Scott Lemieux

JONAH GOLDBERG IS MAKING SENSE. No, really! OK, there are some details that are problematic — I’m not sure what campaign finance reform has to do with this, and George Bush was hardly less prone to claiming to transcend partisan conflict than Hillary Clinton — but the more that the argument that “democracy is about […]

THE TROJAN HOLOCAUST. Like Matt, I wholeheartedly agree that pro-lifers should be more explicit about the extent to which pro-life arguments tend to be embedded within (and derived from) reactionary conceptions of sexuality. Someone taking this advice has been Zell Miller, who recently opined that America has too few children because of “the brutal truth […]

THE MCCAIN PARADOX. To take another quote from Matt‘s article, he’s right that Maverick McStraightTalk John McCain “has the misfortune of being both the most conservative candidate in the race and the one most hated by conservatives.” It’s quite strange, and is one of the ways in which the Bush personality cult will hurt the […]

AFTER ROE? Jessie Hill has an interesting three–part series about potentially overturning Roe at PrawfsBlawg. [HT: Volokh Conspiracy.] The long version of what I have to say on the issue can be found in my article last summer in TAP here and my reply to Benjamin Wittes-type “letting Roe go will be good for reproductive […]

HOW DARE YOU SHOW THE EFFECTS OF MY POLICIES! I’ve been looking forward to this since Friday: Something I didn’t photograph, but wished I did:Nation magazine writer Max Blumenthal queued up to get a book signed by Michelle Malkin. When he reached her, however, he didn’t produce a book. He produced this photo and asked […]

I BLAME JAMES MADISON. At her other online venue, J. Goodrich has a good discussion of American political culture and its role in the fact that the United States maintains an irrational health care system that provides much narrower coverage for much more money (including more state money) than other comparable liberal democracies. While this […]

FEMINISM AND EX ANTE HOUSEWORK STANDARDS. Matt interprets data adduced by Jessica and finds more evidence for my assertion that the typical arrangement of housework in households occupied by heterosexual couples reflects unjust gender balances combined with actually different ex ante standards of cleanliness/tidiness (which are related to said inequalities, of course, but a feminist […]

THE GROWNUPS IN CHARGE. Hilzoy explains the implications of today’s revelations about the abject fiasco that is Bush‘s North Korea policy: Let’s be very clear about what this means. We used to have a deal, the Agreed Framework, that kept North Korea from getting plutonium. We supposedly discovered that they were cheating on that deal […]

GORE’S OBSTACLE. Media Matters has a good response to Richard Cohen, who blames nameless “colleagues” for the interminable media smear campaign against Al Gore in 1999 and 2000, while conveniently forgetting his own frequent participation in said campaign. This does remind us of a point indirectly raised by Ed Kilgore. Not only is Gore exceptionally […]