Well, the Supreme court decided Raich today. Or, as the AP wire story so aptly puts it, "Court Rules Against Pot for Sick People." It's bad enough that this is a giant "Fuck You!" to sick people, as Reason's Nick Gillespie puts it. Sometimes, however, the Supreme Court has to reach conclusions that cause trouble in the short term but that uphold valuable principles. This … [Read more...] about Bad News for Sick People and Fans of Federalism
Steal From the Best
Here's how you write a newspaper column. Find a topic that engages you. Then bang your head against a computer screen until what you've written no longer makes you want to hurl. My words are important to me. I struggle with them, obsess over them. Show me something I wrote and I can tell you stories of how it came to be, why this adjective here or that colon there. Actually, … [Read more...] about Steal From the Best
Vice Squad
One of the sites I visit pretty frequently is Jim Leitzel's Vice Squad. The blurb on the site describes it as Explorations of public policy concerning alcohol, nicotine, other drugs, prostitution, gambling, pornography, .... Jim Leitzel is the Associate Director of Public Policy Studies (or something like that) at the University of Chicago. He's an economist, but most of … [Read more...] about Vice Squad
Thanks!
I don't want to get too involved in blogospheric self-reference, but I want to thank everybody who's visited Windypundit in the last few months, and I especially want to thank Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped for sending me an enormous amount of traffic. I started Windypundit in July of 2002. I didn't work at it too seriously, and I let it go for a while, but then I … [Read more...] about Thanks!
VAC, The Final Chapter
(Links to Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3.) When I first called ComEd's customer service center to complain about the electricity in my house, I wasn't even sure that 135 volts AC was out of the accepted range for electric service. While several consumer web sites have information about electricity costs and rules for disconnection, the web has surprisingly little about … [Read more...] about VAC, The Final Chapter