Eve Conant

David Boies, the prominent Democratic attorney who is working with his former adversary Ted Olson to argue for gay marriage, sees the case as consistent with his work as a lifelong liberal, and with Olson's as a conservative.

Perry v. Schwarzenegger kicked off today, with early-morning candlelight vigils outside the courtroom and, inside, a line of civilians hoping to view history in the making.

NEWSWEEK correspondent Eve Conant is blogging this week from inside the California Supreme Court as it hears arguments on the constitutionality of same-sex marriage. Theodore Olson, in his opening statement is arguing that the Supreme Court has described marriage as a basic civil right, one associated with the right to liberty and intimate choice. "In short, in the words of the highest court in the land, marriage is the most important relationship in life." Judge Vaughn Walker is pressing...

The named plaintiffs in the Proposition 8 trial didn't plan on being high-profile crusaders for gay marriage. Then their rights got taken away.

The lifelong Republican who argued Bush v. Gore before the Supreme Court—and won—goes to court this week to overturn California's ban on gay marriage. Huh?

The twitter Tweet Tracker collection on the National Review's The Corner blog is rife with commentary on U.S. security failures. "Mutullab could get on a plane but joan rivers couldn't," tweets the Review's Kathryn Lopez.  But the tweeting doesn't seem to be resulting in any of the changes conservative commentators have been calling for all day, which is for top officials to get sacked over security lapses leading to the thwarted Christmas Day bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253.

HotAir.com's Allahpundit comes up with this Crayola Akbar line in a post exploring how two of the four leaders allegedly behind the plot to blow up Northwest Flight 253 last week had been released by U.S. authorities from in late 2007. "This reads like a plot of one of the those over-the-top David Zucker attack ads against the left─except it wasn't the left that presided over this one," writes Allahpundit.

In a label-crazy country, why are the ingredients in alcoholic beverages such a mystery?

Some spirit makers boast natural ingredients and nutritional additives in an effort to attract a health-conscious clientele. But can alcohol really be healthy?

"Obamacare" is dominating the otherwise sluggish headlines this week. The National Review's editor Rich Lowry and Robert Costa, the William F. Buckey Jr. Fellow at the National Review Institute lead the site with a hopeful salvo for conservatives: "Five Reasons It Might Not Pass."Their No. 1 reason? "Public Revulsion." The latest NBC/Wall St.

I was one of those people totally unprepared for the massive snowstorm currently hitting D.C. that's headed up north. This fact leads me to why I am writing this—fear not New Yorkers and other Northern-folk, there are lots of ways to have fun in the snow when everything is sold out.Last night when my friend Colleen mentioned renting cross-country skis I thought, brilliant!

"That was such a strange speech," writes Victor Davis Hanson for the National Review's The Corner. Like many other conservative writers he's perplexed that Obama would offer more troops and a timeline for departure in basically the same breath.

Hundreds of private e-mail messages and documents by climate-change researchers were stolen from a server at a British university and circulated among global-warming skeptics last week, fanning the flames of the debate over global warming just ahead of negotiations in Copenhagen to hammer out an international climate accord.

Kentucky police say that census worker Bill Sparkman, whose body was discovered naked and hanging from a tree in a rural cemetery Sept. 12 with the word "Fed" scrawled across his chest, committed suicide.

They are calling it the Manhattan Declaration, a 4,700-word manifesto reaching into scripture and signed by 148 Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical leaders.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force on Monday said women in their 40s should stop routinely having yearly mammograms, and older women should have them only every other year, recommendations that have divided the medical community ("It's crazy—unethical, really," Harvard radiologist Daniel B.

At least one gun used by Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood was an FN Herstal 5.7 semiautomatic—which also happens to be a weapon of choice for Mexican cartels who battle the military and police.

"I could not believe I was hearing that question all weekend: why did he do it? Why did a Muslim, in touch with Al Qaeda, open fire on U.S. military personnel?" asks Rush Limbaugh. "I tell you something, folks, political correctness and a lot of other things are gonna lead to our downfall." Limbaugh also discusses how the House Judiciary Committee just voted to strip the Patriot Act of a provision allowing the government to spy on people who are not linked to known terrorist groups, i.e. "lone...

An ordained Baptist chaplain and army captain, Roger Benimoff spent two tours of duty in Iraq and months between deployments counseling soldiers in the U.S. During his career, he provided spiritual guidance to American soldiers through crises of faith, bereavement, and trauma until he himself broke down.

Maine should have been an example of strength in numbers for gay-marriage proponents but instead turned into heartache. If you don't count the District of Columbia, according to Gary Gates of the Williams Institute, a think tank at UCLA's school of law devoted to gay-rights policies, Maine "has the highest number of same-sex couples per 1,000 households (so the highest per capita) of any state." So what happened?

Last week Glenn Beck prophesied that Sarah Palin was on a potential roll with her upcoming book tour, one that might carry her into 2012—as a real rogue.

The question of Afghanistan and what to do with it is looming large this week in the conservative blogosphere. Early yesterday, Hot Air blogger Ed Morrissey called out New York Sen.

Advocates and opponents of gay rights both eagerly await new census data on same-sex couples.

Black infant mortality has plummeted in one Wisconsin county. Why?

At least he's not if you're a conservative pundit tracking the Obama administration. It's been almost a week since Glenn Beck ran a segment featuring White House Communications Director Anita Dunn counting Mao Zedong and Mother Teresa among two of her favorite political philosophers, and the "mainstream media," according to Bill O'Reilly, are still refusing to deal with it.O'Reilly, mystified, asked Brit Hume: "Look, what if you said, well, look, Hitler came out of nowhere after the Weimar...

One day, when Sila Folow was an 8-year-old girl living in Mali, four elderly women held her down on the dirt floor of an outhouse and, in keeping with local tradition, used a sharp blade to cut out her clitoris and most of her labia.

The recent hanging death of a census taker highlights growing controversies around the census.

James Von Brunn may have acted on his own, but he's hardly alone.

Then: While in Rome for his honeymoon in May 2007, Andrew Speaker learns he has an extreme form of drug-resistant tuberculosis. He flies to Montreal, crosses the border, gets quarantined by the U.S. government and sparks a TB scare.