One of the biggest issues of the upcoming presidential elections is likely to be “experience”. Candidates with long and distinguished political careers (McCain, Biden, Dodd, etc.) are likely to trumpet their Washington experience, and note the relative inexperience of their rivals. Those with local, but not national, political experience (Romney, Giuliani, Vilsack, etc.) [...]

According to this article in the Houston Chronicle a startlingly high percentage of students in Texas drop out of high school. Its really quite scary if you think about it. And even those who graduate high school, many won’t go on to college.
At least half of my circle of friends, on the other hand, [...]

Once upon a time, legislators were paid virtually nothing for their public service. Public service was considered a duty and a privilege, and pay was considered to demean their value. That system, however, created two problems. First, it functionally meant you had to be rich in order to hold one of those [...]

One of the ubiquitous themes running through modern day politics is that debate tends to coalesce around the symptoms and not the problem. Discussions about welfare tend to focus on the size of welfare rolls, when in fact being on welfare is simply a side effect of being poor. As the 1996 welfare [...]

It has finally come to this. In order to protect its students from choking, a school in Rhode Island has banned talking during lunch. Because, ya know, the world is a dangerous place, and if you sit in a seat all day and don’t say anything, then you’re less likely to choke or [...]

Here’s the issue. There are inevitably going to be differences in intelligence and talent levels in schools. We can do one of two things to address this:

I’ve read two stories today on teenagers who made life-altering, stupid decisions. But both cases are also about the arbitrariness of our laws.

My favorite comment on last night’s State of the Union address comes from the Boston Globe’s front page headline: “President Urges Unity on Iraq“. Of course we are pretty united about Iraq: the consensus position among all Democrats and most Republicans is that the Iraq War has been a colossal failure and that the [...]

You may have missed it, if you weren’t watching CSPAN, but yesterday was the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. As such, it occurred to me that this would be a good time to get myself into trouble on abortion. I’ve always believed that there are only two question of any interest underlying the [...]

Here’s what I don’t get. Lots of people don’t like ketchup. Lots of people don’t like mustard. Lots of people don’t like mayonnaise. And yet my airplane sandwich was smothered in them. Even people who like said condiments might prefer to be able to add to taste, rather than have [...]