This Timothy Burke post on the current political moment deserves better than to be buried in the Links Dump. He’s beginning to despair because it looks like “there are many things which could happen which would improve the lives of many Americans which are not going to happen and perhaps cannot happen.” Take health care, […]
Category: Health Care
When Oldsmobiles Turn Into Cadillacs
Kevin Drum checks in with the latest from the class wars: In the middle of a rant about healthcare reform and the compromise over the Cadillac tax, one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers says this: The idea that public employees make less than those in the private sector is a myth that needs to die. Most […]
The Death of Sincerity
Paul Krugman had a post today calling Obama the WYSIWYG President: There’s a lot of dismay/rage on the left over Obama, a number of cries that he isn’t the man progressives thought they were voting for. But that says more about the complainers than it does about Obama himself. If you actually paid attention to […]
Think of It as Kid Insurance
Janet has a typically thoughtful post about tuition benefits, following on a proposal to eliminate tuition benefits for employees of the University of Illinois. Janet does a great job of rounding up the various pros and cons of the benefit and its possible elimination. It takes no time at all for the “Tuition benefits are […]
Baseball and Tea Parties
The baseball playoffs are upon us, which means that most of the sports media are consumed with baseball talk. I find this faintly annoying, as I’m not really a fan of baseball. And, really, I can’t be a fan of baseball, for the same reason that I can’t be a conservative Republican activist– I don’t […]
Notes Toward a Unified Theory of Political Blogging
Theorem: The worthiness of a blog post on a political or social topic is inversely proportional to the number of times derisive nicknames are used to refer to the author’s opponents.
Thursday Sense of Obligation Blogging
A couple of things that I’m not excited to blog about, but sort of feel like I ought to say something about: 1) The Washington Monthly article about StraighterLine, an online program that lets you take college courses for $99/mo. The article is all breathless excitement about the revolutionary transformative power of technology, but it […]
Barney Frank Is Not Amused
The results, however, are amusing for the rest of us: It’s nice to see somebody in a safe district taking advantage of essentially having tenure. We could use more of this.
The Blighted Hellscape of Socialized Medicine
Tobias Buckell had some heart issues a while back, and the stress of Worldcon aggravated things a bit: By Sunday morning, I was feeling completely sapped, and not getting enough sleep. I tried to nap before the pre-Hugo ceremony, but felt like I’d hit a brick wall by the time I’d walked over. I had […]
Cities in Their Old Age
Continuing the morning’s theme of “crushingly depressing stories from the New York Times,” there’s also a downer article about cities where there are more deaths than births: What demographers call a natural decrease has been occurring for years in tiny rural towns and in some retirement meccas in the South. But the phenomenon is relatively […]