Archive

  • The Military Can't Handle the Truth

    Flickr/West Point Public Affairs

    The real scandal this week around military sexual violence isn’t the release of the latest in a string of Department of Defense (DOD) reports to show stunning levels of sexual assault—hell, even the DOD estimates 26,000 actual incidents compared to the 3,374 reported incidents. It’s not the fact that this year marks the third in a row to show an increase in sexual violence (under law, DOD has published them yearly since 2004), or that the latest report “found that among the one-third of women who reported sexual-assault allegations to a military authority, 62 percent suffered retaliation for speaking up.” It’s not even the arrest, two days before the report came out, of the officer in charge of sexual assault prevention programs for the Air Force on sexual battery charges.

  • Sentimental for the Stones Ages

    George Nikitin/Invision/AP

    The Rolling Stones aren't playing anywhere within 900 miles of New Orleans on their "50 And Counting" tour, so it's not exactly as if I have an anguished decision to make now that the Feds have confiscated my Lear jet. But unless offered a free ticket, I doubt I'd have felt any qualms about staying home with Philip Larkin's Collected Poems and my toenail clippers even if the boys had taken it into their heads to headline JazzFest in NOLA last week. (This year's crowd had to settle for lesser dinosaurs: Billy Joel, Hall and Oates, Fleetwood Mac. Word is that Billy—now inching his way back into critical respectability, since you can't deny Mr. Glibmeister's songcraft—knocked it right out of the park.)

    Not that I ever saw them in their prime. My one and only Stones concert was in 1994, by which time I was being paid to go and wouldn't have considered attending otherwise. As intense as it was—defining my high-school and college years from the moment a 15-year-old me bought their Hot Rocks greatest-hits compilation at, ahem, the Guantanamo PX—my version of Stones-mania was all about the records, above all the great run from 1968's Beggars Banquet to 1972's Exile on Main Street.

    Thanks to my genius for timing—or my parents', anyway—those albums were already back catalog by the time I discovered them. The first Stones release I bought when it was new was Goats Head Soup, and talk about a letdown. But just when I was getting fed up with their slipshod Seventies crapola, 1978's Some Girls renewed my fanhood—for a while, anyway.

  • Are Vouchers Dead?

    AP Images/Ben Margot

    When news broke Tuesday that the Louisiana Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s voucher system, which uses public dollars to pay for low-income students to go to private schools, the fight over vouchers made its way back into the headlines. The Louisiana program, pushed hard and publicly by Republican Governor Bobby Jindal, offers any low-income child in the state, regardless of what public school they would attend, tuition assistance at private schools. It’s something liberals fear will become commonplace in other states in the future if conservative lawmakers get their way on education policy.

  • Congress, the Death Panels' Death Panel

    The Affordable Care Act contained many provisions meant to help "bend the curve" of heath-care costs, including cuts to provider payments, incentives for doctors and hospitals to keep patients healthier, and pilot programs to test innovative new ways of providing care. It also included the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), a group of medical experts who would evaluate treatments, drugs, and the like to see if Medicare was getting the most bang for its buck.

  • Hillary Clinton Gets Brief Preview of 2016 (If She Runs)

    Titanic Belfast / Flickr

    One thing I neglected to mention in today’s post on “demand-side scandals” was the attention Republicans gave to Hillary Clinton during yesterday’s hearings over Benghazi.

  • Eight Months Until the End of Job Lock

    Flickr/walknboston

    For years, even before Barack Obama was elected, one of the many complaints liberals (mostly) had about the current employer-based health insurance system was "job lock"—if you have insurance at your job, particularly if you or someone in your family has health issues, then you're going to be hesitant to leave that job. You won't start your own business, or join somebody else's struggling startup (unless they provide insurance), and this constrains people's opportunities and dampens the country's entrepreneurial spirit.

    That this occurs is intuitively obvious—you probably know someone who has experienced it, or have experienced it yourself. And today there's an article in that pro-Democrat hippie rag The Wall Street Journal entitled "Will Health-Care Law Beget Entrepreneurs?" Amid the worrying about the implementation of Obamacare in January, and the quite reasonable concern that the news could be filled with stories of confusion, missteps, and dirtbags like that Papa John's guy cutting employees' hours rather than give them insurance, to avoid the horror of increasing the cost of a pizza by a dime, it's a reminder that there will probably be lots of stories like this one in the news too, stories about people whose lives have been changed for the better by the fact that Americans will have something they've never had before: health security.

  • Deficit Reduction Is Ruining America

    Flickr/Talk Radio News Service

    It’s official: The spending cuts of 2011 and 2012, pushed by Republicans as necessary given our deficits, have damaged the recovery and kept more people out of work. According to Jackie Calmes and Jonathan Weisman of The New York Times, “The nation’s unemployment rate would probably be nearly a point lower, roughly 6.5 percent, and economic growth almost two points higher this year if Washington had not cut spending and raised taxes as it has since 2011.”

  • How Our Tax Dollars Are Fueling Inequality

    (Good Jobs Nation)

    My name is Roxanne Mimms and I work for a food service contractor at the National Zoo.  I work full time but make barely minimum wage. I’m here because workers can’t live off what contractors pay us.  I’m here because I don’t want my two children to grow up on public assistance.  I’m here because I have dreams – My American Dream is a good job with fair wages to provide for my children, being able to pay my bills on time and save for the future.  I’m here because I want to help all the workers at the National Zoo whose dreams are on hold.”

  • Demand-Side Scandals

    Gage Skidmore / Flickr

    Darrell Issa’s control of the House Oversight Committee began with a bold claim. He declared Barack Obama “one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times,” and pledged to uncover the assumed misconduct and corruption of the administration.

  • Why Israel Can't Be Part of Obama's Calculus on Syria

    AP Photo

    From Tel Aviv, so the usual map sites say, you could drive to Damascus in three hours and 20 minutes, if only there were no borders, barbed wire or war in the way. From vacation cottages in the Upper Galilee, where city people go to find some quiet, you can look across the Jordan to the ridge that barely blocks a view of the Syrian capital. Just past the horizon, impossibly close to us, people are killing their countrymen. Cities are being crushed into rubble.

    Israel is a place with very little agreement on anything. Perhaps the closest thing to a national emotional consensus is horror at what's happening in Syria. But there's also unusually wide agreement, especially among policy and strategic experts, that Israel can do pretty much nothing to affect the outcome of the Syrian conflict. At most, it can take limited steps to protect narrow Israeli security interests. For now, the government and military appear to be partners to this consensus.

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