Category: Public Policy

The Question of When

It is a sev­en­teen page arti­cle, but the writ­ing is good and it goes fast: Tri­al by Fire by David Grann in The New York­er.

It real­ly has nev­er been a ques­tion of if, but only of when. When an inno­cent would be exe­cut­ed, and when we will final­ly do away with the death penalty.

It appears that the first ques­tion has an answer.

hat tip:  The New Republic

Accident By Cell Phone

The Nation­al High­way Traf­fic Safe­ty Admin­is­tra­tion gath­ered hun­dreds of pages of research and warn­ings about the haz­ards of dri­vers using cell phones…The find­ings included:

What’s miss­ing?

An increase in the num­ber of acci­dents. That’s what is missing.

25 per­cent of acci­dents are a result of dri­ver dis­trac­tion. Cell phone use while dri­ving has increased 50 per­cent. So cell phone use is increas­ing­ly cit­ed as the cause of the accident.

But it isn’t the cell phone.

The acci­dent is caused by the dis­tract­ed dri­ver. If the dri­ver did not have the phone to be dis­tract­ed by, then he or she would find some­thing else. All the laws pro­hibit­ing cell phone use while dri­ving will do noth­ing to cut down the num­ber of accidents.

Who will save the Republican Party?

Soon­er or lat­er, every­one will fig­ure out that my polit­i­cal views tend to the lib­er­al. One result of that is I tend to read lib­er­al sources. Notably blogs at Talk­ing Points Memo and The New Repub­lic.

Ever since the elec­tion, I have seen many posts on var­i­ous out­lets con­cern­ing the dimin­ish­ment of the Repub­li­can Par­ty. Today brings yet one more.

The GOP is becom­ing a region­al par­ty. The GOP is increas­ing­ly com­prised of only the extreme right base. Etc. Etc.

Who will save the Repub­li­can Par­ty? Are we in dan­ger of becom­ing a one par­ty country?

Don’t wor­ry about it.

The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty will see to it that the Repub­li­can Par­ty will enjoy a resur­gence. Maybe not in 2010. Maybe not in 2012. But the time will come when the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty will just get too car­ried away and the coun­try will look to the Repub­li­can Par­ty for salvation.

Just like the Repub­li­can Par­ty was the recent sal­va­tion of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Party.

Rumors of the death of the Repub­li­can Par­ty are great­ly exaggerated.

07/​22/​2013 Update: The New Repub­lic changed up their web site and the link I post­ed became bro­ken. I have changed the link to what I believe is the page I orig­i­nal­ly linked to. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the con­tent of the TNR post was most­ly in a video which does not seem to be avail­able anymore.