I found this Times piece on the United Food and Commercial Workers’ attempt to build a sort of quasi-union at Wal-Mart fascinating. And I wholeheartedly approve. It’s almost impossible to unionize a Wal-Mart store. They employ the top union busters in the business and they don’t even hide their intimidation of unionization efforts. UFCW has […]
Author: Erik Loomis
Yglesias takes exception to my support of the Huffington Post boycott. He is misguided on several points: 1. Yglesias seems to think that I am trying to take away his internet where people can write w
As some but by no means all progressives know, the Newspapers Guild and the National Writers Union have called a boycott against Huffington Post for refusing to pay its writers. Unlike unionized workp
In the history of American athletes, has there been a player who started out so easy to root for and so easy to like who worked so hard to make people hate him. I mean, who would possibly ever like Kobe Bryant except for a Lakers fan? And one would discount what a Lakers fan […]
Like New Jersey, Connecticut has suffered some from being surrounded by more prominent neighbors (in this case, New York and Massachusetts). Nonetheless, if we expand the notion of traditional politic
Based on the comments coming out of the worst American presidents post, I want to write a few follow-up posts in the next few days, including on Jackson and Indian Removal, Wilson, and Hoover. But I w
The most prominent politician posts have led to some discussions of the worst American presidents. I have Buchanan at the bottom. Scott finds Andrew Johnson even more detestable. I think that in lieu of a state list tonight, I want to produce a worst presidents list. I also want to be clear that presidents are […]
And now we get to the South. Between reelecting their legislators until they die and defending segregation, southern states have played a powerful role in American politics from the beginning of the r
New Jersey has had a somewhat weak group of national politicians throughout its history with an obvious choice for the top. I suspect a lot of this is getting overshadowed by New York and Pennsylvania
Yglesias has been reading Middlekauf and tries to learn lessons on modern health care from the disastrous medicine of the time: I think discussions of health care economics pay far too little attention to the question of pre-modern health care. People have been earning a living as medical professionals for a long time. And yet […]
A couple of notes as we go forward in this series: 1. I am doing the states in order of joining the union. 2. Some of you are bringing up state-level politicians. That was really interesting to me. I
Douthat applies the same tortured logic he uses to discuss abortion and gay marriage to euthanasia, promoting state sanction and imprisonment for those who would engage in assisted suicide without pro