Scott Lemieux

This phenomenon was also evident in yesterday’s NYT article about McCain. One searches the article in vain for evidence that voters — as opposed the elite editorial writers with an extensive history of swooning for the Straight Talk Express — are showing more support for McCain. The same thing goes for talk about a Fred […]

Everyone who reads blogs knows that no discussion of contemporary GOP racism will take place without some idiot mentioning that Robert Byrd was a member of the Klan during the Roosevelt administration. To pre-empt this response. Yglesias makes the obvious point about why the Byrd analogy fails as a defense of Trent Lott‘s praise of […]

There are a couple frustrating elements to Zev Chafets‘s profile of Mike Huckabee. For example, he completely botches the discussion of the DuMond pardon, disappearing the lunatic anti-conspiracy angle that is what makes the pardon so problematic. But this is also odd: Huckabee’s answer to his opponents on the fiscal right has been his Fair […]

I I agree with Matt that 1)it was stupid of Obama‘s campaign to pick a fight with Paul Krugman, but 2) Krugman’s point is very misguided. I don’t think that Obama’s rhetoric about transcending old politics tells us much about how he’ll actually govern. Bush in 2000, after all, didn’t campaign as a 50%+1 conservative […]

The New Jersey legislature has voted to abolish the death penalty, and Corzine says that he will sign the bill. Good. Some death penalty supporters will undoubtedly mention that a majority of the state’s citizens still support the death penalty, but this is misleading. When residents are asked to choose between the viable alternatives, what […]

Larry Sabato — whose Senate predictions in the ’06 midterms were pretty much dead on — sees 2008 as another good one for the Democrats in the Senate, with VA, CO, and NH looking like likely pickups and a couple of other possibilities. This isn’t surprising, but it’s still gratifying to see it laid out […]

I agree with Jim Henley and Roy Edroso that the complaint filed in federal and provincial human rights commissions against Mark Steyn is a dangerous threat to free speech. Not because, as Maclean’s is saying in defense, Steyn’s writing isn’t “Islamophobic,” but because the suppression of political speech is exceptionally dangerous. Some people may object […]

Fay Vincent has a good op-ed about the appalling exclusion of the great union leader Marvin Miller alongside the enshrinement of his incompetent adversary Bowie Kuhn from the National Baseball Hall of Fame. I didn’t know this, but apparently the new inductee brought the same level of competence and integrity to his post-baseball career: When […]

The CIA deliberately destroyed tapes of two of its “severe interrogations.” The First Rule of the Bush administration: It can always get worse. Marty Lederman correctly calls out Jay Rockefeller, who at the very least has been sitting on this information since 2006, for yet again shedding crocodile tears after failing to do anything when […]

Unfortunately, other professional responsibilities have prevented me from reading the full transcripts yet, so I’ve only heard the highlights (I’ll have more when I read them in full.) Marty Lederman found both advocates brilliant (as did TAP’s Phoebe Connelly, who was in attendance) and seems optimistic about the result. Linda Greenhouse also says that the […]