Erin K. O'Neill

High voter turnout is not the only advantage of compulsory voting. For example, enacting compulsory voting in the U.S. could turn political dialogue away from the extremes of all sides.  Moreover, incidents of voter disenfranchisement and voter suppression, in its many nefarious forms, could potentially become a thing of the past.

Roe v. Wade said women have the constitutional right to choose an abortion. It’s controversial, and it wasn’t as explicitly stated as freedom of speech, but it is unfair to deny public money to protect this right. Furthermore, the Hyde Amendment punishes women who can’t afford to choose to terminate a pregnancy.

I have one overarching life philosophy: When in doubt, do as the Australians do. The Aussies have fashioned themselves a very nice, if not perfect, health care system.  It merges the benefits of a government-run universal insurance and care scheme with the flexibility and choice of private insurance rather successfully.

And here’s the kicker: no matter how right I know I am, no matter how well I think I’ve thought out my points, no matter how very wrong my father is, my dad backs me into a rhetorical corner and all is lost. There is no second place, only surrender, in our battlefield of world and political outlooks. My dad always wins.

While the Ann Arbor News was beset by the same problems that pretty much every paper in the industry is currently suffering, the shock is that Booth Newspapers, a subsidiary of Advance Publications, decided not to cut the number of print publications and furlough journalists to maintain profits, but to abolish the News altogether and start fresh. And now, my beloved hometown of Ann Arbor, Mich., is the first major U.S. municipality to be completely without a newspaper.