Scott Lemieux

Ramesh Ponnuru makes an interesting point about Ron Paul: “What strikes me is what a throwback Paul is among libertarians. Hard money and anti-interventionism move him, but he seems utterly uninterested in the lifestyle questions that have taken up so much of Reason for the past decade.” Indeed, he’s not merely indifferent to all such […]

Partly because I think you should stick by your predictions as long as they’re still plausible, I still think that Mitt Romney has to be considered the favorite to win the GOP nomination. Matt, however, makes an interesting point about the biggest impediment Romney faces: the possibility that Huckabee will win in Iowa. Assuming (and […]

Kevin Drum beat me to the most obvious problem with Andrew Sullivan‘s latest attack on Social Security: to call benefits of $12,000 a year “gold plated” is worthy of one of the rich guys in Ruben Bolling‘s “Lucky Ducky” cartoons. Adding to the comedy is Sullivan generously noting that “I’d rather settle for a lower […]

The latest from the War On (Some Classes of People Who Use Some) Drugs, a/k/a where the Constitution goes to die. Marcy Wheeler does a very good job of explaining the illogic behind claims that the government doesn’t need probable cause to get access to tracking data; if taken seriously, it would eviscerate large parts […]

The Supreme Court has decided to hear an appeal to the D.C. Circuit decision striking down D.C.’s handguns ban. I’ll have more discussion about this later, but to stimulate discussion in the interim I’ll say that 1) the most plausible interpretation of the 2nd Amendment, I think, confers an individual right to bear arms, although […]

The recent hysteria about a few peripheral citations of legal norms in other liberal democracies in Supreme Court opinions has reached some kind of apex with a speaker at a Federalist Society convention proposing a constitutional amendment banning the practice. What’s strange is the amount of energy being expended over what it quite obviously a […]

Is there anything more pathetic than someone whining about excessive “Bush hatred” based on generalizations derived from nameless individuals at apocryphal-sounding dinner parties … in 2007? Peter Berkowitz‘s latest column has been written so many times that there must be a template you can use by now. Well, you could use the occasion chance to […]

As a number of bloggers have noted, the U.S. Sentencing Commission will be hearing testimony today about whether their new guidelines reducing the gross and arbitrary disparity between sentences for crack and powdered cocaine should be applied retroactively. Sentencing Law and Policy points to this WaPo story, noting that upwards of 90 percent of those […]

Matt provides some useful quotes taking on Paul Berman‘s attempt to claim that he was contemporaneously against the Iraq War. Perhaps even more instructive is this one from another post in the Slate symposium. After conceding that mistakes were made by the leaders of the war, he turns to another enemy: But some of the […]

Steve notes some projection among wingers concerning the relatively poor box-office performance of Lions for Lambs. Apparently many conservatives can’t imagine evaluating art in anything but political terms, and assumes that everyone else does the same. But perhaps we should consider the fact that the movie isn’t doing especially well because it, er, doesn’t sound […]