Through close readings of debates centered around sponsorship, supervision, and standardization recorded in the Congressional Globe and Congressional Record during this period, Williamjames Hull Hoffer traces a critical shift in ideas that ultimately ushered in Progressive legislation: the willingness of American citizens to allow, and in fact ask for, federal intervention in their daily lives.
The ethical debates centered around the precautionary principle, the right to know, and do no harm.
Given the country's impressive performance, current internal policy debates center around the question how to withdraw parts of the recent reforms.
On the policy front: Many of the policy debates center around how best to balance the adverse short-run effects of fiscal consolidation and bank deleveraging versus their favorable effects in the long run.
And as recently as a few years ago, fans and pundits entrenched the two in a point-counterpoint debate centered around which one of them was N.B.A.'s best point guard.
Until the McNamara era, much Congressional debate centered around budgetary allocations in the traditional service categories (Army, Navy, Air Force, and so on), each broken down by personnel, operation and maintenance, procurement, R & D, and military construction.
On Monday, debate centered around whether the league and police, who investigated the incident before Rice agreed not to contest a charge of aggravated assault, had ever had access to the new TMZ video.
With a significant part of the tax reform debate centered around increasing the deficit, which will require multiple votes to increase the debt ceiling, the timing is not great.
After all, if you're up to your neck in a Twitter debate centered around, I don't know, whether the Palm Pre was a bigger smartphone flop than the BlackBerry Z10, you're probably not going to pay much attention to the snarky quips your followers are flinging at each other.
