Scott Lemieux

THE PORKBUSTERS PROBLEM. Jane Galt brings up a reasonable point with respect to the anti-“Porkbusters” position taken by a cross-ideological set of bloggers (including me) last week: But seriously, while this is true on some level, isn’t porkbusters still a good idea? There are other reasons to want to cut pork, besides being worried about […]

PATHETICALLY LIKE A MARTYR. Hilzoy offers the best summary for Paul Wolfowitz‘s ignominious departure from the World Bank that I’ve seen so far: A few suggestions for his successor: (1) If you don’t want to resign under a cloud, don’t create one. (2) If you think people are out to get you, don’t hand them […]

THE “PORKBUSTERS” DODGE. Ramesh Ponnuru has an excellent critique of the “Porkbusters” crusade, noting that it “places an enormous amount of political energy in the service of trivial goals.” As he points out, even the modest reductions in federal spending actually being claimed are largely illusory: …most of the time, getting rid of earmarks saves […]

THE ARGUMENT FROM TRADITION. Thers take on the first half of the Scalia quote approvingly cited by Ann Althouse. I’d like to deal with the second: “What Shakespeare is to the high school English student,” Scalia said, “the society’s accepted constitutional traditions are to the prudent jurist. “He does not judge them, but is judged […]

TORTURIN’ RUDY. I’m not sure what’s more depressing about yesterday’s debate — the current forerunner enthusiastically and unequivocally supporting torture, or how well it went over in the audience. Obviously, Giuliani‘s authoritarianism is going to become more and more manifest because it’s his only possible route to victory. I still think that when Rudy goes […]

THE FECKLESSNESS OF CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS. Garance, Matt and zuzu have already amply demonstrated the bad faith, distortions, and selective evidence of the latest manifestation of Christina Hoff Sommers‘s feeble “American feminists don’t care about the suppression of Islamic women” routine. And, of course, American feminists are in a no-win situation. One might have thought […]

HAWKS STICKING THEIR HEADS IN THE SAND (OF IRAQ). Ezra reminds us of one of the more bizarre manifestations of pro-Bush‘s-war liberalism, Paul Berman‘s attempt to fit Islamic terrorism seamlessly into the WWII and/or Cold War models of conflict, as a fight waged against totalitarianism. A year later, sometime TAP contributor Stephen Holmes offered the […]

VOTE FRAUD FRAUD UPDATE. New evidence suggests that the failure of U.S. Attorneys to pursue bogus vote fraud changes was an even bigger factor in the DOJ’s political purge than was previously known: Nearly half the U.S. attorneys slated for removal by the administration last year were targets of Republican complaints that they were lax […]

COUNTERMOBILIZATION NOTES. Charles Krauthammer, taking one of the laziest column ideas off the shelf, is the umpteenth nominally pro-choice wealthy male columnist to argue that Roe should be overturned and that this would end most of the conflict about abortion in the United States. The problem with his argument is that there isn’t the slightest […]

SUPPORTING REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS IS THE NEW CONTRARIANISM. Christine Stansell‘s new article about Carhart II is very good. The puzzle it presents is how on earth it made it into the New Republic — perhaps Jeffrey Rosen and Ben Wittes were away on a cruise (high contrarianism on the high seas!) or something. Anyway, it’s a […]