Okay, campers, rise and shine, and don't forget your booties because it's cooold out there today! Roger Ebert has included Harold Ramis'* "Groundhog Day" in his expanding list of "The Great Movies." It belongs there. And it's a much better date movie than "Citizen Kane." Ebert describes how a film he first regarded "with cheerful moderation" has stayed with him. But there are a few films, and this is one of them, that burrow into our memories and become reference... Read more
Dateline NEW CASTLE, Del. — Volunteers with Operation Air Conditioner today are mailing 500 pairs of combat boots to American troops serving in Iraq. After today's shipment, the ad hoc nonprofit group will have shipped about 3,600 pairs of the desert-ready boots to U.S. service men and women. Operation AC started in 2003 when Frankie Mayo received a letter from her son, an MP serving in Iraq, complaining about the summer heat there. She bought an air conditioner and shipped... Read more
That picture is worth more than any thousand words I could write about this. The fact that we — the U.S. of A, the purported good guys — are blithely about to appoint this man as our top law enforcement official has me so appalled and ashamed that words fail. Thanks to Jeanne for the image. She also provides this link, reminding us: "Make sure you follow through at the end by writing to your senators and urging them to... Read more
An old journalists' maxim states: "If your mama says she loves you, check it out." Yet in myriad ways the press forgets this time-honored wisdom and operates on a presumption of good faith. Whenever it does so, it becomes vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. Take for example the naming of legislation. A state lawmaker dedicated to educational reform introduces a bill and calls it "The Education Reform Act of 1997." That may be an accurate representation of the bill's substance... Read more
Atrios discusses Social Security's "value as an annuity." It's insurance against long life, and it doesn't suffer from the adverse selection problem that normal annuity markets do. To be clear, long life is a good thing, but what's not good is the uncertainty about time of death. From a financial planning perspective, given nest egg at retirement of x and expected years until death y you'd like to spend x/y annually and have exactly 0 dollars at the moment of... Read more
John Leland's New York Times Magazine profile of Jay Bakker — "The Punk Christian Son of a Preacher Man" — provides a nice portrait of this son of famous parents. I met Jay one summer at the Cornerstone Festival. I liked him. Like most people in America, I already knew part of his story. I knew about the business empire his parents, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, had created, and I hadn't been sorry to see it fall. PTL had... Read more
In his Inaugural address yesterday, President Bush recited Michael Gerson's reference to Isaac Norris' quotation of Leviticus 25:10: "Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof." Norris was the "Pensylvania" assemblyman who chose this verse of scripture for the bell cast to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the colony's charter. Leviticus 25 outlines the laws for the Year of Jubilee, which was to follow every seventh Sabbath Year. We still use the word "Jubilee" to refer to... Read more
Rick Perlstein is, to put it mildly, not optimistic about the next four years. Read the entire essay, "Eve of Destruction" — read it over and over and over again, my friend, if you don't believe we're on that eve. But I want to focus here on Perlstein's comments on No Child Left Behind: You've heard of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, the one that produces those anguished news reports every four years about all the countries... Read more
Slate's Chris Suellentrop joins the chorus of those claiming that Social Security is a "welfare" program. He does so explicitly: Liberals, for their part, aren't bereft of philosophy. They support Social Security because it's redistributive. In other words, it's welfare for old people. The politically correct term for this is "social insurance." To Suellentrop, Roosevelt's insistence that the system be designed as social insurance and not as redistributive welfare was a disingenuous, euphemistic form of political correctness. (What a prescient... Read more
Brad DeLong points us to this strange essay from Jonathan Rauch in The National Journal. Rauch notes that there is no "crisis" facing Social Security and that President Bush's proposals all seem like solutions in search of a problem. But then Rauch joins that search. Like a customer in a shoe store, he tries on several different rationales for why Bush's plan might be defensible before settling on the idea that there's something morally commendable about people taking personal responsibility... Read more
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