I was going to use the "it's complicated" Headline, but by the time I read the Sunday paper, my brain was hurting from the complicated world we live in and try to prosper within while having the government and economy we desire.
In no particular order:
A study of ethnic group economic and cultural success focuses on how the group's sense of superiority combined with a sense of inferiority and a familial passing on of personal discipline from generation to generation leads to relative success in life. Not for everyone in the ethnic group, but for most members overall. So when we are discussing income inequality, school performance and any other number changes to government policy, a key thought should be: What will be the guiding impact on parenting and a child's sense of the achievable.
What Drives Success? Parenting apparently
In the sports section there was a nice piece on Richard Sherman of the Seattle Seahawks. His parents made a difference to him and his sense of the achievable derived directly from that.
Link to Richard Sherman article
Ross Douthat wrote a very nice piece on what he believes conservatives need to acknowledge about family issues and what liberals need to acknowledge about family issues. The policy fall out from he identifies is very complicated going to the heart of the capitalistic model with globalization a reality. And very frankly, his desired path for limiting divorce and abortion rights smacks of a desire to have the government perform a big brother role in peoples private lives which runs head on into Republican's desire to not have the government doing just that in health care. I would postulate that if it is good in the former, it is certainly good in the latter.
He also pushes a view that my friend RedStateVT frequently pushes that pop culture is the cause of much of what is wrong with American Society. Since almost everything in pop culture is rooted in the 1st Amendment (Freedom of Speech for my foreign readers), I don't know what government can do to limit what I freely admit assaults my sense of sensibility on occasion.
Link to Douthat
My biggest takeaway from the Douthat column is that the thoughts are reasonable ones that people should be discussing when trying to come up with changes to our policies and that the current partisanship in national politics prevents such discussions from happening. I can see a Democrat saying, yes I might want to limit 2nd trimester abortion more, but how can I do that when so many of the other side want to eliminate abortion rights completely. How will that look in my next campaign?
The level of hatred between the political partisans at the local levels has permeated the Congress and eliminated any reasonable discussions of bridges between the points of view that could mean progress.
And finally, Thomas Friedman's column today puts another dagger in the heart of the neo-conservative's view that US military action can create a democracy in the Middle East. He discusses the progress in Tunisia, the necessary societal factors for creation of a democracy, the shortage of those factors in many other Middle Eastern countries and by inference, the fact that without those factors, no military action by an outsider can create a democracy.
Link to Friedman
And for what it is worth, a fascinating and outrageous exercise of police over reach and hospitals taking advantage to use the police over reach when it presents itself to enrich themselves from the medical insurance system.
A $6,000 hospital bill for being in police custody
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