Mark Kleiman

Zoe Pollock, posting on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, links to a paper that notes the shortage of organs for transplant: 114,000 recipients on waiting lists, 14,000 donors per year. The two most promising alternatives are xenotransplantation, the replacement of a human organ with an animal one, or engineering human organs from scratch. Actually, no. As Sally […]

With more and more smart, honest conservatives getting fed up and switching sides, the remaining smart, honest conservatives are especially precious for those of us who don’t want to talk only to members of the Blue team. So Ramesh Ponnuru is a scarce resource, and I wouldn’t criticize him if I didn’t have to. But […]

There seems to be puzzlement around (whether real or fake, it’s hard to tell) about Paul Ryan’s bona fides as a fiscal conservative/budget hawk. As Reason’s Hit & Run points out, Ryan voted for “TARP, Medicare D and even George W. Bush’s wars, each a budget-buster of its own on the road to fiscal calamity.” […]

Have you ever wondered what a hard-core, Bible-thumping, Tenth Amendment Tea Partisan would produce as legislation if he got really, really stoned first? Actually, neither had I. But then I found out by reading the text of Oregon’s proposed Measure 80, one of three marijuana legalization initiatives on the ballot this fall. (Colorado and Washington […]

When I read that the guy who shot up the Sikh Temple was an ex-military neo-Nazi skinhead, something in the back of my head whispered, “Didn’t DHS have a report about such people? And didn’t a bunch of Republican politicians and members of the wingnut commentariat complain that DHS was slandering veterans and conservatives by […]

Since I’ve been pretty censorious about people throwing around unsubstantiated charges, I need to walk back my charge that Harry Reid was “lying” about his supposed conversation with someone who allegedly knows that Mitt Romney didn’t pay any taxes for 1o years. Politico reports, based on comments by unnamed Reid staffers, that Reid actually believes […]

In an election year where one presidential candidate wants to raise taxes on the rich and the other wants to cut them, and immediately after near-party-line votes on whether to extend the Bush tax cuts for income above $250,000 a year, you’d think that Tom Edsall’s review of Joseph Stiglitz’s tract against inequality would acknowledge […]

How did the Brookings/Urban Institute Tax Policy Center go from being a purveyor of “objective third-party analysis” to being just another “liberal” group? In Romney-land, it was easy. When TPC analyzed Rick Perry’s tax plans and found that they would be disastrous for the middle class, that was objective analysis, according to the Romney campaign. […]

It’s an elementary rule of political courtesy that if your enemies want to fight one another you should offer to hold their coats. It turns out that there are big intra-wingnut differences over Michelle Bachmann’s attempt to assassinate the character of Huma Abedin, with Limbaugh and Gingrich on Bachmann’s side [She’s not making any accusations, […]

While there’s some disconnect between “This is a holy place” and “Kiss my @ss,” I have to admit some sympathy for Romney’s spokesgeek. His guy has been looking like a fool, and the press has been taking delight in reporting it. Worse, the traveling reporters seem to be incapable of asking a question that might […]