John McCain gave us the details of his healthcare plan yesterday. (You can find details here or here.) There’s more to like here than I would have thought–although it’s far from a good plan. Here are the details:

I was pretty critical of McCain’s support for a “gas-tax holiday”, and I’m pretty disappointed in Clinton’s support of the idea. As I said before, the gas-tax holiday just doesn’t make any sense if you think about it. It’s an extremely small amount of money ($0.18 on the gallon translates to about $10 [...]

I read a very interesting book this weekend on the plane, Robert Frank and Philip Cook’s “Winner take all society” and I thought it was relevant enough to issues that Leftfielders talk about that it would be worth reviewing, even though we don’t typically do book reviews on this site.
According to Frank and [...]

This week is Passover. Passover is challenging under the best of circumstances because of the food restrictions. This year its doubly bad because I’m at a conference and don’t have access to a kitchen, so I really can’t eat much at all. Other people at the conference have noticed that I’m not [...]

John McCain believes that the government response to Hurricane Katrina was “disgraceful”. In a speech yesterday he faulted FEMA’s organization, it’s leadership, and President Bush’s response in particular. It was the kind of speech you would expect of someone who was severely disappointed in how the leadership of his own party responded to [...]

One of my favorite NFL columnists, TMQ, often notes that “experts” generally do significantly worse at predicting outcomes by virtue of the fact that they over-think problems. It is true that experts generally do better than just a coin-flip (which means that they do know something, after all)… but they do far worse than [...]

You should check out this article on weather forecasting, which compared the actual weather with forecasts made by the Kansas City evening news and the national weather service. It’s not the greatest or most thorough scientific study in the world, but it is a good first-stab at an interesting problem: how accurate are weather [...]

I’ve had some intermittent foot pain over the last few months, and so I went and saw a podiatrist this morning. The doctor poked and prodded my feet for a bit; he watched me stand, walk, and sit; he had me describe what kinds of exercise I do; he talked to me about my [...]

What is real patriotism? What does it really meant to “love America”? The pundits and politicians love to ask these questions. But they never answer them directly. Instead, these questions are usually set ups for a classic “bait-and-switch”; they ask about patriotism, but answer about something completely different. So I [...]

It’s past time that people stopped thinking about McCain as a “maverick” Senator.