Unpardonable Pardons

Pardons are for guilty people. According to the US Supreme Court in Burdick v. United States, accepting a presidential pardon "carries an imputation of guilt; acceptance a confession of it." If you disagree, a More...

Don’t Believe Caller ID

Or the From address on an email.

Got a phone call from 802 760 xxxx the other day. My number is 802 760 yyyy. “A neighbor,” I thought, even though I didn’t recognize the specific number and it had no name associated with it. I answered More...

Is Medicaid Helping Fuel the Opioid Crisis?

Probably.

According to Express Scripts, which is a large manager of pharmacy benefit plans including Medicaid, “M More...

American Tears

My nephew Luke’s maternal grandparents are holocaust survivors. On his paternal side we’re descended from refugees fleeing Eastern European pogroms. Luke’s wife, Sokchea, survived the Cambodian genocide. The events in Charlottesville led Sokchea to write this sad and beautiful letter to their bab More...

Whataboutism

Trump, Obama, and Naming Evil

Nothing excuses Donald Trump’s failure to immediately denounce Nazis, KKK members, and white separatists in Charlottesville immediately and by name. Even this slime has a right to march and speak; but they More...

If We’re All the Same, Who Needs Diversity?

“Diversity in schools and workplaces is crucial,” I remember being told, “because people from different ethnicities, places, economic situations and men and women have different points of view, different ways of looking at a problem.” My experience has been that diversity does bring all these ben More...

Hospital Competition Would be a Good Thing

Monday I blogged that ACA (aka the Affordable Care Act aka ObamaCare) is an unworkable political compromise between private health care and government run health care in which insurance companies become rent collectors bu More...

Arlo by Night

What could be worse than a raccoon in the garden?

First Arlo, my DIY home video camera, discovered a groundhog in More...