Rudy Giuliani just introduced the outlines of a health care plan. Most of it, you will note, comes straight from the President’s 2006 State of the Union health care proposal. While most of it is recycled, I can only hope that this indicates a willingness to prioritize health care reform in his campaign. In any case, his plan centers around ten basic ideas. There are a couple ideas here that could improve the current system–if they are implemented with intelligence and compassion, that is. On the other hand a couple of them could make the system we have demonstrably worse. As a package, they would probably do more good than harm, although they do nothing to deal with the worst problem in our system: the inherently flawed incentive structures of private insurers. Anyway, here’s a breakdown of the proposals:
Hey Silence, how about an analysis of what’s going on in Japan right now with Abe’s party losing the elections…
According to this article, the newest tactic in the fight against gang violence is to sue the gang to create an injunction against gang members hanging out together. The logic being that if the gang can’t meet, then they can’t plan violence, drug smuggling, or other nefarious gang activities.
I’m not constitutional law expert, but it seems to me that freedom of assembly is guaranteed to US citizens, and this seems a slap in the face to that notion.
Of course I would like a decrease in gang violence. But once you create a precedent that certain groups are unable to meet, its a slippery slope to forbidding other undesirable groups from meeting. And what groups are “undesirable” changes over time, and almost always comes out against groups holding minority opinions.
This strategy of reducing gang violence is all around bad news, and I hope the courts strike it down.
Mitt Romney is an idiot.
In 2004 Barack Obama supported a bill in Illinois that allowed for the teaching of age appropriate sex education to elementary school students as young as Kindergarten. The bill specified such topics as knowing about the body, understanding basics about sexual harassment and abuse (as in, it’s not ok to be touched here), etc. It also specified procedures by which parents could keep their kids out of such classes, if they desired. Recently, Obama reiterated his support for such proposals, and Romney has jumped all over him for “promoting the teaching of sex ed to Kindergarteners”. Obama’s campaign said that they were deliberately misleading the public; Romney’s campaign has said that it’s an important discussion.
A federal district court ruled yesterday that the city of Hazelton, PA has no right to pass anti-illegal immigration ordinances. At issue were two laws. One would have fined landlords who did not require proof of citizenship or visa when renting to immigrants. The other made English the official language of the city, even to the point of forbidding city employees from providing translated documents without permission. The judge ruled that these ordinances violated state law, federal law, and were unconstitutional for reasons of due process and for infringing on Congress’ constitutional right to regulate immigration. You can read the full text of the decision here. It was the right decision, and I applaud Judge James Munley for making it.
Also I should note that this decision likely invalidates similar laws in hundreds of communities nationwide. Those laws, like Hazelton’s, were predicated on the notion that illegal immigrants are bad for a community, and therefore the community has every right to evict them. Of course, there is a lot of bigotry behind those statements. But what really baffles me is that almost every time those kinds of statements have been made, they are accompanied by what is surely a demonstrably false assertion: that illegal immigrants are a drain on public coffers.
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