Scott Lemieux

Reading Kate’s rundown of potential VP candidates left my jaw on the floor more than once. As a strong Obama leaner, I was especially appalled. Seriously, Dianne Fienstein? First of all, on the merits she’s awful, a wet on many issues even though she has a safe seat (cf. most recently her casting the decisive […]

I’ve long been skeptical about the Beauchamp stories, and wouldn’t be surprised if more elements of them were proven false. Having said that, though, I see nothing objectionable here. Obviously, 1) there’s no reason to uncritically believe the self-serving results of an investigation the Army refuses to make public, and 2) a recantation under the […]

It’s not just that Mark Penn, Union Buster has made a career out of slicing the electorate into arbitrary subgroups inevitably calculated to push the Democratic Party to the right and to focus on the interests of the affluent. It’s also that he would seem to be completely incompetent (or, at least, so sloppy and […]

With respect to the debate between Garance, Ezra and Matt referenced below, I think the answer is that they’re all right. I certainly agree with Garance (and I don’t think anybody disagrees) that there’s no hidden liberal technocrat waiting to emerge if Romney becomes President. Obviously, the relatively liberal Republican that governed in Massachusetts was […]

You may have heard about this embrace of utter crackpottery from new social conservative darling Mike Huckabee: Speaking before a gathering of Christian conservative voters, GOP presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee said legalized abortion in the United States was a holocaust. “Sometimes we talk about why we’re importing so many people in our workforce,” the former […]

Unlike Ezra, I’m still not really convinced by this article that a serious third-party campaign is inevitable should Giuliani win the GOP nomination. Consider the qualifications in the quotes obtained by Scherer: “There will be further exploration of what is to be done…And there will be some discussion of who would be a viable independent […]

Ross Douthat tries to defend ineffective and inequitable abortion criminalization policies: Whereas we know that when abortion was legalized in America in the early 1970s, the abortion rate went up dramatically; we also know that Western Europe, which has lower abortion rates than the U.S., also has (somewhat) more restrictive abortion laws. Which suggests if […]

In response to Matt here, let’s go back and see what I actually wrote about the new WHO study: If the goal of abortion is to protect fetal life, criminalization is at best an ineffective and grossly inequitable means of achieving this goal, and the bundle of policies favoring reproductive freedom (including legal abortion) generally […]

Like Matt (and Garance), I think JMM gets this exactly right: I know I’ve said before that Romney’s profound and almost incalculable phoniness is a terrifying prospect to behold in a possible president. But the danger of phoniness, aesthetic or otherwise, cannot hold a candle to the truly catastrophic foreign policy Giuliani would likely pursue […]