Harry's Place

Attacks on “tax-and-spend” liberal Democrats have long been a favorite weapon in the Republican campaign arsenal.
I’m a tax-and-spend liberal myself (as long as the taxing is progressive and the spending produces benefits for the whole society). And I don’t object to controlled deficit spending as a means of boosting the economy. Nonetheless I recognize the [...]

Today marks the completion of one year online for Harry’s Place and I am taking this opportunity to thank the many people who have helped the site grow and develop.
Blogs are a labour of love – we don’t make a penny out of the time we spend on reading, writing and linking but I have [...]

Four new British blogs belatedly added to the roll today.
On the left there is Labour MP Clive Soley whose site offers a different style and approach to that of the first blogging MP Tom Watson with longer more reflective articles.
I’ve mentioned Marc Mulholland’s Daily Moiders before and Marc also pops up in the comments boxes [...]

Back in July I posted about the Bush administration’s effort to remove overtime pay protection for up to 8 million US workers. Well it seems they got what they wanted. The administration pressured the Republican-controlled Congress into dropping an amendment which would have prevented Bush’s new overtime rules from taking effect.
I don’t care what Oliver [...]

A debate about protests/demonstrations is underway across several left blogs at the moment and Norman Geras’s post on the issue today has links to most of them as well as, of course, containing his own take on the issue.
To those who cliam that the nature of Saddam’s regime was not the issue in the build [...]

We bloggers spend a lot of time criticising the mainstream media but it has to be said that the Observer leader today is absolutely spot-on.
A United Front Against Terrorism.

Chris Brooke at Virtual Stoa has some very sensible things to say in response to those in the pro-war camp who constantly ask why the Stoppers didn’t protest about human rights in Iraq and don’t protest about other matters than the war.
He is absolutely right that the bulk of those who made up the [...]

Free-market demigod Milton Friedman wrote an article a couple of years back which raised the possibility of government-funded catastrophic health insurance for every American- what Matthew Yglesias calls single-payer lite.
Friedman concluded, “While so radical a reform is almost surely not politically feasible at the moment, it may become so as dissatisfaction with the current arrangements [...]

Much as I support the ideal of European unity, I sometimes get the idea that the European Union- as a real, existing organization- is worse than useless.
For example The Financial Times reports:
The European Union’s racism watchdog has shelved a report on anti-semitism because the study concluded Muslims and pro-Palestinian groups were behind many of the [...]

As we mark the 40th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, it’s become an article of faith among many on the Left that the murder was the product of a right-wing conspiracy. The usual suspects- the Mafia, Texas oil men, the CIA or some combination thereof- are almost secondary to the [...]