Adam Winkler’s Gunfight is a book of contradictions: a dispassionate book about a passionately debated topic, a sane book about competing insanities, a page-turner about legal doctrine and obscure bits of history, a piece of serious scholarship combined with journalistic flair.

I’m certain there are people who have thought about this a great deal, but “do you or an organization you work for stand to profit as a result of the actions of this panel” seems a more effective threshold for participation in federal advisory boards.

Because the definition of “lobbyist” seems a bit too flexible to prohibit the biggest of the professional influence peddlers.

A recent New York Times profile casts John McCain as a tough guy for his response to the attacks of September 11. The fact that McCain was duped by the charlatan Ahmed Chalabi doesn’t seem to detract from the senator’s reputation as a straight talking maverick. For that matter, nobody outside the blogosphere seems terribly concerned that McCain’s top foreign policy and national security adviser was one of Chalabi’s closest American allies.