Follow us as we watch President Obama’s State of the Union! Summary: Obama’s State of the Union Address was reminiscent of his victory speech on the day he was elected. He appealed to voters on all parts of the political spectrum by focusing on issues that are at the forefront of the minds of most Americans. Obama touched on nearly ... Read More
James Fallows makes a lot of good points in his long Atlantic article, “How American Can Rise Again.” I’ll highlight just one. Let’s call it “the pathos of helplessness”: The full details are beyond us here, but the crucial point is that in principle, the United States itself has the power to correct what is wrong in each case. Take ... Read More
In a culture that often values boldness above all else, American politics is surprisingly allergic to big ideas. Despite the clamor over President Obama's health-care reform plan, it is important to remember that it proposes fairly incremental changes.
The question is not intended substantively. The bill that is being debated by the Senate is an ugly mess from the perspective of any reasonable observer, left, right, or center. However, as inefficient and messy as it is, it will still do a much better job than the status quo of providing healthcare to the people in the country who ... Read More
The U.S. Supreme Court may be about to render the most important business decision of the decidedly pro-business Roberts era, but one might not know it from the details of the case. The plaintiff is a small conservative advocacy group, not a major corporation; the focal point is a corporate-funded anti-Hillary Clinton documentary that was banned by the FEC, as ... Read More
Public discourse in the age of the Internet Republic.com 2.0 by Cass Sunstein Princeton University Press, September 2009, $24.95, 272 pp. Create Your Own Economy by Tyler Cowen Dutton Adult, July 2009, $25.95, 272 pp. Cass Sunstein begins Republic.com 2.0 by asking his readers to imagine a world where their control over the media they consume is total.”It is some ... Read More
Tom Ridge on the creation and evolution of the Department of Homeland Security and the future of the Republican Party. Tom Ridge is the first Secretary of Homeland Security. He is a former Representative and Governor of Pennsylvania. He was very visible in the 2008 Presidential Race as an aide to Senator John McCain. Harvard Political Review: Can you describe ... Read More
I read the initial article in The Crimson confident that the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., would make waves far beyond Cambridge, Mass. Allegations of racial profiling mounted; the charges were ultimately dropped. But let’s not forget, as Stanford Law School professor Ralph Richard Banks wrote in The Times, that the police did exactly what we would hope they would ... Read More
You know who is one of the most dependable Democrats in the Senate right now? Arlen Spector (D-PA). It does not take any great insight to figure out why that is; Spector is rightly afraid of a successful primary challenge from Joe Sestak over his insufficient progressivism. On the Republican side of the aisle is further proof positive: the threats ... Read More
Affordable housing in uncertain times About 12 million Americans spend more than half of their annual income on rent or mortgage, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Affordable housing is of particular concern in urban centers, due to high population densities and costs of living. Even after the collapse of the housing bubble, paying rent remains ... Read More
Daring to end homelessness While the recent collapse of the U.S. housing market has prompted a renewed debate about American homeownership and its future, the related topic of homelessness has remained largely ignored. Hundreds of thousands of citizens live lives of addiction and mental illness on the streets of American cities. On any given day, 900,000 people — including 200,000 ... Read More
So I was reading this article by Nate Silver. It’s a good read, and you should look at the whole thing, but the last paragraph in particular caught my eye. The bigger risks, however, are probably for the Republicans. We’re not in What’s the Matter With Kansas anymore: the left’s economic populism has the potential to be an extremely strong ... Read More
New role, new tactics for Kathleen Sebelius In December 1999, Kansas Insurance Commissioner Kathleen Sebelius expressed concern that new privacy rules imposed by the federal department of Health and Human Services would undercut state jurisdiction over health information. Federal bureaucracy, she argued, could not handle enforcement as nimbly as the states. A decade later, Sebelius will have the opportunity to ... Read More
