mrclay.org

Lately Detroit’s terrible situation is given as proof that liberalism inevitably leads to cities lying in ruin with high unemployment, high crime, poor education outcomes, etc.

Sent to my House Representative Corrine Brown (links added here):
Ms. Brown,
I encourage you to support H.R. 4055, Honest Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE) Initiative Act of 2009. Hawaiian Judge Alm’s probation and parole reform program has shown we can significantly reduce both crime and imprisonment.
The program is a clear winner all around: States save prison [...]

While Microsoft has certainly used unlawful practices in the past to build the Windows empire, I fail to see how Opera’s EU antitrust case was anything more than a thinly veiled (and successful) attempt by Opera—and later additional competitors—to strong-arm Microsoft into directly promoting their products.
Users of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows operating system in Europe who [...]

Bill Moyers treats us to LBJ’s telephone recordings, highlighting some of the similarities between today and the days before our escalation in Vietnam. I wish we could hear the conversations of all our presidents like this. Moyer’s concludes with this:
Now in a different world, at a different time, and with a different president, we face [...]

Greenwald makes a pretty convincing case that Bush/Obama’s “justice system” for accused terrorists is merely for display purposes only.
If you’re accused of being a Terrorist, there’s not one set procedure used to determine your guilt; instead, the Government has a roving bazaar of various processes which it, in its sole discretion, picks for you based [...]

Today almost no credible evidence suggests that cannabis belongs on Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, alongside drugs like heroin. This position has stifled medical research of the drug and its component chemicals for 39 years, making research extremely expensive and arbitrarily difficult to secure compared to that of much more harmful drugs.
A few [...]

(Obviously started in August)
In the age of Glenn Beck, the town hall meeting paradigm is just the anonymous web forum with no moderator. The people interested in genuine discussion won’t go near it, and “socialist!” is the new “yr gay”. To this extent the tea party folks have certainly been successful at churning out viral [...]

NPR Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep is often an excellent interviewer, but his behavior in this “interview” with Republican chairman Michael Steele was awful (and many commenters seem to agree). This morning I only heard the last 30 seconds or so and it was painful. I tried to listen again and could only stand a [...]

Immediately after posting, I ran across this article that makes the case against insurance better than any other I’ve read. If you’re serious about the health care debate, you should read it.

An Andrew Sullivan reader needed a (seemingly) straightforward outpatient procedure. Her bill was almost 300% of the estimate. She complains that “the price of health care procedures is nothing but a dart thrown at numbers on a dart board.”
Of course the provider has acted in bad faith, but I think the entire insurance system is [...]