NRO’s Campaign Spot: Two revealing comments from Aetna CEO Ron Williams in an interview with BusinessWeek out now: Will insurance premiums go up? The answer is yes, and some of the things that will drive those premiums are significant additional taxes the industry will ultimately have to pay in the first year. The President said that this bill would not have any impact on people who already had coverage, that

[Saturdays tend to be good days for discussion, so I thought I’d bring back this post, originally published here in 2002 (many of the links probably won’t work, but that shouldn’t affect your ability to piece together the various staked positions under review). The person I’m answering here has, since this piece, decided (as many others from the earlier days of the blogosphere have) that I am reprehensible and worthy

Dan Collins is experiencing what many of us these days are experiencing, namely, the shock of the surreal supplanting the actual, and doing so in plain sight, with hardly so much as a second thought: The House voted to censure Joe Wilson when he shouted “You lie!” after Obama claimed that illegal immigrants wouldn’t be covered by his legislation. They then had to spend the night making their counter-claims true.

This will be an especially personal post, but as it brings into sharp relief many of the ideas I’ve spent years writing about here, I figured it’s worth sharing. As many of you know, a few evenings ago I received the following email from one of my old creative writing professors:

The most transparent, post-partisan administration ever! Barack Obama has threatened to give Craig Becker, the labor union lawyer apologist, not the curmudgeon Ted Danson character, a recess appointment. It could come as early as next week. You might remember that last month, the Senate failed to come up with enough votes to bring Becker’s nomination for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to the floor in a bi-partisan rejection of

From the NYT: Buried deep in the health care legislation that President Obama signed on Tuesday is a new requirement that will affect any American who walks into a McDonald’s, Starbucks or Burger King. Every big restaurant chain in the nation will now be required to put calorie information on their menus and drive-through signs. In other words, as soon as 2011 it will be impossible to chomp down on

Just received an email from Antik denim asking me if I wouldn’t mind removing the rear tags and signature stitching from my Antik “McQueen” jeans. Because while Antik has always liked the way I look in the jeans, they are nevertheless “more and more alarmed,” they tell me, by my “propensity to clench my ass” in a manner that “some might construe as aggressive and potentially violent. Or maybe racist.”

From bitter-clinging, two-digit teabagger John Stossel, Christhumping in Reason: Bernie Madoff took money from people who thought he’d invested it, gave some to others who thought it was a partial return on their earlier investments, and kept much for himself. That’s called a Ponzi scheme, and his $50 billion fraud was called the biggest ever. But it wasn’t the biggest. Social Security and Medicare are much bigger ones. These are