Scott Lemieux

After seeing the new study demonstrating the gross ineffectiveness of “pro-life” policies in actually reducing abortion rates that Kate discussed last week, Professor B suggests that “pro-lifers” be renamed the “pro dead women” camp. While impolitic, the label is sadly accurate. Essentially, the only thing that criminalizing abortion accomplishes is to ensure that some number […]

As Jim Henley notes, if nothing else Al Gore‘s Nobel Prize has made for arguably “the funniest day in the history of the internet,” producing all measure of wingnuttery. It’s worth, however, clearing up some nonsense about a recent British Court ruling about An Inconvenient Truth. Despite misleading claims that the judge found “nine significant […]

Publius brings up what I think is a genuinely difficult question about the House Resolution condemning the anti-Armenian genocide. I would differ in that I’m inclined to say that if I’m a legislator and the resolution comes up, I probably have to vote for it. To vote against is, if not quite tantamount to a […]

Speaking of “liberal hawks,” the Bush administration’s idea of a Deep Thinker tries to combine the vain preening of liberal Iraq War dead-enders with very strange conservative strawman arguments about moral relativism. And, alas, it succeeds: It is inherently difficult for liberals to argue against the expansion of social and political liberalism in oppressive parts […]

I didn’t get to the latest self-parody by Roger Cohen — yes, he really thinks that accusing people who supported the war in Afghanistan of “Bush Derangement Syndrome” is an argument! — yesterday, so a couple people beat me to it. I’ll just add that when you’re reduced to invoking random dictators from the past […]

Matt disagrees with me that Dobson is probably bluffing about a third-party run if Giuliani is the nominee. I don’t mean to discount the possibility entirely, but I do think it takes a pretty cynical view of Dobson’s motives (“cynical”, of course, doesn’t mean “wrong.”) If we assume that Dobson wants to maximize his personal […]

To follow up on Rob below, one major reason I always strongly opposed the Iraq war is that my graduate training entailed some study of the difficulties of state-building. Building stable states, let alone liberal democracies, is very difficult, and usually involves alliances with other powerful actors to help raise revenues and maintain coercive authority. […]

I certainly agree with Yglesias that “It would be a big, big problem for Giuliani‘s general election campaign to have any of the major cultural conservative institutions backing a third party candidate. It’s generally very difficult to win when you have a spoiler trying to take you down the way Ross Perot was gunning for […]

This is only going to last as long as it takes the Supreme Court to give the green light again, or for the state to find a new lethal injection formula that might lessen the chance of being tortured to death, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has taken the obvious step. The cases […]