Scott Lemieux

To follow up on Adam‘s point here, the conservative project to separate the implied constitutional “right to privacy” from Roe v. Wade is longstanding. (I should note, contra to Ponnuru‘s fancy shuffling, the question — and Palin‘s answer — were both about the “right to privacy” as opposed to whether specific provisions of the Bill […]

I see we have a key Republican policy so common that even Sarah Palin can repeat it with some measure of coherence. This “principle,” alas, is the idea that women lack the moral agency to be held accountable for actions that are allegedly so bad that assisting someone in such an action should be a […]

As Adam pointed out yesterday, even taken at face value John Boehner‘s attempt to use whining to deflect responsibility from his inability to secure the votes he promised for the bailout bill is embarrassing. Even worse, as Jonathan Zasloff notes, is that the story is plainly false. The speech was hardly some partisan stemwinder and, […]

I’m baffled by this quasi-rationalization of McCain‘s reprehensible campaign from erstwhile McCain-lover Jon Chait: Any attempt to determine McCain’s true motives is necessarily pure speculation. It’s possible that McCain has convinced himself to actually believe the lies he has been telling. But here’s a more likely explanation: All this dishonesty can be understood not as […]

Opposition to the California proposition that would eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry and return them to second-class citizenship continues to grow, with 55 percent planning to vote no and just 38 percent supporting it (a very bad position for an initiative). [HT: Roger Ailes.] Why, I’m beginning to wonder if predictions that […]

Look, if Republicans want to go to the mat for executives who think that they deserve multimillion-dollar payouts for running venerable, profitable companies completely into the ground — “It’s the unassailable product of the Free Market! Now how about that $700 billion in taxpayer money to buy out worthless assets? Gimme Gimme Gimme!” — by […]

As one would expect, Stuart Taylor‘s article about the campaigns is a masterpiece of false equivalence, using such tricks as balancing lies and smears from John McCain‘s campaign with stupid articles in The New York Times that the Obama campaign had nothing to do with. He also somehow gets through an article about campaign lies […]

On the issue of the citation of foreign law in United States Supreme Court opinions, I think this is the key passage in Adam Liptak‘s recent article: The controversy over the citation of foreign law in American courts is freighted with misconceptions. One is that the practice is somehow new or unusual. The other is […]

A commenter at my other gig has the right take on the new Richard Cohen column: He’s kinda like a kid who, upon discovering that there is no Santa Claus, attempts to locate the precise moment in time that Jolly St. Nick ceased to exist. I suppose some people might be inclined to be charitable […]

Cathy Young has an attempted feminist defense of Sarah Palin (endorsed, naturally, by Ann Althouse.) The fundamental problem with the argument is that there’s no inherent value to having lots of people call themselves feminists, per se. The point is to get people to endorse feminist principles, and on this count Palin’s record is utterly […]