FreedomTalks

This is an interesting video by Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who decided to thank bloggers for getting his message out to voters. Not a bad strategy for building good relationships with the new media. It’s a good idea that I would imagine other candidates might follow in the near future.

Colorado Republican candidate for the 6th district Steve Ward refused to sign the FreedomWorks “No Earmarks Pledge” today. I just got off the phone with him and he did not provide a reason for this refusal to sign this common sense pledge. Sadly, too many Republicans pay lip service to supporting “limited government” while not [...]

FW Chairman Dick Armey recently took on the issue of earmarks over at Townhall:
There are three groups of people who regularly spend other people’s money: children, thieves, and politicians. All three of these groups need supervision—a watchful, responsible eye who keeps them in line. For children, that means parents. For thieves, that means police [...]

No doubt there are a lot of folks who’re true believers in the OpenSocial idea, but Google’s support of the OpenSocial principles, which say that participating companies should open and align their web 2.0 services in such a way that 1) developers can write a single application that will work cross-platform and 2) users would [...]

Over at Reason, Ron Bailey responds to the oft-employed environmentalist argument that whatever expensive, restrictive regulation they’re arguing for at a given time is justified because “we owe it to future generations.” That sounds nice, but the reality of the argument is far less pleasant.  As Bailey says:
Really? Perhaps intergenerational ethics tells us that poor [...]

Hillary Clinton wants Congress to put up $30 billion to prop up investors and others who can’t made bets on the housing market and can’t afford their mortgages. Meanwhile, she’s reiterating her call for a five-year freeze on subprime interest rates, an idea with serious potential detriment. Clinton is doing her best to [...]

One of the things that makes Ezra Klein such an effective liberal advocate is that he’s policy-smart and spin-smart. In other words: He knows what he’s talking about and how to shape effective messages using what he knows. So he can dive into wonk shop-talk on one hand and deploy with tough rhetorical maneuvers on [...]

Over at the Atlantic, Megan McArdle predicts that more regulation is certainly in store for the financial sector — but isn’t sure it’ll do much good:
[T]he broad demands for “stricter scrutiny” and “more transparency” are meaningless…
The problem is not transparency but complexity: The value of the securities was as opaque to those who held them [...]

The read of the morning is Michael Tanner’s new Cato paper [PDF] comparing problems and successes in health-care systems worldwide. Most interesting is that The New Republic’s resident health-care guru (and government health insurance advocate), Jonathan Cohn, reviewed the paper even while disagreeing with its conclusions, meaning that you can pretty much bet that [...]

Can, as Hillary Clinton argues, health insurance mandates cover the uninsured in America?  Doesn’t look like it. Meanwhile, seems that they simply exacerbate the funding problems they’re designed to cure.
A central premise of RomneyCare, the smorgasbord of health care reforms that Gov. Mitt Romney (R) wrought in Massachusetts, is that the government could cover the [...]