Let me leap to the defense of Damon Linker once again, partly out of appreciation for his link to our humble blog. Linker, following Rawls, thinks that we can separate issues of “mere life” from those of “the good life.” That is, the liberal state can and should address issues of common security and welfare, … Read more
Alex’s recent blog post about UBS reminded me of a story I read in today’s New York Times about an Israeli spy living in Lebanon. Despite the fact that he was recruited in 1983 by the Israeli government and had been actively spying since then, according to the article, the red flag that raised suspicions … Read more
So UBS, the Swiss bank, has admitted to participating in massive, massive fraud, and using its US banking division as basically a tax-evasion service for wealthy Americans. Their entire US individual-banking service was run for that purpose, as it turns out. The current political environment is starting to look a lot like the Great Depression, … Read more
The big auto companies are back for more money. Color me shocked. Really, just stunned in surprise. It seems as though the only rationale for giving them more money at this point is a jobs welfare program. That is not necessarily a bad move; the fallout from the disentegration of Detroit could easily undo all … Read more
Will Wilkinson rightly diagnoses the Republican Party’s brain drain: smart people don’t want to hang around with “flag-waving moral reactionaries” no matter how much they all might agree on the godlike efficiency of the market. But he still does believe in the market, so he can’t, or hasn’t, given himself up to the Democrats just … Read more
Mark Hemingway is upset because the NY Times suggests that more GOP governors favor the stimulus than actually do. Fine, fair enough. Perhaps the Times suggests that all or most GOP governors support the stimulus, when really only five (Rell, Gibbons, Schwarzenegger, Crist, Douglas) do so explicitly. But this is curious: Hemingway says that the … Read more
A whole slew of conservative (or conservative-ish) writers are taking on the idea of “illiberal liberalism,” by which they mean a liberalism that tries to exclude dogmatic religious communities from respectable public debate, or which puts such restraints on those communities (by, say, forbidding them to use religious justifications for their public-policy preferences) that they … Read more
It was no secret that life imitated art this past election, as, throughout the campaign season, fans of NBC’s The West Wing couldn’t help but draw parallels between the junior senator from Illionois who would become President of the United States and the freshman congressman from Texas who did the same thing in the fictional … Read more
Harvard students had Monday off for President’s Day and I made use of my free time by checking in on the final day of this years Harvard Speech and Debate tournament. A good friend of mine from high school was in town coaching his student in the tournament, and the guy made it all the … Read more
In honor or Presidents’ Day, C-SPAN released the results of a survey given to 64 presidential historians, asking them to rank all the presidents in ten categories ranging from Pursued Equal Justice for All, Crisis Leadership, Economic Management, etc. The results of those ten categories were then compiled to generate a list of all the … Read more