Political Thought
One can sense a desire, in the broadly defined Tea Party movement, to repeal something among the many decisions, amendments, and statutes that have diluted the Founders’ experiment of divided government powers. Todd Zywicki marks the introduction of the Seventeenth Amendment to the list of candidates for rethinking: Election of senators by state legislatures was…
Being unemployed for long periods is a terrible experience for those who lack the resources to survive an extended financial drain. Especially when a family is on the line, the hopelessness and fear of joblessness is one of modern life’s greatest anxieties. Still, at a certain point, unemployment benefits begin to become a weapon of…
Robert Whitcomb ruminates over the “psychological” conservatism of New England: New Englanders are in fact more psychologically conservative than most of the rest of the country, whatever the social and economic liberalism ascribed to them by the press. That their rates of divorce, illegitimacy, alcohol and other drug abuse, personal bankruptcy and other signs of…
Catching up on my reading, I highlighted the following, from First Thing editor Joseph Bottum’s thoughts on the Ground Zero mosque controversy: Real democracy is messy. It’s got protestors and agitators and banners and manners and morals and financial pressures and gossip and policemen on horses keeping an eye out to make sure it doesn’t…
Theodore Gatchel suggests that one way to improve the function of Congress is to narrow the focus of each legislative item: If the Democrats had broken health-care legislation into smaller, “clean” bills, each of which dealt with a single aspect of health care, President Obama might well have gained more of what he wanted, and…
I’ll be relieved when today has passed, for community engagement reasons, and I’ll be relieved when Tuesday has passed, for political involvement reasons, and I’ll be relaxed when November has passed, for professional reasons. Which all serves obliquely to explain why I’m just now, of a Saturday morning, catching up on Mark Steyn’s week of…
This unsigned editorial in the Providence Journal makes a reasonable case: Much of the debate about unemployment assiduously avoids the basic causes of long-term joblessness and falling wages. One is globalization. Large U.S. companies, aided by modern telecommunications and fast transportation, find it increasingly easy to move jobs abroad, where the wages tend to be…
How about a frightening assessment of our relationship with China: Why would China so brazenly challenge the world’s economic powers like this? Because the country’s leaders know what our leaders are only beginning to understand — that China would probably win a global trade war. It’s certainly worth reading Eric Weiner’s entire essay for the…
An op-ed in the New York Post, by Sen. James Inhofe (R, OK) points to a couple of topics worth discussion: One insidious force keeping unemployment high is regulatory uncertainty: Companies that could hire (or re-hire), don’t — because they’re worried about what new restrictions will be coming down from Washington. Congress bears much of…
On Saturday, Tiverton Citizens for Change hosted a fundraiser for local candidates, featuring speeches from several. Nancy Driggs, Republican for RI House District 70 (Portsmouth, Tiverton), gave us something a bit more comprehensive than a review of local issues. Here is what she said. My name is Nancy Driggs, and I am the non-incumbent candidate…
