on "Are You There, Chelsea?" -- hastily issued an apology and lamented that "Our system was late to obscure the inappropriate gesture." The NFL similarly decreed that "The obscene gesture in the performance was completely inappropriate, very disappointing and we apologize to our fans."

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Romer and Boskin agree that government should do nothing to save or promote the manufacturing sector in the United States.  Their critiques of industrial policy, in turn, have produced responses by prominent advocates of federal aid for technological innovation and manufacturing, including Clyde Prestowitz, a former Reagan administration official and founder of the Economic Strategy Institute.

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I am asked this all the time. It presents a number of complications.

First, you can't simply cut a hole into the side of a plane and add an extra door. Doing so would require a large-scale and extremely expensive structural redesign. And in most cockpits there simply isn't room for such an addition.

Presumably, too, you'd need to add a lavatory to the cockpit. And what about rest facilities? Long-haul flights carry augmented crews that work in shifts, and the off-duty pilots require a suitable place to relax or sleep. You'd be doubling or tripling the size of the average cockpit, which in turn would take up space already used for galleys, storage and passenger seats.

In addition there are times when it's beneficial for pilots to have direct access to the cabin, for checking out certain mechanical problems, helping the flight attendants deal with passenger issues, and so on. Plus, I don't like the idea of there being only one way out of a cockpit during an emergency.

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McMillan spent months exploring the American food system from three different angles: picking produce in California fields, working in two Michigan Walmarts, and expediting (organizing the flow of food from the kitchen to the dining room) at a Brooklyn, N.Y., Applebee's. By turns analytical and anecdotal, her book marshals first-person experience, history and current research to paint a picture of America's 21st-century food reality.

McMillan asks why the distribution of good, healthy food -- easy access to which she considers a human right -- is so often left to private companies, begging us to change the conversation from one about what people eat (she thinks that given the choice, people will eat relatively healthily) to one about healthy food's accessibility.

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A loss in Arizona next Tuesday wouldn’t be much of a problem for Santorum, since it has been seen as a Romney redoubt. But Michigan is another story. It’s demographically friendly to Santorum, who seems to fare well with blue-collar and middle-class Republicans, and when he opened a significant lead there last week it became clear that the state was winnable for him.

Thus, Michigan has become something of a litmus test for the future of the GOP race. If Santorum can prevail in the face of aggressive spending and campaigning by Romney, it will show strength and endurance that has eluded previous Romney foes, and will make the possibility of a Santorum nomination much more real. Conversely, if Romney can engineer a victory, especially one by a solid margin, it will suggest that Santorum is just the latest flash in the pan and that the pattern that has defined the GOP process so far – Romney challenger emerges, surges and is then beaten back – still holds.

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Syria looks like Libya all over again. A brutal dictator uses his military to repress his country’s protests. A civil war erupts. And, oh yes, a split opens among American liberals over what to do about it.

With a few notable exceptions, the conservative movement has been of one mind on foreign policy issues since 9/11. All right-wingers supported the Afghanistan war, and virtually all supported Iraq, as well. Every conservative believes President Obama has been a craven appeaser of America’s enemies, and now all believe that pressure should increase against Iran, even if that means another war in the Middle East.

Liberals have shown no such unanimity. They were divided not only on Iraq but also on President Bush’s 2006 surge, Obama’s Afghanistan escalation, and the intervention in Libya. Views fall roughly along two lines. Dominating the party since Bill Clinton’s ascension are liberal hawks who believe it is in America’s interest to use military power abroad to promote human rights and expand democracy. More popular among the rank-and-file of the Democratic Party are attitudes skeptical of the use of force in major wars. (The only exception to this split is over the use of drones, which nearly all Democrats support).

Though Barack Obama opposed the Iraq War when he was a state legislator, as president he is closer to the liberal hawks camp. The best account we have of the decision-making on Libya, from Michael Hastings in Rolling Stone, has the president explicitly declaring that America needs to have an expanded conception of its role in the world. Just looking after its own affairs, attending to its national interests, is “not how America leads,” Obama said. The rationale Obama employed in a speech delivered at the National Defense University in March of 2011 was the closest he has come to defining an Obama doctrine.

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We live in a world that is changing at a breakneck pace. Yet drug awareness is still stuck somewhere around the "Saved by the Bell" era. And it was lame back then too.

Though "Pot, the Party Crasher" sounds like a lesser-known B-side by the Wiggles, it is in fact an educational film developed by Project Alert, a substance abuse prevention curriculum that also incorporates classroom activities and exercises. It was developed by the think tank RAND Corp. and boasts "measurable results" in reducing drug, tobacco and alcohol use that are "grounded in solid science."

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The argument was simple: Employers were refusing to hire because they feared the "regulatory uncertainty" flowing in the wake of the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank bank reform law. Terrified that the future implementation of these reforms would crimp their profits, employers laid low. A policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation provided the smoking gun: He argued that job growth slowed dramatically almost immediately after the passage of the Affordable Care Act in April 2010 -- "this suggests," he wrote, "that businesses are not exaggerating when they tell pollsters that the new health care law is holding back hiring."

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My parents are a pretty conservative middle-class Jewish family. I was always open-minded about sex, but that's not where my decision to work in the sex industry came from. I think that had more to do with a lack of boundaries, and from having inappropriate relationships. (I had a relationship with a much older man when I was 12 years old -- the kind of thing that imprints young women who often wind up being strippers.)

When I was 16, I went to college a year early in New York and promptly dropped out. My friend said to me, "Why don't you come and work at the club where I work? They won't care that you're a terrible waitress." So I started off as a stripper, and then I moved into doing escort work, and it was through a friend that I knew from doing the latter that I got the job working supposedly to entertain rich businessmen in Singapore. Then I wound up being a guest of the Prince of Brunei and essentially becoming a member of his harem. This was about 18 years ago. (I haven't done sex work for the past 15 years.) I was in Brunei for about a year and a half on and off. We parted ways amicably and I went home and never went back.

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It was a shocking departure from the aggressive homophobia that he himself observed as "a shy, geeky, closeted teenager" in the late '90s and early 2000s. For his new book, "The Declining Significance of Homophobia: How Teenage Boys Are Redefining Masculinity and Heterosexuality," McCormack spent the year observing social interactions and collecting data from three high schools in the U.K. Over and over again, he saw the same surprising scene: young straight men being physically affectionate and emotionally expressive with one another. What's more, he found that homophobic behavior is a rarity and that when someone does express anti-gay beliefs, they "are reprimanded by other students."

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