Scott Lemieux

TRAMP THE DIRT DOWN. Randy Paul helpfully supplements the NYT’s list of important dates in the life of the late Augusto Pinochet: September 1974: Has DINA, his secret police organization plant a bomb in the car of General Carlos Prats, his predecessor in Buenos Aires. The bomb kills General Prats and his wife, Sofia. Debris […]

THE COUNTERMOBILIZATION MYTH — CANADIAN EDITION. Gay rights litigation has been very successful in our neighbor to the north, with major victories at both the federal and provincial levels (including with respect to marriage benefits. According to oft-cited conventional wisdom, this success should have been a disaster for the gay rights movement, mobilizing a huge […]

NO CREDIBILITY. As the Iraq War continues to get more and more hopeless, we’re sure to start hearing more of the tautological trump card inevitably played by the dead-enders of ill-conceived wars: we need to maintain a ruinous war in order to preserve American “credibility.” As Daniel Davies pointed out in comments about Michael Novak‘s […]

APPALLING ON EVERY LEVEL. As a follow-up to Garance‘s post below, Lizardbreath of Unfogged lays out why the treatment of Jose Padilla is indefensible on every level: We seem to be systematically ill-treating our prisoners in a way that doesn’t make any legitimate sense. If it’s punishment, it’s simply wrong because they haven’t been tried. […]

SELECTIVE ORIGINALISM. Amy Stuart Wells discusses the school integration cases that will be argued before the Supreme Court today. In addition to their intrinsic interest, cases involving racial classifications that are used to facilitate integration rather than segregation are intriguing because they provide evidence (beyond the obvious) of the incoherence of modern conservative judicial theories. […]

NONE OF THE ABOVE. Nancy Pelosi has, thankfully, chosen to reject both Hastings and Harman, the obviously correct option. The evidence against Hastings is pretty compelling, and taking a bribe as a federal judge isn’t the typically vacuous “character” issue; it suggests a lack of ethics and judgment in ways that can affect policy. Moreover, […]

CENTER-RIGHT PUNDITS ARE NOT A GOVERNING COALITION. Brothers Ben and Ezra say most of what needs to be said about this atrocious, risibly anachronistic op-ed by Thomas Edsall. An argument this silly contains multitudes, however, and there’s one point I’d like to add. My question: if we’re throwing “organized labor, minority advocacy organizations [and] reproductive- […]

DAMN THOSE LEGISLATIVE ACTIVISTS! You have to hand it to Mitt Romney –like so many opponents of same-sex marriage, he’s principled. These decisions should be left to the legislature. Unless, of course, the legislature reaches an outcome you don’t like, in which case the executive can veto the legislation and urge that it be resolved […]

WHEN YOU THINK YOU’VE LOST EVERYTHING, YOU FIND OUT YOU CAN ALWAYS LOSE A LITTLE MORE. So it’s not just that Bush‘s new chief of family planning services, Eric Keroack, uses wacky cartoons to teach kids reactionary, anti-scientific nonsense about sexuality. Apparently, he’s not even a board-certified ob-gyn. Heckuva job, Bushie! (In fairness, as Bush […]

ROBERT ALTMAN. I was lucky enough to see a beautiful 35mm restoration of La Regle Du Jeu last week. The most obvious modern inheritor of the “open” filmmaking style invented by Renoir, Robert Altman, has died. Altman was a risk-taker, and as is well-known this made him uneven. (Pauline Kael, one of his biggest critical […]