Mickey Kaus reports on/speculates on potential Republican immigration legislation.  Ugh.  Why would Republicans in the House vote for an amnesty they know Americans oppose?  Money talks — and the Chamber of Commerce and various tech giants are pushing hard for cheap laborers. (I don’t really have anything to offer in the way of novel insights, but — Ugh.) Read more

First, the link: “Ventra’s Costs Put Nonprofits in a Bind.” (I don’t think this is behind a paywall, but you may be able to search based on the title if so.) Second, the context: Over the past six months or so, Chicago has been transitioning to a new fare-payment system, the Ventra card. The system is contracted out (another example of privatization, which works better when the government isn’t corrupt and effectively selling off assets to pay short-term expenses —... Read more

This weekend in the blog/commentary world, Avik Roy wrote a piece at National Review Online, “The Conservative Case for Universal Coverage,” which argues that “no Republican health-reform plan will get anywhere until Republicans come to agree that it’s a legitimate goal of public policy to ensure that all Americans have access to quality health care, just as we agree that all Americans should have access to a quality education.” Furthermore, he points to the experience of other countries which manage... Read more

Stop Saying “Do what you love. Love what you do.” It devalues actual work. That’s not actually the title of the Slate article, but it’s how they label it in the “share” facebook link. And the author has a good point: the pitch to people that they should pursue, at significant sacrifice, a job that they find enriching, can be harmful. It privileges those occupations which are “lovable” at the expense of respect for those occupations which are just plain... Read more

Long week at work and still not done! (Hence, the small number of recent posts.) But I wanted to park a link to a blog post that instapundit.com linked to yesterday, “If the GOP wants to jumpstart a National 3rd Party movement for Conservatives ,” on a blog called datechguyblog.com, which I hadn’t run into before. His basic arguement is that conservatives should form a third party, as negotiating leverage with the “party bosses” if nothing else, but he starts... Read more

So I finally got around to looking at the GOP candidates for Governor in Illinois. The situation isn’t quite as dire as I had previously thought. We’ve got Bruce Rauner — the usual gazillionaire “buy the election” type. He doesn’t have much to offer than the standard “I’m going to run Illinois like a business.” Guess what? Government isn’t a business, much less a private equity firm. If anything, it’s more like GM, where part of the required skill set... Read more

So I was writing yesterday about the War on Poverty, and at the same time posted comments along a similar vein at the Cass Sunstein blog, in a post called “New War on Poverty Needs Correct Facts” — to which a reader responded, “Poverty is a relative measure. We’re all of us wealthier than one hundred years or even fifty years ago. The key issue is whether it is acceptable and consistent with our founding principles that so much of... Read more

So this one surprised me:  in reading an article, I came across a reference to the overall physical fitness of Notre Dame students compared to their peers (no surprise:  they’re much more physically fit and more physically active), based on a fitness assessment.  So I hunted this down online and found out that Notre Dame requires two semesters of physical education as a graduation requirement, including a course called, “Contemporary Topics for College Students” (which is basically Health class) and various... Read more

This is going to be short, but I want to get this core idea “out there” and then do some more reading on this later on: The GOP Party Line on the War on Poverty is that we’ve lost, because we’re doing everything wrong.  But that fails to recognize that there are two components to the concept of “poverty,” as in “living in poverty”: first, living in a state of acute material deprivation, and second, being dependent on government (means-tested)... Read more