I have my enthusiasms.  Right now it's Orwell.  Here's the essay Bookshop Memories at the blog George Orwell Novels.  Orwell writes,

In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money. 

On the home front, gasoline, food, and other commodities were rationed.  The east and west coasts were blacked out at night.  The ages for drafting men were lowered to eighteen and raised to forty-five, and the physical standards were steadily diminished; towards the end of the war, it was said half in jest, that the only requirements for draftees were that they be able to see lightning and hear thunder.  Over fourteen million American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines were under arms (Rhenquist, William H. All The Laws But One: Civil Liberties in Wartime (New York; Vintage Books, 2000), pg. 188)

Mr. David Dudley Field, on behalf of Lamdin P. Milligan, argues, regarding the prerogative power of the president, that:

The oath of office cannot be considered as a grant of power.  Its effect is merely to superadd a religious sanction to what would otherwise be his official duty, and to bind his conscience against any attempt to usurp power or overthrow the Constitution (Ex parte Milligan, 71 U.S. 2 (1866)).

Civil Disobedience

There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.

-Thoreau, Henry David.  Walden and Civil Disobedience (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company Riverside Editions, 1960), pg. 240.

"Clarity, Simplicity, Brevity, and Humanity"

Please read "Writing English as a Second Language" by William Zinsser at AmericanScholar.org.

Zinsser writes,

So what is good English—the language we’re here today to wrestle with? It’s not as musical as Spanish, or Italian, or French, or as ornamental as Arabic, or as vibrant as some of your native languages. But I’m hopelessly in love with English because it’s plain and it’s strong. It has a huge vocabulary of words that have precise shades of meaning; there’s no subject, however technical or complex, that can’t be made clear to any reader in good English—if it’s used right. Unfortunately, there are many ways of using it wrong. Those are the damaging habits I want to warn you about today.

In another national survey (Internet) just after the election itself, Sniderman and Stiglitz (2008) thoroughly explore racial prejudice and 2008 vote choice. They find that American voters do not hesitate “to make frankly derogatory comments about blacks.” For example, about one out of five whites surveyed described “most blacks” as “violent”; essentially the same fraction also described them as “boastful”; almost one out of three said they were “complaining.” Overall, the investigators ranked 10% of respondents as high scorers on a prejudice index (built from five items). Among Republicans, variation in this prejudice index does not significantly relate to declared votes for Obama. However, among Democrats, the effect is significant and strong; for those in the bottom third on the prejudice index, 95% voted Obama; but for those in the top third the percent drops to 62, for a difference of minus 33 points. This large defection appears partially offset by voters who view blacks with “esteem.” Considering those in the bottom third on this esteem index, 77% voted Obama; but for those in the top third the percentage rises to 96, for a difference of +19 points. (Relatedly, Craemer et al. [2009] report that some white voters may have come to a psychological closeness to Obama, enabling them to vote for him.)

Using these above differences, as reported in Sniderman and Stiglitz (2008), we go on to take the positive esteem number (+19) from the negative prejudice number (−33), implying a 14-point loss among Democrats. While that calculation suggests to us a substantial racial cost, translation of that number into a precise vote estimate remains uncertain, and the authors themselves do not offer any such calculation. However, that task is carried out by Aistrup, Kisangani, and Piri (2009) in their analysis of a pre-convention survey from the South. In a logistic regression model, with the dependent variable vote intention for McCain or Obama, and under extensive controls (e.g., ideology, party identification, SES), they find racial resentment has a strong impact. For example, among Democrats, when the race resentment index shifts upward one standard deviation, the probability of a McCain vote increases from about 40% to 58%. Unfortunately for our purposes, this survey confines itself to one part of the country.

-Lewis-Beck, Michael S, Charles Tien, and Richard Nadeau.  "Obama's Missed Landslide: A Racial Cost?" in PS: Political Science and Politics, Vol. 43. No. 1 (published online January 15, 2010).

Having had the filibuster wielded against them so effectively in the 103rd Congress, Democrats, now in the minority, made full use of their prerogatives under Senate rules; major legislation frequently encountered extended debate-related problems. The minority Democrats because increasingly adept at using extended debate and the Senate’s loose amending rules in combination to get their issues onto the Senate agenda. By threatening or actually offering their bills as often non-germane amendments to whatever legislation the majority leader brought to the floor and using extended debate to block a quick end to debate, Democrats forced Republicans to consider a number of issues they would rather have avoided–most prominently the minimum wage, tobacco taxes, campaign finance reform, and managed care (Sinclair, Unorthodox Lawmaking, 107)

Sinclair, Barbara.  Unorthodox Lawmaking: New Legislative Processes in the U.S. Congress (CQ Press: Washington, D.C.), 2000. 

Manual Labor

I am not a manual labourer and please God I never shall be one, but there are some kinds of manual work that I could do if I had to.  At a pitch I could be a tolerable road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or even a tenth rate farm hand.  But by no conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-minter; the work would kill me in a few weeks (Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 32-33).

Four Texts on Socrates

If Socrates was right in holding that the desire for gain, for distinction, and for knowledge are inherent in human nature, then a Marxist regime will necessarily be at constant war with the most powerful as well as the most noble propensities of man.

-Four Texts on Socrates, ed. Thomas G. West and Grace Starry West (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), pg. 11.

Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers

Western institutional theorists have concerned themselves with the problem of ensuring that the exercise of government power, which is essential to the realization of the values of their societies, should be controlled in order that it should not itself be destructive of the values it was intended to promote.  The great theme of the advocates of constitutionalism, in contrast either to theorists of utopianism, or of absolutism, of the right or of the left, has been the frank acknowledgement of the role of government in society, linked with the determination to bring that government under control and to place limits on the exercise of its power

Ville, M. J. C., Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers (Oxford, Clarendon Press: 1967), pg. 1.