New Facebook Page

Dear Readers,

It has been repeatedly drawn to my attention that the blog does not have a dedicated Facebook page. In the past, I have invited readers who wish to follow on Facebook to friend me, but as the blog has grown this has become increasingly impossible. In the aftermath of the viral UK election post (which was spread predominately through Facebook) I now recognize that it is no longer reasonable to go on this way. For these reasons, I have created a Facebook page for the blog bearing my name. The page is called “Benjamin Studebaker”. Click here for a direct link. You’ll also find a place where you can “like” it at the bottom of the website, right under where it says “Facebook Updates”. If you like me on Facebook, here’s what you get:

New blog posts in your Facebook feed the moment I publish them.
Additional political thoughts I may have that are too long for Twitter and too short for the blog.
Every Thursday I will share a “Throwback Thursday” post–something I published a while ago that I think is still relevant and important.

You won’t get any irrelevant content, just blog stuff.

I also want to take this opportunity to personally thank those of you who shared the UK election post. There have been over 812,000 hits on it (as of May 9, 2015), and I am gratified by the 160,000+ people who chose to share it on Facebook. I only wish it had been able to have a larger impact on the result.

Thanks again,

Benjamin

Candidate Evaluations: Carly Fiorina

With three republicans deciding to run for president within the last week, I have a lot of writing to do. Today we’re covering Carly Fiorina, who declared on May 4. As regular readers know well by now, the Candidate Evaluations series is about examining a US presidential candidate’s background, policy history, and explicit statements in an attempt to figure out whether the candidate would actually be any good at being president, rather than focusing on electability or likeability, as is common in the mainstream press. There have been quite a few of these–so far, we have looked at:

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Candidate Evaluations: Ben Carson

Despite the continued explosive popularity of my UK election post, I am now drawing down my comment responses and focusing on doing new work for my regular readers (though newbies are more than welcome to join in). This means resuming the Candidate Evaluations series and covering Ben Carson, who recently declared his intent to run for president. If you’re new to this series, the goal is to examine a US presidential candidate’s background, policy history, and explicit statements in an attempt to figure out whether the candidate would actually be any good at being president. Too often, no one bothers to ask these questions, focusing instead on electability or likability. The series often ventures into fun digressions–for Rand Paul, we talked about the Austrian school, for Hillary Clinton, we talked about welfare reform and financial deregulation during the 90’s. I’ve also covered Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and–my favorite so far–Bernie Sanders.

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13 Terrible Tory Counterarguments

A few days ago, I wrote a post called Britain: For the Love of God, Please Stop David Cameron. I didn’t expect much out of it, because my usual audience is predominately American, and many Americans take little interest in the British elections. So I was pleasantly surprised when it went semi-viral in the UK, quickly becoming the most popular post I have written. Naturally, with a larger audience comes more critical (and sometimes just aggressively hostile) comments, and my usual policy of responding to every critical or interesting comment I receive is increasingly no longer practical. So instead, I’ve decided to write this all-purpose response to the most common bad critiques I’ve seen levied at my post. If you’re one of the wonderful people who read my post and deemed it worth sharing, I hope that this post will help you deal with any Tory supporters you may run across who may try to give you grief about it. So let’s get started.

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Britain: For the Love of God, Please Stop David Cameron

On May 7 (this Thursday), Britain has a general election. I care deeply about British politics–I did my BA over there and will return to do my PhD there this fall. But more importantly, David Cameron’s government has managed the country’s economy with stunning fecklessness, and I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do my part to point this out.

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