This is a response to Max and Cathy, which got a little long for the comments section in the original post. Max, I agree with you that government subsidies for corn and sugar are bad. However, whereas you say that “the food industry” is “majorly dysfunctional,” I would argue that federal food policy is majorly dysfunctional. Moreover, I can agree ... Read More
There was really no justification for the status quo ante in the federal student loan program. The model was this: Students applied for a loan from a private loan company, which loaned them money guaranteed by the federal government. They pocketed the profits, and all risk was assumed by the federal government. Students who had access to this program’s version ... Read More
The article I wrote with Peter recently went up, and I had a few thoughts that I wanted to add. I’m from Massachusetts — Plymouth to be exact — so this election was pretty much the only big news for the greater part of our J-term. This was bound to be one of the big new stories, simply due to ... Read More
On December 23rd, 2009, Harvard Law student Hebah M. Ismail’s ’06 landed at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport with the intention of joining Clinical Instructor and Global Advocacy Fellow Ahmad Amara, as well as another fellow student, for research on land disputes between the Israeli government and Bedouin communities in the Negev desert. At airport security, Ismail was interrogated for ... Read More
No, I don’t think he’s an anti-semite (see Jonathan Chait on that). But he has been reckless enough with the truth, and obsessed enough with Israel, that much of the recent criticism is spot-on. Take Sullivan’s latest post on CPAC for example. He begins by heralding Ron Paul’s surprise victory in the CPAC straw poll, and ends up with yet another diatribe against Israel and the ”neocon” quest ... Read More
A lengthy NYT article on the Tea Partiers — which Sam comments on below — does a good job of sheding light on what this movement is all about. The Tea Party is obviously one of the biggest topics in American politics right now. Their recent convention showed that they are here to stay for quite a bit. But how ... Read More
I’m hardly an expert on modern warfare, but this New York Times op-ed is pretty clearly silly and deserving of refutation. Defense consultant Lara Dadkhah is discussing the way that NATO air forces have voluntarily drawn down their airstrikes and are thus tying one hand behind their back. She argues that this is incredibly harmful since “America does not have ... Read More
The other day, my girlfriend (who’s not a math fan) sent me a link to a new New York Times post by Steven Strogatz, an applied math professor at Cornell who is writing a blog that will, over the next few weeks, give readers a quick tutorial on math, “from pre-school to grad school.” Strogatz starts slowly; his first piece ... Read More
Will Leiter gives us an overview of Obama’s “bipartisan summit” strategy and asks, in effect, will it work? Some smart people whom I respect say that this is capitulation and error (see Yglesias’ “doomed strategy” post). That viewpoint conforms nicely with the basic stance on the left since Scott Brown’s election, which has been that either (a) healthcare reform is ... Read More
Well, the Senate just spent a year trying and failing to pass a moderate, compromised-to-hell health reform plan. Which, incidentally, if that is comprehensive reform I’m not really sure I’d like to see their “tinkering around the edges”. However, the important thing is that they managed to defuse special interest anger by buying them off with legislative goodies. Wait, that’s ... Read More
I spent this past week complaining about government dysfunction — so I’d be remiss not to mention the Citizens United ruling. Of the many bad things that happened last week Citizens United is probably the most significant. The ruling will make our government worse. How much worse? It’s not clear — some argue that risk-averse corporations won’t be inclined to ... Read More
