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Federal judge Vaughn Walker ruled today that the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program was illegal. This has been obvious ever since the New York Times blew the lid off of the National Security Administration’s massive surveillance operation in late 2005. It is amazing that the issue is still open to dispute. Unfortunately, there is not a [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized
Having presumed to judge bloggers by their Top Ten Influential Books Lists, I think it’s only sporting if I publish my own and subject it to the same critique. Here it is: 1. Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities 2. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy 3. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate 4. Nicholas Wade, Before [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized
More on the costs of Obamacare: A USA Today/Gallup poll finds that almost two-thirds of people think the healthcare reform bill costs too much and, more interestingly, “expands the government’s role in health care too far.” We kept hearing that after the bill passed and people either learned what was actually in it, or just [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized
Audio from the Tocqueville Forum’s two-day event at Georgetown University on the “Red Tory” ideas of Philip Blond is now online. Red Toryism is a cousin to Ordoliberalism and the economic thought of Wilhelm Roepke, and perhaps a grandchild of Chesterton and Belloc’s Distributism — though all that makes it sound more old-fashioned than Blond’s [...]
Filed under: Conservatism, Culture, Economics
Austin Bramwell turns a discriminating eye to a meme that’s been making its way through the prestige blogosphere: Tyler Cowen’s proposal that bloggers list the ten books that most influenced them. Matthew Yglesias, Will Wilkinson, and Ross Douthat were among those to take up Cowen’s challenge. Think of it less as “Dancing With the Nerds” [...]
Reason‘s Katherine Mangu-Ward has a well-reported piece in The Washington Post succinctly summed up in its headline: “Traditional schools aren’t working. Let’s move learning online.” She’s not completely convincing when she writes that “it’s time to take online education seriously — because we’ve tried everything else.” Actually, I think that at one time, our schools [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized
In an interview with Justine Sharrock, Naomi Wolf shows that she doesn’t completely buy into the Left’s stereotype of the Tea Parties as racist. Not only that, she endorses states’ rights and taking on the Fed: NW: I used to think “End the Fed people” were crackpots. The media paints them as deranged. But it [...]
Filed under: liberties
That’s what Jim Antle argues at the Daily Caller. He doesn’t necessarily expect that that GOP, or chastened Democrats, will repeal it, but he points out that it simply is not true that entitlements are never curtailed — and he cites the story of the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act passed in 1988 as proof: The [...]
Filed under: Politics
Today President Obama signed into law a package of “fixes” for the healthcare reform bill passed to such uproar this month. Obamacare is not even ten days old, and it’s already starting to cost us more: Among other things, the “fixes” bill significantly expands health insurance subsidies for lower- and middle-income families while watering down [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized
Not the pharmaceutical companies, according to a federal judge who yesterday struck down patents on two genes linked to breast cancer. Biotech businesses and their scientists say the decision will stifle research, destroy incentives for product development, and grow government by leaving federally supported universities as the only institutions willing to undertake further genetic studies. [...]
Filed under: Economics