Subscribe to Excerpts
Subscribe by Email
Bill Bennett thinks that locking people up isn’t always the best solution to the crime problem. That’s good news. There remains a puzzle: HOPE and related ideas appeal to conservative pundits and think-tanks, but Republican legislators seem firmly committed to toughness for the sake of toughness. On the other hand, liberals in office tend to [...]
Archive for May, 2011
May 27th, 2011
The Democrats did. And it doesn’t matter: they were right to do so. Here’s why. The GOP filibuster of Goodwin Liu (who has since withdrawn his candidacy) has led to all sort of recriminations. “You violated the “Gang of 14″ agreement!” “Oh yeah? You filibustered Miguel Estrada.” And on and on. Dahlia Lithwick suggests that [...]
May 27th, 2011
Category: Uncategorized
Chris Christie doesn’t want New Jersey to be part of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. Free riding is in vogue. Arizona quit the WCI in 2010. This coalition of the willing is fraying a pinch. With Federal Carbon Cap & Trade legislation on the very back burner, it is up to a few liberal coastal states [...]
May 27th, 2011
Category: Uncategorized
Would-be anti-abortion terrorist hesitated to pull the trigger because he wasn’t sure he was “100% in sync with God.”
May 27th, 2011
Category: Watching Conservatives
Mitt Romney sends left-over pizza to Obama’s Chicago HQ. Tim Pawlently posts a snarky tweet accusing Obama of being on a “pub crawl.” Aren’t there any grown-ups left in the GOP?
May 27th, 2011
Category: Campaign 2012, Watching Conservatives
Republican voters can forgive Newt’s craziness, and even his immorality. It’s his occasional flashes of sanity they can’t stand.
May 26th, 2011
Last fall I wrote in some detail about “minimum pricing” of alcohol, an innovative approach to reducing high-risk drinking. At the time, minimum pricing was attracting support from a number of public health and public safety experts in the U.K. To recapitulate the key points, very heavy drinkers shop around for cheap booze, and as [...]
May 26th, 2011
Category: Woolgathering, Wretched excess
…as we depart from our normal non-partisan objectivity to point you to John Cole’s collection of titles for the Sarah Palin movie, because they are a stitch. Samples: Mooseferatu Driving Miss Crazy The Woman Who Knew Too Little The Iquitarod Citizen Vain to which I humbly add Mirth of a Nation Halfbaked Alaska
May 25th, 2011
Category: Campaign 2012, Health Care
Henry Olsen at AEI writes that blue-collar voters are “susceptible to the age-old Democratic argument that the secret Republican agenda is to eviscerate middle-class entitlements to fund tax cuts for the wealthy.” Paul Ryan’s service to the country was revealing the secret. Those voters are (at last) perceiving the truth before their eyes. And they don’t like what they see.
May 25th, 2011
Category: Drug Policy, Public management
Dr. Tom Frieden and a number of other CDC experts have put together an excellent public health grand rounds about the epidemic of drug overdoses in the U.S, which is driven mainly by a five fold increase in prescription drug deaths. The situation is in fact substantially worse than the official data reflect, for two [...]