Pema Levy

In his Times column last week, Ta-Nehisi Coates wondered about Rick Perry‘s record: “Should Gov. Rick Perry of Texas enter the 2012 presidential race, he would enjoy a strange and remarkable escort — the irrepressible ghost of Cameron Todd Willingham.” As much as I’d like to see Rick Perry pay politically for sentencing an innocent […]

Scott‘s column today on how Monday’s decision in Walmart v. Dukes does a nice job of putting Scalia’s opinion into historical perspective. An important exercise because, as he writes, “The idea that discrimination will rarely coexist with policies that are neutral on their face only makes sense if you ignore much of American history…” Not […]

Today, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas revealed that he is in the country illegally in a New York Times piece. What makes the piece so incredible is that it’s largely one-of-a-kind, and not because there aren’t an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States, many of whom surely have experiences similar to […]

Yesterday’s decision in Walmart v. Dukes, in which the five conservative justices ruled that Walmart was too big and diverse to be subject to a company-wide class-action suit, reminds me of this bit from British comedian Eddie Izzard on mass murderers getting away with, well, being mass murderers (the relevant part starts about 45 seconds […]

Anti-abortion zealots do not trust Mitt Romney one bit. At the Republican Leadership Conference over the weekend, the Susan B. Anthony List, the organization nominally dedicated to electing anti-abortion women to office, announced the pledge they’ve convinced most of the major candidates to sign. But Mitt Romney refused to sign the pledge. Nevermind that the […]

Sahil Kapur has a good piece up at TNR about the Tea Party’s plans to go after Mitt Romney because he’s not the “rock-solid fiscal conservative” they want. According to Kapur, FreedomWorks, the Dick Armey-led Tea Party organization, is threatening to “uneash part of its $25 million treasure trove in an attempt to sink his […]

Yesterday night, the lawsuit over Indiana’s law to defund Planned Parenthood got more complicated. As states go after abortion access and Planned Parenthood clinics in particular, the federal government has shied away from these state-level fights. But recently, states have begun to defund Planned Parenthood (and other abortion providers) by denying them Medicaid funds, making […]

ThinkProgress reports on a rift between the Chamber of Commerce and many GOP freshmen over the debt ceiling. The Chamber wants the debt ceiling raised because they know the economic results of not doing so would be bad for businesses. The freshmen, who have sworn not to raise the debt ceiling, responded to the Chamber: […]

The most important way for conservatives to roll back access to family planning is to link it to abortion. To wit, at the Faith and Freedom Conference last week, Susan B. Anthony List president Marjorie Dannenfelser declared: “Every year that contraception and family planning increases, the abortion rate also increases in direct proportion. … This […]