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Mark Kleiman bats in the leadoff position today, offering his comments on the controversial bankruptcy bill the Senate is set to vote on. “The primary moral argument made in favor of the bankruptcy bill just rammed through the Senate,” he writes, “is that holding people to their debts represents a move back toward ‘personal responsibility.’ That seems like a fairly odd bit of reasoning, given that there are always two sides to a transaction. Why is it that we should punish irresponsibility on the part of the debtors and reward irresponsibility on the part of the creditors?”
The bill, which makes it harder for consumers to erase their debts in bankruptcy court — but which also includes loopholes for the wealthy — was also taken up at The Shameless Agitator, who gives a pretty good rundown of some left-leaning criticism of the bill, while Centerfield takes stock of objections from both the right and the left.
Pennywit, echoing what seems to be the opinion of many bloggers on both sides of the ideological divide, writes:
While I agree with the general precept that people should pay their debts, I find myself more sympathetic to the debtors here. A company that extends credit to subprime borrowers must realize on some level that it is taking a risk that those borrowers will default. After all, a credit-card company has access to the person’s credit report, income, and quite possibly his past spending behavior. The credit-card company is hardly an innocent victim.
While many might be weary to the bone of the extended Dan Rather denouement, for many a conservative blogger it’s mother’s milk. Several topped off the predictable crowing and blogger triumphalism with disgust at Rather’s final broadcast, which Patrick Ruffini dismissed as little more than a “cheap trick.” The Moderate Voice, however, as might be guessed by its name, gives the whole thing a bit more thought, mulling over what steps Rather and CBS News might take next.
Finally, Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly has an interesting item concerning Lada Ademic and Natalie Glance’s study on “blog behavior.” The study “collected a sample of 40 political blogs, 20 from the right and 20 from the left, and then plotted the links between them over a period of time.” The conclusion? Conservative blogs, as a group, have a “generally denser web of relationships than the liberal blogosphere,” although both right and left tend to keep it in-house when linking to other blogs.
Go figure.
–Paul McLeary
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