Mark Kleiman

If Catholic Charities wants to exercise its First Amendment rights to be mean to gay people, then perhaps it should stop getting almost two-thirds of its budget from tax dollars. And speaking of “conscience clauses”: what happens to a physician or nurse in a Catholic hospital whose conscience dictates giving a rape or incest victim […]

Most fascinating bit (against tough competition) in Daniel Okrent’s Last Call (of which the Ken Burns mini-series Prohibition is more or less the film version): there’s no contemporary authority for the stories about Joseph Kennedy, Sr., as a rum-runner, and the question certainly would have arisen when FDR nominated him to run the SEC. I’m […]

Good for him! Sullivan concentrates on the bigotry in the letters rather than their broader paranoid vision and their con-man approach to fleecing the marks, but he concedes that Paul’s failure to deal with the fact of the letters alone is disqualifying. Sullivan endorses the relatively sane conservative in the race, Jon Huntsman. I can’t […]

So the latest bit of filth Ron Paul signed but says he didn’t write was a pitch for an “insider” investment newsletter warning of a “coming race war” and “the federal-homosexual cover-up on AIDS.” This should presumably put “paid” next to the Ron Paul account and leave anti-Romney Republicans looking for yet another flavor of […]

Remember the debate between Obama and McCain about attacking terrorists holed up in Pakistan? The entire Republican party had a collective case of the vapors about the horror of possibly doing something on Pakistani soil without permission of the ISI and its tame politicians. (When the ever-clueless Sarah Palin disagreed, McCain insisted she hadn’t meant […]

I disagree with Andrew Sullivan more often than I agree with him, but in general I have no difficulty following his reasoning. But his defense of his endorsement of Ron Paul leaves me shaking my head and doubting my reading comprehension. The history – for those not well-versed in the deeper circles of the Wingnut […]

And Mitt doesn’t have one. Steve Benen recites the facts. Daniel Larison proposes a theory: [Romney] has reinvented himself so thoroughly that he can no longer remember what is true and what isn’t, and he has absorbed and appropriated so many new positions over the years that it all gets jumbled together and re-mixed according […]

Michael Kinsley defined a “gaffe” in politics as a moment when the candidate inadvertently tells the truth. I suppose the same rule applies to punditry. Leading wingnut blogger Erick Erickson, in a long reflection on Newt Gingrich’s marital infidelities and political apostasies, gives a plug to Rick Perry. Its terms tell you all you need […]

The Huntsman campaign nails Mitt Romney: “He finds it so difficult to come down on one side of an issue.” The voice is Romney’s. [Cross-posted at The Reality-Based Community]

Jon Huntsman, in August: To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy. And again: The minute that the Republican Party becomes the party – the anti-science party, we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the […]