Scott Lemieux

WE CAN”T AFFORD NOT TO HAVE UNIVERSAL HEATHCARE: To follow up on Atrios and Ezra, let me carry the stats in this Times article one step further. Let’s use their figures to extrapolate government health care spending per capita: United States $2745 France $2464 Canada $2215 Again, our system doesn’t just spend far more money […]

WHAT’S NOT THE MATTER WITH KANSAS: Freshly re-elected governor Kathleen Sebelius has some gratifying parting shots for Kansas’s outgoing Underwear Drawer Monitor Phil Kline: Gov. Kathleen Sebelius today criticized Attorney General Phill Kline�s actions in his abortion investigation into George Tiller. �The story just continues to get stranger and stranger,� Sebelius said in response to […]

WHY ARE WE LISTENING TO THIS MAN? In pointing us to this remarkable construction of ice cream castles in the air and destruction of strawmen by Frederick Kagan and Kenneth Pollack at AEI, Yglesias asks: “Whether the Kagan-Pollack meeting of the minds enhances Kagan’s credibility or detracts from Pollack’s I’ll leave as an exercise to […]

THE TRAGIC INELUCTABILITY OF BUSH’S WAR. People who have seen my writings about Ralph Nader will not be surprised that I tend to be skeptical of “heighten the contradictions” arguments. As such, I’m afraid that on the merits I have to side with Sam over Spencer or Rob on this one. If Congressional Democrats could […]

W STANDS FOR WOMEN WAHABBISM. During the build-up to the Iraq war, you may recall various Bush apologists who have less than no interest in women’s rights domestically using women’s rights in other countries as a prop to advance the administration’s foreign policy (often spiced up with dishonest claims that American feminist groups ignore violations […]

CATASTROPHE KEEPS US FROM THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION. As someone who has long been a proponent of “Hillary Myth #2,” I was very interested in the data adduced by Garance. I do think that Matt Yglesias gets at a couple of possible limitations. First, I definitely agree that Clinton won’t be perceived by Democratic primary voters […]

MORAL CLARITY. Via Drum, I see that in his new LA Times column (“Iraq Needs a Pinochet“) Jonah Goldberg argues that you can’t make an omelet without throwing a few people out of planes, and that the baseline for measuring the quality of a country’s leadership should be Fidel Castro. (This must have been the […]

BLAME CONGRESS. Glenn Greenwald and Lyle Denniston have excellent analysis of the decision of District Court Judge James Robertson to dismiss the habeas corpus claim of Salim Ahmed Hamdan. Under the circumstances, the decision is actually about as good an outcome for opponents of arbitrary detentions as could be expected. Robertson held that Congress has […]

WHY THE “PARTIAL BIRTH” CASE MATTERS: AN ANTI-REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM PERSPECTIVE. Hadley Arkes, one of the pro-life movement’s most prominent intellectuals, has an article in First Things about the upcoming “partial birth” abortion decision. It starts off strangely, with the claim that “people on both sides seriously expect the Court will use its decision to overturn […]

A (QUALIFIED) DEFENSE OF THE TRANS-FAT BAN. This probably won’t help increase comity between progressives and our newly receptive libertarian brothers and sisters, but as William Saletan and Lindsay Beyerstein point out, the case for New York City’s much-derided ban on trans-fats is actually very compelling. I tend to start from quite libertarian premises on […]