"Conservatism never fails, it is only failed."

Posted at October 19, 2007 12:38 AM in response to The Right's "Ideological Purity Dodge"

I'm rather surprised to hear the percentage of midwife births in the US is so low; in the Minneapolis hospital where my son was born, they are pretty much institutionalized, fully paid for on my modest HMO plan. It wasn't quite as personal an experience as you might expect; in this hospital, the midwives were on rotating shifts, and we dealt with several. The one we'd been seeing for several months was on Christmas vacation, and my son was also born at 12:23 am (amazing coincidence!) so our midwife had just started her shift. But it was still way better than any other encounter I've had with the medical profession.

Posted at August 20, 2007 8:48 AM in response to Our Bizarro-Completely Normal Birth Experience

That's the same thing I was wondering. The landlord/renter relationship can be quite complicated, and is governed by all kinds of separate laws and expectations. Who is responsible for maintainence, for example? If a former owner now renting allowed the house to go to seed, who would be financially responsible for the depreciation? I have a hard time imagining mortgage companies would want to wade into this morass. Perhaps a separate subindustry would have to emerge to take charge of management duties on these properties.

Posted at August 20, 2007 8:31 AM in response to Own to Rent: The Way to Save Subprime Borrowers

That's funny, in my first draft I actually typed "tool," but thought it was a little harsh.

Posted at July 17, 2007 7:15 AM in response to Right Wing Lies! Says Keith Ellison Compared Bush to Hitler

I live in Rep. Ellison's district, happily voted for him and will do so again. But I do think he made a mistake here. It's certainly open for debate whether the Nazis' horrors were so unique that it's fundamentally illegitimate to compare anything to them. But the fact is, Nazi analogies have been abused for so long that it's not surprising that people have become ultra-sensitive to them.

I wouldn't suggest that public figures should calibrate their speech to avoid tripping the right-wing outrage machine's wires. But as Dick Durbin showed, if you mention the Nazis there's a pretty good chance the rest of your message is going to be drowned out in the subsequent howling. This is one area in which it's best for people to tread lightly, especially when you can easily make the same point without running afoul of Godwin's law or it's corollaries.

Naturally, none of this changes the fact that Katherine Kersten is a fool.

Posted at July 16, 2007 9:37 AM in response to Right Wing Lies! Says Keith Ellison Compared Bush to Hitler

I especially appreciate #8. I'm always puzzled by liberals who are unalloyed free traders. If you tell them that environmental regulations, worker safety laws, or corporate taxes are distortions of the market which inhibit economic activity and destroy jobs, they will rightly scoff. But if you say the exact same things about tariffs or trade laws, they'll nod their heads approvingly.

Posted at July 12, 2007 6:58 AM in response to The Ten Boxes of Heterodoxy, or Why Economics Sucks

Exactly. My short-form version of this is "economics is sociology that thinks it's physics."

Posted at July 12, 2007 6:54 AM in response to The Ten Boxes of Heterodoxy, or Why Economics Sucks

This is unbelievable. I had previously thought that Hitchens had thrown in his lot with the neocons out of opposition to the brutal practices of the Taliban and Saddam's regime. That is, the same people he vigorously opposed when they were propping up right-wing dictatorships, he now supports since they were trying to topple other dictatorships. Stupid, but at least there was a simplistic moral logic to it.

Evidently his conversion to the dark side is now complete, since he is willing to apologize for tyrants who are sympathetic to US aims and fighting Islam on every front. All he needs now is a dark mask, and we can rechristen him Darth Hitchowitz.

Posted at June 19, 2007 11:08 AM in response to Tunis off the Grill

I think you'd be interested in an article by David Graeber called "Army of Altruists" that appeared in Harper's a few months back. I really can't do it justice, but he talks about how many working-class kids join the army because it's their best opportunity to make a difference in the world. Along the way, the essay also discusses the relationship of religion and market economies, and offers what I think might be the best Grand Unified Theory of Republicanism (i.e. how the big business and religious right wings intertwine) that I've ever read.

http://www.sleepykid.org/blog/2007/01/13/army-of-altruists/

Posted at April 24, 2007 2:32 PM in response to How Would You Know if The Economy Was Working?

There appears to have been some law enforcement hope that if enough people saw the writing style, someone might recognize the writer.

It's worth remembering that hope was well-founded. Kaczynski's brother noticed the similarities between the manifesto and letters he'd received from his brother, and notified the FBI.

Posted at April 23, 2007 9:45 AM in response to The Murderer and the Media