Mark Kleiman

The Washington State marijuana-legalization initiative is now far enough ahead in the polls to make passage a good probability, though nothing like a lock. (Colorado’s proposition is ahead, but not by enough to make passage likely; Oregon’s is DOA, as it deserves to be.) What might happen if the Washington proposition did pass? Well, what […]

DougJ at Balloon Juice mocks Mark Halperin for noting that Mitt Romney has decisively lost “the Tom Friedman primary.” Granted, as a thinker Friedman is a couple of chapters short of a dissertation, while as a writer he’s a skilled typist. But he can sometimes smell b.s. if he has a stack of it shoved […]

J.D. Kleineke of AEI states an important half-truth: the architecture of Obamacare is consistent with conservative principles of competition, transparency, and personal responsibilty, and conservatives who denounce it are mostly incoherent and self-contradictory in doing so. But it is only half the truth. The other half is that the subsidies built in to the plan […]

Predictably, now that Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin has refused to step aside for a more presentable wingnut, the GOP operatives who tried to get rid of him are now rallying ’round. Of course it’s not entirely fair to pin all Akin’s lunatic beliefs on his supporters. But on one point he’s entirely orthodox: his disapproval […]

Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake pour some cold water on Democratic euphoria about the polls: since in many ways the current environment isn’t as favorable for Obama as 2008 was, his margin in 2008 puts a reasonable upper bound on his likely margin this year; indeed, this year is likely to be closer. Yes, but. […]

Ann Althouse is throwing a tantrum about the Roger Simon column that imagined Paul Ryan referring to Mitt Romney as “The Stench,” after a local Republican official in Iowa was quoted in the NYT as saying that if Ryan ever wanted to run for national office he’d have to “wash the stench of Romney off […]

So a senior citizen who has been terrified by the right-wing noise machine asks Paul Ryan – remember, he’s supposed to be the responsible, serious, wonky one on the ticket – about “death panels.” And instead of telling the voter frankly that there’s no such thing, Ryan quibbles with the term and then goes on […]

Now here’s a scary headline and lead from the NYT: Life Spans Shrink for Least-Educated Whites in the U.S. For generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that this enduring trend has reversed itself for the country’s least-educated whites, an increasingly […]

Watching people such as Kristol and Brooks run away in horror from the secret Romney speech that Kristol called “stupid and arrogant talk” puts me in mind of the classic story of why the stripper quit. Before the story, here’s the puzzle: Kristol and Brooks and the rest of them have been backing Romney all […]

This is almost too good to be true, but I can’t imagine why the Iranian state media would have made it up. Apparently some hajatolislam encountered a woman he considered inappropriately dressed and ordered her to “cover herself up.” When she told him that he could instead cover his eyes, he repeated the order. She […]