It looks obvious

To enforce mandates, or to not enforce mandates? this is, at least part, of the question: 

To see why Clinton’s argument is nonsensical, consider that the country could achieve nearly universal health insurance immediately simply by enacting an individual mandate coupled with a truly draconian penalty for non-compliance. But so what? This would be good for Blue Cross, Health Net, and Aetna, but the worried middle class wouldn’t sleep any better at night knowing the government was going to force it to buy unaffordable insurance than knowing that it might have to go without unaffordable insurance. Clinton understands this, of course, which is why she refuses to discuss penalties or enforcement.

Clinton could reasonably argue that, as president, she would need to accept an individual mandate in order to win Congressional backing for market reforms and subsidies that would truly help the uninsured. Instead, she chooses to claim that mandates are themselves the goal, because doing so allows her to falsely charge that Obama is less committed than she is to the real goal of making affordable health insurance available to all. Her choice of tactics can be rooted only in a cynical belief that her attacks can succeed because the issue is just too complicated for most voters to understand.

As the dust seems to settle about the McCain alleged scandal the Washington Times is looking into the decline of the New York Time:

The New York Times’ recent hit-and-run on John McCain is a moment of reckoning for the "newspaper of record." Certainly the fact that the previously reasonable Executive Editor Bill Keller spent the weekend lashing out at the McCain camp for "trying to change the subject to us … [attempting] to use the New York Times as an opportunity to rally the base," suggests that the Times still has not realized that the rest of the world now regards its pronouncements as just as fallible as the rest of the news media’s. Indeed, its own public editor finds it fallible in this case. As Clark Hoyt wrote over the weekend: "[I]f you cannot provide readers with some independent evidence, I think it is wrong to report the suppositions or concerns of anonymous aides about whether the boss is getting into the wrong bed."

Don Boudreaux trying to clarify a common mistake: 

More generally, it seems difficult for some people to grasp the fact that society and government are not identical — or, more precisely, to grasp the fact that civil society can and does often thrive outside of government influence and, indeed, very often (I would say most often) in spite of such influence.

Few weeks ago I linked to an HBO documentary movie about disturbing problems with the electronic voting machines used in many states. The Onion has a unique take on the issue…