A California law went into effect saying that single occupant bathrooms need to be mixed gender. Now in my office we have two of those upstairs and two multi-occupant bathrooms [with showers] downstairs. Changing the downstairs bathrooms to mixed […]
Federal Government
A Manifesto: Important Events That Shaped My Political Views – Howard Ahmanson
As I reflect upon the beginnings of my present political views, I believe that three specific events shaped my way of thinking. The first was my conversion to Christianity. The second was my introduction to ‘Reconstructionism’ and my subsequent move […]
Edward Kleinbard Says, Don’t Soak the Few and the Rich
Edward Kleinbard, a professor at the University of Southern California, has pointed out that despite and in the face of extreme income inequality, not only is America’s tax system fairly ‘progressive’, its spending is fairly progressive in that the less […]
Agrarianism Without Agriculture?
The ever-surprising Ralph Nader has recently been reading some paleo-conservative sources, and has written a book entitled Unstoppable; the Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State. In the acknowledgements at the end, he specifically thanks Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a […]
The Closer to Home, The Farther from the People: The Media have Turned the Founding Fathers’ World Upside Down
In an essay in the recent book The Beholden State [pages 96-101], William Voegeli, of the Claremont Institute, writes about the scandal in the Los Angeles borough of Bell, where the city officers were found to be ridiculously overpaid. He questions […]
Why ‘entitlement’ programs aren’t really entitlements
I fully agree with Jim Huffman of Lewis and Clark Law school that the ‘entitlements’ of Social Security and Medicare are not, in any moral sense, entitlements. That does not mean that I favor eliminating them. The problem with Social […]
The D.C. Mistake
We have been warned both by Nate Silver and by the Washington Post that there is a possibility of an electoral tie with each side getting 269 electoral votes. How did we end up with that possibility? How did we end […]
Washington D.C.: The Center of the Universe: And Who to blame?
Joel Kotkin on Newgeography.com writes about the nearly recession-proof nature of Washington, D. C. and its metro area. It is a city of government and the mandarin classes, and they never go out of style. But it seems to me that […]
Observations on California’s Political Geography
A recent series of political maps from PPIC, Public Policy Institute of California, provides some fascinating information. One of the maps inflates or shrinks the various regions according to population; it makes clear why the Democratic Party dominates the state, […]
Stealth Democracy: A Summary of the Thesis of John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse
It was fashionable in the sixties to talk of ‘participatory democracy.’ But John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, claim, on the basis of much research and reading, that that is exactly what the […]