Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to John de Lancie, 64.So what I learned to today is that Picard's girlfriend Vash, last seen skipping out with Q, was in the one with the Slayerfest. Huh. Guess I have an excuse to watch it again -- it's a good episode, no?

Getting to the good stuff:

1. Conor Friedersdorf takes Mark Levin more seriously than Levin deserves, but I enjoyed reading the review anyway. One point of contention I'd have. Friedersdorf says that Levin has good taste in thinkers, and I'm certainly a fan of Levin's heroes -- the Framers, Tocqueville, Montesquieu, and Locke. Well, sort of on Locke, but sure (but where's Burke? Oh well). However, while I'll grant him Marx -- no point arguing that one -- and Plato, why is Hobbes his enemy? Sounds to me as if Levin's versions of Hobbes, and perhaps Locke, could use a little more careful reading. At any rate, anyone really worried about the utopian impulse should be in my view a lot more concerned about Rousseau. Of course, Friedersdorf is correct both that Paine (and Jefferson) would rapidly get implicated in any such real investigation, and that the utopian impulse is currently found much more among radicals such as George W. Bush and Newt Gingrich than on any leading Democrats these days.

I seem to have gone on too long. Oh well.

2. ACA and the Supremes: Jonathan Cohn has a look at the issues in play. Scott Clement has some polling numbers that look bad for ACA.

3. Sarah Kliff talks to Don Berwick about where the money is in health care costs. Remember: the US
doesn't have a federal budget problem; it's a health care costs problem, and it's at least as big a disaster (some, including me, would say more) if those costs were shifted off the government and back to individuals and businesses.


4. And why William Rehnquist wasn't Hero of the Republic, by Adam Liptak.

4 comments:

  1. My favorite part of the ACA polling link are the comments that accuse the WaPo of liberal bias because they're reporting numbers that favor Republicans. (I won't use "conservatives," because the individual mandate was THEIR IDEA that they now hate!) You can't make this up. They're somehow "spinning" the results. You know, the ones they're publishing from their own poll that show results that favor Republicans that they didn't HAVE to publish. Those results.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Most of what I remember about that episode is Mr. Pitt trying to kill Buffy and Cordi. Maybe if his socks weren't too tight he would have done a better job at guiding the Russians.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "Conor Friedersdorf takes Mark Levin more seriously than Levin deserves..."

    Have you considered why you have approximately 3 conservative readers?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Late, but Levin occasionally refers to Conor as 'Friedersdork', which is really all you need to know about the depth of Levin's mind.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.

Who links to my website?