Vicki Kennedy, wife of the late Senator Ted Kennedy, was disinvited from being the commencement speaker at a small Catholic college after the bishop of that area expressed concern about her views. The bishop declined to even speak with her about them before intervening. [Read more…]
Suppose you are in charge of a community college and there turns out to be a huge demand for math and English classes so that students are being repeatedly turned away because they are full. You might think that it is a good thing that people are seeking more education and that the solution is to open up more classes to meet that demand by (say) hiring more math and English teachers. [Read more…]
I think that the pace of campaigning is taking its toll on Rick Santorum and he has reached the stage where he is free-associating as a result of fatigue. He said in a speech about how he “read somewhere” that almost none of the California state universities teach American history. [Read more…]
The former socialist president of Brazil Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva grew up poor and knew what it was like to be hungry as a child. When he took office in 2003, he said that food was a basic human right and launched the Zero Hunger program. Part of it involves government-run restaurants that serve everyone healthy meals at low prices. This Marketplace report describes one such restaurant: [Read more…]
Recall that the events of the Arab spring were triggered by a 26-year old man in Tunisia setting himself on fire in an act of protest and despair at the conditions in that country.
Now an elderly pensioner in Greece has shot and killed himself near the parliament, reportedly leaving a suicide note accusing the government of reducing his pension to nothing. This has sparked violent demonstrations and clashes with the police. [Read more…]
I live close to Amish country, with its people who reject electricity and the automobile and live lifestyles largely unchanged from well over a century ago. Drive for a little over half an hour or so, and you enter a world of horses and buggies, men with beards and hats, women with blue dresses and bonnets, and neat, well-maintained houses and barns set in a picture-postcard countryside. [Read more…]
In this song that conveys cheerful resignation, Willie Nelson captures a sentiment that those of us who are older and looking back will recognize, that it is too late to change some things and there is no point wasting time in futile regrets. [Read more…]
In a previous post, the issue came up of how same-sex couples whose marriage is recognized in other countries do not have immigration rights for the spouse in the US if one of them happens to be a US citizen. This is a consequence of the infamous Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 that was signed into law by Bill Clinton. [Read more…]
[Update: David Cay Johnston emailed me to clarify some points in my post. He said:
Also, it is not necessarily a subsidy to provide rural service at the same price as other service. Calling it a subsidy depends, partly, on making a value judgement about the network. If you cannot reach a relative or business in a rural place the utility of the network is reduced, making it less valuable to you and everyone else. So urban callers get a benefit, too, from rural service.
And as my column carefully points out, people in URBAN areas could end up without phones or with only high-cost phones under the rules the phone companies are writing and getting enacted, in four states so far, into law.]
I must admit that this is not a question that had occurred to a city dweller like me who takes such access for granted. But David Cay Johnston says that there is a nearly century-old obligation for phone companies that provided landline service to also be providers of last resort to all at the same price, so that people in remote areas are not disadvantaged. [Read more…]
This coming Sunday is Easter which commemorates the day when Jesus rose from the dead. Or so I’m told.
Looked at dispassionately, the whole Easter thing is a bit over the top. The idea of vicarious atonement when it comes to things like sacrificing children and virgins to assuage the gods who unleash natural disasters is something we are now horrified about and yet the idea of Jesus having to die to save the rest of us from sin does not seem odd. In fact, many Christians seem to positively relish all the gory details of Jesus’s suffering and death, as can be seen in the commercial success of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, which I did not see since I am not a fan of gratuitous violence. [Read more…]