Video Games are Protected Speech
In a 7-2 vote, the US Supreme Court ruled today that violent video games cannot be prevented from being sold/rented to minors. The two were Breyer and Thomas (together again) arguing that we already...
Category: The League
Because you said so
When I meet new people and tell them I’m a pediatrician, there are a handful of common responses I get. There’s usually a remark about how much I must love kids. (Most of the...
Same-Sex Marriage in New York
It seems appropriate to have a thread. To kick things off on an appropriately contentious note, I’ll repeat that I’m more of a pessimist than most on the pro-SSM side. Law is a powerful...
Competition and Inequality
In my last post, Labour and the American Middle Class, I expressed my scepticism of the ability of unions to improve the incomes of the disadvantaged. However, this still leaves the question of how...
One More Note on Israel
Andrew Sullivan, responding to Jeffrey Goldberg, writes: If no American Jew can conceive of a situation in which they would walk away from Israel, then there is no leverage at all to persuade Israel...
Song for Stephen Metcalf
For those interested, Metcalf responds to his critics (including our own Mark Thompson) here.
Immigration, Inequality and Pie
Tim Lee has an excellent response up to this post by NRO’s Daniel Foster, who writes: Punishing a minor by removing him from the culture he’s adopted as his own, for the crimes of...
Classical Liberalism in America
So, for many readers of my work there’s a sense that I am wishy-washy on a number of issues (though hopefully they also notice where I am consistent: against the war on drugs, for...
Why I Hunt
~ by Mike at the Big Stick Back in February at my own blog I wrote a review of The Wild Within, a new Travel channel show featuring Steve Rinella. The series is based...
Best Summary Judgment Motion Ever
Mark Cuban’s lawyer may be my new hero. This summary judgment motion in a presumably complex, though no doubt frivolous, shareholder suit from Ross Perot, Jr. cannot possibly be topped for its combination of...
Game of Thrones Bookclub (Week Four)
I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to write about one particular part of this book: the fight between Bronn and Ser Vardis Egen. If you haven’t already noticed, A Song of Ice and Fire...
Notes on the Wicked Son
The reasons why people initially cared about Allison Benedikt’s essay on … something to do with changing her mind about Israel remain mysterious to me. Its sentiments were anything but new to this world;...
LeBron James and the creative class
Does the LeBron-Cleveland saga reflect the anxieties of modern American life?* Bear with me for a moment: A monumentally talented product from the old industrial heartland flees his hometown and a band of hardworking**...
Is greed the real villain in the war on drugs?
I have a piece up at Forbes patiently explaining the difference between black markets and free markets and why the drug war cannot be laid at the feet of greedy capitalists. It’s a response...
The policy illusion
Adam Schaeffer responds to my school choice / single-payer post: Kain is right that many school choice advocates want a single-payer, government voucher system. But he’s absolutely wrong to imply the libertarian preference is...
Forgiveness
As of right now, I’m willing to forgive Ron Paul a heck of a lot. Barney Frank too. Their bill to legalize marijuana would do a whole lot of good both for our country...
Jose Antonio Vargas: “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant”
Read the story, then read the story behind the story. Then comment.
The Broad and the Narrow, or How to Beat a Dead Horse
[Ed. Note – I realize this is beating a dead horse at this point, but in my defense, the below was primarily written prior to the last two or three posts on the Metcalf...
Ignoring the Thrust
by E.C. Gach It looks like there’s three different categories of critique which aim at rebutting this “garbage” by Stephen Metcalf over at Slate (I’m open to additional categories I may have missed). 1.)...
School Choice and Single Payer
(This post originally appeared at Forbes. I’m posting it here partly because I think it’s a consistent position to support both single-payer healthcare – something many progressives advocate – and single-payer education – something...
