Yesterday I divided the 45 issues that candidates are talking about into 4 tiers of importance.  Today I’ll look at the top tier of issues, rank them, and give a brief justification of its rank. 
Ideally I would rank the issue without regard to what my personal policy preference is.  But as you’ll see, that’s impossible.  Things where I’m [...]

For the past few days, Mike has been ranking the candidates.  While I disagree with much of his ranking (Go Ron Paul! That’s not an endorsement), I don’t know enough about all the candidates, especially the less publicized ones, to be able to post a counter-ranking. 
But an interesting discussion emerged from Mike’s list - which [...]

The Republican contenders were easy to rank; just about all of them were absurdly unqualified for one reason or another, but they were certainly all different. The Democratic contenders are different in background, education, and style, but policy-wise the differences between the first five on this list are extremely small. As such, the [...]

The Christmas season is just about upon us, which means that I’m about to go on vacation for a couple weeks. And thanks to the absurd little dance that the state parties did this year, the Iowa Caucus will occur before I return. In any case, I figured it was about time for [...]

A standard, and oft-recited, refrain from political leaders during times of war is that we need to listen to the commanders in the field. It’s a common line, and it sounds good at first blush: after all, the people who are fighting the war must logically know the most about it, and therefore we [...]

Well, New Jersey is abolishing the death penalty.  If pressed, I would probably come down on the side of keeping the death penalty.  I don’t particularly like the death penalty, but I like having flexibility in the legal system.   In my ideal world I’d like to have the legal option of using the death penalty [...]

Ron Paul’s supporters raised over $6 million in one day for his campaign!  Yowzah!  That’s nearly as much as many candidates have raised in entire quarters!  Go Ron Paul (that’s not an endorsement)!

Awhile back, I criticized Fred Thompson pretty harshly for proposing that we increase the size of our military budget to 4.5% of GDP, up from 3.7% currently, which the Thompson campaign believes will cost about $150 Billion. Thompson never suggested how we will pay for this increase, nor has he provided any explanation of [...]

I’ve been reading a lot of debate transcripts lately (sixteen and counting), and let me tell you that not all debates are created equal.  In particular, there are a number of different ways of asking questions: some good, some not.  So in the hopes of raising the level of debate, I thought it might be [...]

I’ve lost count of how many of these correlation vs. causation posts I’ve done.  Either the media isn’t reading my posts, or else they keep forgetting what I’ve said…
This time the culprit is a recent set of studies that students who don’t pull all nighters get better grades than those who do.   The study [...]