NewsTrust - All Rated Stories

Like a Rat

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Slate - By Alan E. Kazdin, Carlo Rotella - Nov. 12 (News Analysis) - Psychologists who work with children and families tend to avoid mentioning to parents that the treatments they use are often based on research done on animals.

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The health insurers stumble into an argument for a public option.

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Timothy Noah - Oct. 14 (News Analysis) - Health reform cleared the Senate finance committee, 14-9, without a public option. Now the trick is figuring out how to put it back in. One powerful argument for doing so comes from an unlikely source: the private health-insurance lobby.

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Nonprofit Journalism Comes at a Cost

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Jack Shafer - Oct. 01 (Opinion) - But before we get out the party hats and noise-makers to celebrate the rise of nonprofit journalism, here's the bad news. In the current arrangement, we're substituting one flawed business model for another. For-profit newspapers lose money accidentally. Nonprofit news operations lose money deliberately. No matter how good the nonprofit operation is, it always ends up sustaining itself with handouts, and handouts come with conditions.

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The American Way of Dentistry: How dentists think.

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By June Thomas - Sep. 30 (Special Report) - Dentists earn their living in a way that's markedly different from the way doctors do. Somewhere between 80 percent and 85 percent of American dentists practice as owner-operators, as compared with only about 20 percent of physicians. Group practices, which are common for doctors, are rare for dentists—about 63 percent work solo, 20 percent practice with one other dentist, and 17 percent are in business with two or more dentists. A dentist's "income" is therefore typically the difference between the fees she receives and the expenditures she lays out, which are considerable. This is usually true even for dental specialists.

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Sometimes it takes an outsider like Andrew Breitbart to show the press corps the way.

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:05:19 -0700

Slate - By Jack Shafer - Sep. 24 (Opinion) - ... Andrew Breitbart is a conservative... and Matt Drudge protégé. Lately, he has distributed a series of videos... in which the duo visits various ACORN offices with a hidden camera, pretending to be a pimp and prostitute seeking advice on setting up a brothel.

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There's a lot more to the Afghan strategy than how many troops we send

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Fred Kaplan - Sep. 23 (Opinion) - The push is on for President Barack Obama to send more troops to Afghanistan, perhaps as many as 40,000 more. Boxing in Obama was almost certainly the aim of whoever gave the Washington Post's Bob Woodward a copy of the 66-page internal memo by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

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The United States can't win in Afghanistan unless its new president makes major reforms, and quickly.

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Fred Kaplan - Aug. 28 (Opinion) - The ballots haven't all yet been counted in Afghanistan's election, but the interim reports—of intimidation, low turnout, continued violence, and widespread fraud—bode poorly for the country and our war there.

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Is half a torture investigation better than none at all?

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Dahlia Lithwick - Aug. 26 (Opinion) - Holder has fallen prey to the sort of magical legal thinking that seeps through the whole CIA report: the presumption that if there's a legal memo, it must be legal.

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Was Bill Clinton's visit to North Korea worth the time, energy, and prestige? No way.

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Christopher Hitchens - Aug. 11 (Opinion) - I call your attention to a small detail about Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two American journalists who were wrongfully arrested, illegally detained, and then capriciously released by the crime family that controls the northern section of the Korean peninsula and treats all its inhabitants as slave-prisoners and all the neighbors within its missile range as hostages.

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Let's pretend Obama really was born in Kenya. What would happen then?

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Brian Palmer - Aug. 06 (News Analysis) - Let's pretend, for just a moment, that the birthers had credible evidence that Obama was foreign-born. Then what would happen?

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Is Obama trying too hard not to be like his predecessors?

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Jacob Weisberg - Aug. 04 (Opinion) - Obama's major difficulties predictably derive from reacting too strongly against the Clinton model. Where Clinton went wrong by being too controlling, Obama has given up to much control. Leaving the specifics to Congress has led to a classic sausage-making festival.

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Health, American-Style

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Jacob Weisberg - Jul. 18 (Opinion) - America's system has become wildly unfair and expensive. In fixing it, Reid says, we should follow other countries where health care is fairer, cheaper, and produces better results. He's right that we can learn much from practices elsewhere—why, for instance, can't we have those nifty smart cards the French use instead of paper records?

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At Sotomayor's hearing, the abortion protestors are only ones telling the truth

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Dahlia Lithwick - Jul. 15 (Opinion) - Anyone who believes these confirmation hearings represent much beyond empty political theater should consider how meaningful these proceedings can really be when the only people speaking the truth are being systematically tackled and dragged screaming from the room. I am speaking of the abortion protestors, the fifth of which was hauled out today, shouting that Sen. Pat Leahy needs to go to confession. Each time it happens, the journalists look anxious, the nominee gets flustered, and Leahy unspools his Senate-decorum speech. But amid the half-truths and fantasies and dog whistles that compose the bulk of these hearings, I actually find the protesters quite refreshing.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.4 average - 6 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Congress has only 22 working days left to reform America's health care system.

