The Red White and Blue Pill
Charles Koch: The people I pay agree with me, so should you.
According to George Mason University’s Mercatus Center,
calculated the Competitive Enterprise Institute
Mr. Koch failed to mention that he funds the people he is quoting. I for one am not surprised the people he pays to reach the conclusions he supports are in total agreement with him.
CIA admits to spying on US Senate computer network
Some CIA employees acted in a manner inconsistent with the common understanding reached between SSCI (Senate Select Committee on Intelligence) and the CIA in 2009
This will go not be investigated because the GOP is too busy being outraged by Obama’s fictional abuses of power.
Can we start discussing Israel’s actions as possibly motivated by a little more than pure defense yet? Can we agree that it’s possible to be critical of Israeli overreach without being opposed to Israel’s right to exist? The Times of Israel published an article on “when genocide is permissible.” Here’s their funder – Vox
Poverty replicates itself in very predictable structural ways.
Not a perfect article but worth a read. I’ve never seen any reason to support the pull-your-pants up view of poverty being a defect in individuals. If it were true the great depression would have been the great slack where a fifth of the nation decided to become lazy and live off free soup.
Satanists Demand Religious Exemption From Abortion Restrictions, Cite Hobby Lobby Ruling
Now that the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby, the Satanists point out, it strengthens their own quest to opt out of laws related to women’s health care that go against their religious liberty.
When the Satanists seem more reasonable than you, maybe you need to start rethinking your position.
George Will Shocks Fox News Panel: Tell Child Refugees ‘Welcome To America’
“We ought to say to these children, ‘Welcome to America, you’re going to go to school, and get a job, and become American,’” Will suggested. “We have 3,141 counties in this country. That would be 20 per county.”
…
Will explained. “We’ve handled what [American poet] Emma Lazarus called the ‘wretched refuse of your teeming shore’ a long time ago, and a lot more people than this.”
I don’t alway agree with him, but he is right here. The idea that there exists some subset of people who can not become American is contrary to all the historical evidence. Those kids will make it.
Sweden school choice: The country’s disastrous experiment with Milton Friedman and vouchers.
Advocates for choice-based solutions should take a look at what’s happened to schools in Sweden, where parents and educators would be thrilled to trade their country’s steep drop in PISA scores over the past 10 years for America’s middling but consistent results. What’s caused the recent crisis in Swedish education? Researchers and policy analysts are increasingly pointing the finger at many of the choice-oriented reforms that are being championed as the way forward for American schools. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that adding more accountability and discipline to American schools would be a bad thing, it does hint at the many headaches that can come from trying to do so by aggressively introducing marketlike competition to education.
The argument from the right will be that it wasn’t free market enough. That if there had been less government it would have worked.
Clearly, this reform didn’t work in Sweden. Maybe there was some basic flaw in the implementation. Maybe its just a flawed idea.
Libertarian Accidentally Shows Obamacare Success
While some of his points have validity, it’s fair to say that the broader narrative conveyed by his work, which certainly lies on the sophisticated end of the anti-Obamacare industry, has utterly failed to prepare his libertarian readers for the possibility that the hated health-care law will actually work more or less as intended.
The better it works, the more likely they will start calling it Romenycare and insist that it works because of capitalism and markets, not government.
That’s the way they square their cognitive bias with reality.
Obama Signs Passive-Aggressive Executive Order
Telling Congress, “It’s O.K., I don’t mind doing everything myself,” President Obama prepared to sign a passive-aggressive executive order on Tuesday.