Tag Archives: politics & political

thoughts on NOW and the Stupak Amendment

Dis­claimer: I haven’t been fol­low­ing the health care stuff too closely, because it is exhaust­ing, but this par­tic­u­lar aspect inter­ests me. The National Orga­ni­za­tion for Women is very upset because the Stu­pak Amend­ment passed and is part of the health care bill that passed the house the other day. Accord­ing to the NYT, the Amend­ment “would

retroactive legitimization of regulation

This NYT arti­cle caught my eye: New York’s Cab­bies Like Credit Cards? Go Fig­ure New York’s cab­bies howled when the city began forc­ing them to take credit cards. Some even went on strike, call­ing the require­ments a kow­tow to tourists and a bur­den on dri­vers. But two years later, the back-of-the-cab swipe has emerged as

is cultural libertarianism entailed by political libertarianism?

A cou­ple of months ago, I had a debate with a lib­er­tar­ian friend over whether cul­tural lib­er­tar­i­an­ism is correct/good/necessary/whatever. At the time, I was sure that I was what you would call a “cul­tural lib­er­tar­ian fem­i­nist,” as spec­i­fied in the Lib­eral Fem­i­nism entry on the Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy (a rep­utable source). Recently, Kerry How­ley

competition is as american as apple pie, except in education

Recently, I saw the above video on Face­book. Basi­cally, it illus­trates the argu­ment that a pub­lic option in health care would com­pete against pri­vate insur­ers to the ben­e­fit of those cov­ered under both kinds of plans. This argu­ment seems like it is sup­posed to appeal to the market-minded among us, who are into com­pe­ti­tion amongst

my least favorite facebook group: "cancel student loan debt to stimulate the economy"

I found out about this lit­tle move­ment through its Face­book group, “Can­cel Stu­dent Loan Debt to Stim­u­late the Econ­omy.” Basi­cally, a guy named Robert Apple­baum hatched an attractive-to-some but crazy plan to have the gov­ern­ment bail out those car­ry­ing col­lege debt by pay­ing off their loans. This would, allegedly, cause all those for­merly oppressed by

FYI, Nancy Gibbs, society doesn't own me

I sub­scribe to Time mag­a­zine because two years ago they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. How­ever, at this point, I don’t think I would renew even if they paid me to do so. Their reces­sion cov­er­age has been laugh­able, and the opin­ion pieces seem ever more ridicu­lous. One of the lat­est in a

IHS for the win

I’ve been gone because I was here, cour­tesy of the IHS.  It was an amaz­ing time; I haven’t had as much sum­mer learn­ing fun since Space Camp over ten years ago. The peo­ple were almost with­out excep­tion both intel­li­gent and pleas­ant, which is more remark­able than you might think. I am not sure whether to