In this country’s steady march against immigration and seeming desire to isolate itself behind a wall that no one can scale, the same question keeps pressing to the forefront of my mind: what, exactly, is so wrong with immigrants? In the midst of this tide of hateful rhetoric, I see a lot of people on …
Category Archives: politics
Snipping the Safety Net with Welfare Drug Test Legislation
Multiple states last year proposed welfare drug testing laws requiring recipients of benefits to successfully pass drug tests to stay on welfare and other social assistance programmes. The courts disagreed with this brilliant scheme, arguing that the laws were unconstitutional, but they’re at it again this year, with a rising tide of legislative hijinks involving …
Rampage Violence Distracts from Larger Gun Violence Issues
The United States has been experiencing an unprecedented and terrible uptick in rampage violence over the last few years, with mass shootings across the nation in a wide variety of locales. It’s awful, and every time one occurs, the media focus on it, dissecting every detail, demonising mental illness, luridly reporting on every imaginable aspect, …
A Modest Proposal: Pay for Performance in Congress
As a general rule, I loathe ‘pay for performance’ schemes, primarily because they’re often designed to penalise workers and allow the bosses to get away with underpaying their staff and reallocating funds to administrators. They’re also often based on flawed metrics, like using student testing to assess the ‘performance’ of teachers and insisting that the …
Class and Information Access
Information, they say, likes to be free. And in some cases that is certainly true, but it would be a lie to act like all information is readily available for free to those who want it, because there are some serious costs involved, and some of those are maybe not immediately obvious to those occupying …
Have We Forgotten the Separation of Powers?
As leader of the Executive Branch, the President holds a considerable amount of power, both in the literal and metaphorical sense. Presidents are capable of issuing executive orders, vetoing legislation, appointing people to key government posts, and shaping policy decisions. And as the Commander in Chief and occupant of the White House, the President also …
The Dark Tale of Kettleman City
I’ve been following the story of Kettleman City for a long time. The Southern California town has flickered in and out of the news as a result of a wave of congenital disabilities residents believe are associated with a nearby waste management facility, and they’ve fought to have the issue recognised, and to get action …
Laying Some History On You: Belated Apologies
Four years ago, California’s legislature decided it was, perhaps, finally time to do something about the abysmal treatment of Chinese-Americans in California historically. 60 years after some of the last anti-Chinese laws in California were repealed, the legislature formally apologised, issuing a statement about how it was really rather sorry about the whole thing, and …
Patterns and Presidential Pardons
One of the notable issues with the Obama Administration when it comes to prison reform has been a distinct reluctance to get involved in the process through Presidential pardons, with a paltry nine in total through the second half of FY2011. Critics wondered why the President was so reticent to issue pardons, especially in cases …
Can We Build a Global Climate Diplomacy?
I seem to be on a bit of a climate change tear lately. I would apologise, but we all know I’m not sorry in the slightest, and I’m going to force you to endure discussions about climate change whenever I see fit because it’s a critically important topic. The next few years in particular represent …
