Scott Lemieux

AND NANCY PELOSI IS GETTING A PASS FOR ATTACKING APPLE PIE AND FREEDOM! Matt deals with the central abject idiocy in this post by Michael Goldfarb . Obviously, nobody is mocking McCain for having security when he tours Baghdad; they’re (correctly) mocking him for claiming that walking around with a bulletproof vest, a hundred troops, […]

THE AUTHORITARIAN. Yglesias finds Rudy Giuliani asserting an “inherent authority” to fund troops without congressional appropriations. Evidently, it would be difficult to find a claim made by a mainstream candidate more transparently at odds with the text and structure of the Constitution. (Even John Yoo concedes that Congress can check the President’s wartime powers by […]

BAD FAITH. My question for people who still argue that tax cuts actually increase revenues: shouldn’t conservatarians who believe this be opposed to tax cuts? After all, they’ll just produce more revenues that the government can use to spend and (according to supply-side premises) strangle the economy! The answer, of course, is that nobody really […]

ABORTION CRIMINALIZATION ON THE GROUND. Mexico City is on the verge of decriminalizing abortion. The New York Times story on it is really first-rate. What I like about it is that it makes clear what the effects of the abortion ban are, and women will have large numbers of abortions even under conditions of formal […]

THE HORROR. It is quite remarkable how obsessed Chris Matthews remains with Bill Clinton‘s sex life. (Why the adultery of Hillary Clinton‘s husband is a major campaign issue while we can be free to swoon over Republican adulterers, some of whom actively humiliate their exes, remains unclear. Although one prominent law professor does claim that […]

BUT IF WE MAKE ACCESS TO THE BALLOT EASIER, DEMOCRATIC UNICORNS WILL STEAL OUR ELECTIONS! Today Michael Waldman and Justin Levitt have a really terrific piece about the GOP’s voter fraud fraud. The scam is advanced by the common method of “generalizing from apocryphal anecdotes”: Allegations of voter fraud — someone sneaking into the polls […]

BE CAREFUL, EVERYONE, OR SHE”LL TAUNT YOU A SECOND TIME! I don’t think there’s much more to say about Ann Althouse‘s bizarre tirade against our colleague. However, just as I’m sure Ann (Friedman) was surprised to learn a few months ago that her other blog is “sexed up with pictures of women in bras,” Garance […]

PRISON REFORM AND THE PLRA. I strongly recommend reading this post about the Prison Litigation Reform Act, which makes it more difficult for prisoners to sue and reduces the scope of potential litigation in ways that enable appalling prison conditions to continue. This is particularly problematic because (due to prisoners’ evident lack of political clout) […]

JUDGMENT. Matt is right about this. In addition to the fact that it’s contrary to progressive interests to have Penn advising people, there’s the additional issue of what it says about Clinton’s priorities that she would hire him in the first place. Clinton wants her head pollster to be somebody whose specialty is giving catchy […]