Mark Kleiman

It’s hard to tell whether Andrew Sullivan’s puzzlement – about why conservatives don’t recognize what Sullivan sees as Obama’s fundamentally conservative nature – is genuine or Socratic, but the matter seems simple to me: most Americans who identify as “conservative” aren’t conservative in the sense Sullivan intends. “Conservative” has multiple meanings, distinguished by having different […]

Tom Edsall nails it: The Republican ticket is flooding the airwaves with commercials that develop two themes designed to turn the presidential contest into a racially freighted resource competition pitting middle class white voters against the minority poor. Read the whole thing. Edsall lays out the argument in detail, and with lots of supporting facts. […]

You’ll be able to read far and wide this year without finding a sicker piece of political writing than Kevin Williamson’s paean to the awesomeness of Mitt Romney’s alpha-maleness, now up on National Review Online. Williamson’s central argument is that the wives of Romney and his sons have huge litters, consisting mostly of males, while […]

The two main political stories of the last forty-eight hours have been (1) Todd Akin making up biomedical findings and (2) Niall Ferguson making up CBO conclusions. Both seem surprised to find themselves under siege, and I can sympathize: ever since the reign of the Great Communicator (read: Pathological Liar) Ronald Reagan, the right has […]

Speanking of bullsh*t, here’s my current favorite sample: “All rape is real rape.” Are there different kinds of rape? What kind of stupid question is that? Of course there are. To be lawful, sex must take place with valid consent. It’s unlawful if one of the parties 1) Doesn’t consent 2) Can’t consent due to […]

MS Bellows Jr., writing in the Guardian, proposes a beautifully simple theory to explain Mitt Romney’s reticence about his tax returns: that his 2009 return would have shown him as a resident of La Jolla, CA, when he voted (in the crucial Coakley-Brown special election) as resident of his son’s basement in Belmont, MA. Here’s […]

One obvious way to help people economically is to reduce the prices of the stuff they buy by imposing legal caps. Rent, food, and gasoline all have been targets of such policies. In general they’re a dumb idea, because price controls create shortages and shortages lead to evasion, inefficiency, and unfairness. That’s both textbook intro-to-economics […]

As the Republican establishment runs away from the insane comment of the Republican Senate candidate in Missouri, let’s pause to notice the underlying pattern. Now that the GOP is the Party with the Fringe on Top, its membership has given itself permission – with the aid of the Murdoch press – to simply invent new […]

Watch, and Beau Kilmer will show you how it’s done: you keep smiling, and you keep your knife so sharp that the number you’re killing doesn’t even feel it going in. Jon Gettman is a marijuana-legalization activist with a Ph.D. from George Mason University. He made up the statistic that the value of the annual […]

Paul Ryan makes jokes as a 71-year-old man, yelling about the threat Ryan poses to Social Security and Medicare, is wrestled to the ground by two police officers. The man isn’t threatening, he’s not cursing, and he’s nowhere near Ryan: he’s just yelling about why fifty years of paying in to the system doesn’t entitle […]