Entries for March 2009

New Gallup poll data show the controversy over President Obama's commencement speech at Notre Dame University may be much ado about nothing. Except for fringe church radicals, that is.

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

My TJS colleague Mary Kate Cary refers us to an interesting Christian Science Monitor opinion piece by her former Bush #41 speechwriting colleague, Mark Lange, who proposes that women might do better running the world than men:

I'm totally against nationalized healthcare of any sort. I've heard horror stories from too many friends living in countries where healthcare is nationalized. One Canadian told me about having to wait months for a CT-scan to find out whether her brain tumor was benign or malignant.

An Italian national described being required to show up at a public clinic every three days for prescription drugs (because nationalized healthcare is too cheap to give them out in 30-day supplies.) But the Miami Herald ran an investigation into how insurance companies secretly blacklist millions of Americans with common ailments. The investigation's results are so infuriating it's enough to make even me think socialized medicine might be an improvement (just kidding.) At the very least, as the Obama administration tackles healthcare, this sort of thing ought to be banned and its perpetrators dragged to the public square and punished:

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

To anyone who still believes animals don't experience pain, here's a new study to shock you into reality:

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

The controversy over Notre Dame University's invitation to President Obama to deliver this year's commencement address is too tempting for me not to join, so here goes. My colleague Dan Gilgoff has been doing a stunning job of recounting the battle, blow by blow.

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

This is one of the dumbest things I've heard recently coming out of state legislatures, forcing thinking people to pose the question: And what is your point?

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

The NRO's Kathryn Lopez offered a one-line post yesterday that preceded an excerpt of an Agence France-Presse article on Saudi cleric hysteria over women's advancement in that country. Lopez's one-liner was questionable.

The article quoted clerics as saying, among other unbelievably atavistic statements, that it is "religiously impermissible" for Saudi women to appear on television and other babble as follows: