Blue v. Red
This week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is an apt one for thinking on a grand scale — of the where-we’ve-been-and-where-we-must-go variety. Essays in that vein fill the tabs on my open browser window, and as is often the case, most of them come from the center-right’s great aggregator and one-line editorialist Glenn Reynolds.…
Joel Kotkin at Forbes: With their enthusiastic backing of President Obama and the Democratic Party on Election Day, the bluest parts of America may have embraced a program utterly at odds with their economic self-interest….Any move to raise taxes on the rich — defined as households making over $250,000 annually — strikes directly at the…
Economic development options, from all-government to government-dominated; the heartless-to-caring axis in politics; Southern New Englanders’ “independence”; solidarity between Romney and his garbage man; the media coup d’etat. Continue reading on the Ocean State Current…
Two lines of debate in the battle of Left versus Right cross frequently. One is the question of whether history has an inexorable pull toward which it progresses, making it possible for there to be a “right side” of history that one can predict beforehand for a given issue. The other is whether one’s side…
Believing the political worst of priests; spinning bad SAT results; the skill of being trainable; the strange market valuation in Unionland. Continue reading on the Ocean State Current…
In the battle of hidden video and archived recordings that is sure to characterize political campaigns during the digital age, audio emerged from a 1998 presentation by then-state-senator Barack Obama at Loyola University in Illinois. The statement that made headlines (at least on the center-right side of the media) was now-President Obama’s belief in economic…
Today: September 11, global change, evolution, economics, 17th amendment, gold standard, and a boughten electorate… all to a purpose.
Today’s quick(ish) hits touch on: Partisanship as evidenced by Bill Maher, Rachel Maddow, and Nick Gillespie. The libertarian-conservative divide and this year’s election. Ed Fitzpatrick’s one-way love of fact checking. The dependency nation as an existential threat. Read all about it on the Ocean State Current…
The Stephen Hopkins Center for Civil Rights’ panel discussion on the event of Milton Friedman’s hundredth birthday offset “liberaltarian” Brown professor John Tomasi with June Speakman, a Roger Williams professor more inclined to agree with the prefix of the coinage. The panel would have benefited from the inclusion of an unabridged conservative who agreed with…
President Obama’s teleprompter style has been the subject of substantial (often mocking) critical commentary, and with some justification, as this nearly parodic 2010 video from a Virginia classroom proves: Given recent political events, one can sympathize with the desire of public officials to avoid extemporaneous speech. In a world in which one’s every public utterance…
