I want to thank these guys for pulling my big butt across this finish line.

The only truly individualistic health-care choice - where you receive care that is unpolluted by anyone else's funds - is to forgo insurance altogether, paying out-of-pocket for health services as you need them.

It is always a disappointment to turn from forthright consideration of some subject - whether from the Left or the Right, a poet or a plumber - to the Beltway version, in which the only aspects of the issue that matter are the effects it will have on the fortunes of the two parties and the various men in power.

Concerns about the size and role of government are what seem to leave reformers stammering and speechless in town-hall meetings. The right wants to have a debate over fundamental principles; elected Democrats seem incapable of giving it to them.

It's curious how this parallels what goes on in academia. In academic fields like cultural studies, there's a lot of emphasis placed on finding and celebrating instances of audience "counter-hegemony" or audience "agency" instances of people not acting in the way that TV or the culture industry tells them to - the idea being that people really do have free will.

People understand how, with the concentration of ownership, the things that make up their lives are increasingly under the control of fewer and fewer hands. We see a great, popular demonology of corporate villains that especially tends to focus on the leaders of the culture industry, such as Rupert Murdoch, who is a very widely hated figure.