Via Steve Benen, we see that former Rep. J.D. Hayworth, who is challenging John McCain in the Republican Senate primary in Arizona, has some interesting ideas about what gay marriage will lead to: “You see, the Massachusetts Supreme Court, when it started this move toward same-sex marriage, actually defined marriage — now get this — […]
Paul Waldman
Paul Waldman is a weekly columnist and senior writer for The American Prospect. He also writes for the Plum Line blog at The Washington Post and The Week and is the author of Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success.
Posted inArticle
Pro-Lifers For More Abortions.
Imagine that you are strongly opposed to abortion rights, and what you’d like is for all abortions to be illegal. Then you’re faced with two alternatives: 1. In Path 1, federal funds will not be used to give anyone abortion coverage, but the number of abortions will either stay the same or increase. 2. In […]
Posted inArticle
Pizza Menus and Irrational Doctors.
A few days ago, Dan Ariely of Duke University, was on NPR to discuss his research on the way doctors make decisions, which mirrors the troubling ways consumers make decisions. If a pizza menu starts with the pie with everything, then descends into options with fewer and fewer toppings, people will order more toppings than […]
Posted inArticle
The Difference Between the Present and the Future.
Today’s Washington Post features a piece by two Democratic pollsters, Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen, advising Democrats to jettison health-care reform, because “the battle for public opinion has been lost. Comprehensive health care has been lost. If it fails, as appears possible, Democrats will face the brunt of the electorate’s reaction. If it passes, however, […]
Posted inArticle
The Global Digital Divide.
Lots of people, myself included, have lamented the fact that for all America’s dominance of the Internet, there are other countries, like South Korea, where they have better broadband service than we do. But when you look at the entire globe, it’s obvious that the world is divided into Internet haves, and Internet have-nots. Play […]
Posted inEducation in America
An Education Program We Can All Support.
Progressives surely understand by now that Barack Obama has no intention of making the rhetorical case for progressivism a theme of his presidency. This is a continuing disappointment; if he spent as much time attacking conservatism as, say, Ronald Reagan did attacking liberalism, we might actually be able to change our national conversation on the […]
Posted inArticle
Put Your Filibuster Where Your Mouth Is.
Now that it’s looking like there’s not much they can do to stop health-care reform (if it does go down, it will be because of recalcitrant centrist Democrats), Republicans have taken to warning their opponents that if HCR passes, it will mean electoral doom for Democrats. So here’s a question some intrepid interviewer might ask […]
Posted inArticle
The Future of Health-Care Rhetoric.
What will Republicans say if health-care reform passes? This is a question I’ve begun to ponder, since the things conservatives have been saying up to this point — “death panels,” reform is a “government takeover of one-sixth of the economy” — have been totally unmoored from reality. But if reform actually passes, those arguments won’t […]
Posted inArticle
It’s Not About the Ideology.
Just in the past few years, we’ve seen the political pendulum swing wildly back and forth between the left and the right, from the post-9/11 conservative heyday, to the progressive revival in 2006-2008, and now, supposedly, to a new dawn for the GOP. Andrew Sullivan laments how “ideology has infiltrated everything, it has saturated public […]
Posted inArticle
Post Romantic
Despite its current financial woes, the Postal Service is still the best mail delivery service around — and one of the government’s bigger successes.