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By John Dickerson - Jul. 09 (Opinion) - Like a true Amtrak passenger, Biden is engaging in a little wishful thinking. Yes, health care reform is moving along at a steady pace. But it's not going as fast as it needs to.

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What the Nixon tapes tell us about the Republican Party.

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Christopher Hitchens - Jul. 01 (Opinion) - I wonder sometimes whether the Nixon tapes really will just continue to be the gift that never stops giving. I was in college when Richard Milhous Nixon was first elected president, and I can still remember the profound sense of loathing and disgust that I experienced at the mere sight, let alone the sound, of him and of his most especially repellent sidekick Henry Kissinger. Wiser and older people tell you that the passions of your youth will dry up and that a more sere and autumnal condition will overtake you as maturity advances, but the thought of the Nixon gang in the White House still infuses me with a pure and undiluted hatred and makes me consider throwing up things that I don't even remember having eaten.

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What the placebo effect can teach us about health care reform. An interview with Peter Orszag.

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By John Dickerson - Jun. 30 (Interview) - Defaults matter in health plans, too: Most people don't switch their health plans during "open enrollment season," even if doing so would be beneficial to them. The point is that health reform will fall short if it doesn't reflect how people actually go about making decisions in their day-to-day lives.

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What will happen when U.S. combat troops withdraw from Iraq?

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Fred Kaplan - Jun. 27 (Opinion) - So, is all hell about to break loose in Iraq? By June 30, all U.S. combat troops are scheduled—in fact, they're required—to be withdrawn from all of Iraq's cities, towns, and villages.

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Why the newspaper still beats the Amazon Kindle.

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Farhad Manjoo - Jun. 20 (Review) - After using it for a week, I can say the new Kindle is a good first attempt at melding what's great about papers with what's great about digital devices. The trouble is, it's not nearly good enough.

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Obama couldn't sway the Iranian election even if he wanted to.

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Fred Kaplan - Jun. 12 (Opinion) - Ahmadinejad has great appeal among rural voters; he bills himself as one of them, plays to their Islamic conservatism, and lavishes enormous subsidies on them. He is greatly disliked in the cities for those same economic policies, which cause massive inflation, as well as for his repression of modern lifestyles, especially of women's rights.

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The paradox of health reform

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Timothy Noah - Jun. 10 (Special Report) - ... employer-based health insurance is dying. A troublesome irony is that health care reform may spare this awkward and inegalitarian system the death it richly deserves.

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How Obama's speech to the "Muslim world" helps Tehran

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Lee Smith - Jun. 04 (Opinion) - If President Barack Obama's speech in Cairo on Thursday is designed to hit "reset" on Washington's relations with the Muslim world, the White House may soon find that it is pushing the wrong buttons. Public diplomacy in the lands of Islam is a deeply complicated affair, and Muslims do it much better than U.S. presidents.

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How the Republicans can reverse their decline.

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Jacob Weisberg - Jun. 02 (Opinion) - There has been little open acknowledgement on the right of the depth of the problem, let alone any sign of the wholesale rethinking that the GOP needs to return to viability.

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The Rational Hysterics

Wed, 27 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Dahlia Lithwick - May. 27 (Opinion) - Instead of wading into a bruising identity politics war they cannot possibly win, conservatives—even the angriest conservatives—should wade into Sotomayor's vast legal writings. There are hundreds of cases for them to read and parse and quote out of context. Let's have this confirmation battle on the merits, rather than in the sinkhole of unfounded character attacks. The real problem for Sotomayor's opponents is that anyone who has closely read her opinions won't find much to build a case on. As the indefatigable team at SCOTUSblog has chronicled here and here, on the appeals court, Judge Sotomayor has taken a fairly moderate, text-based approach to the cases before her, placing her much closer to retiring Justice David Souter than to the late Justice William Brennan on the judicial activism spectrum.

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The Sotomayor Mystery

Tue, 26 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Emily Bazelon - May. 26 (News Analysis) - Judge Sonia Sotomayor is smart and sharp, and her formidable track record on the bench should put to rest any lingering doubts that she isn't. (Why was the left, or at least the center, criticizing one of its own?) But there is a mystery in Sotomayor's recent history: a brief, unsigned opinion in the difficult race case now before the Supreme Court, Ricci v. DeStefano. Sotomayor punted when Ricci came before her, to such a degree that she raised more questions than she answered.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.3 average - 9 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Obama tries to show that America can have a thoughtful war president.

Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By John Dickerson - May. 22 (Opinion) - On Thursday, President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney both spoke about the war against terrorists. Obama spoke to America's ideals, literally if not figuratively, delivering his speech in the building that houses the Constitution. Cheney spoke from a bunker, figuratively if not literally, holding forth in a roomful of conservative partisans. How this debate plays out politically will depend on where the American people find themselves.

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