Mark Kleiman

So some wingnut decides to steal Paul Krugman’s identity by creating a Google+ account in his name and posting something stupid on it. The wingnut has now boasted of, rather than confessed to, what was quite probably a crime and quite certainly an appallingly unethical action. Nasty, but not surprising. (The “controversy,” if you’ll allow […]

Juan Cole says it’s about over. Tunisia and Egypt recognized the insurgent government overnight. Is the House of Assad next? The best argument against the NATO intervention was that it wouldn’t work. Apparently it did. That’s not to say that we should expect a smooth road ahead in Libya, any more than in Egypt or […]

The good thing about Rick Perry, it is said, is that you know where he stands. Well, sometimes. Other times, he finds a way to rise above mere principle. Jay Root of the Texas Tribune completely nails Perry on the question of Gardasil, a vaccine against the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV). In 2007 Perry tried […]

Megan McArdle wants to know how fuel-efficiency standards for big trucks could possibly be efficiency-improving: after all, if making trucks more energy-efficient paid for itself, the trucking companies would do so voluntarily. Reasonable question, but the answer isn’t far to seek. Increased consumption of oil increases the rents that oil producers can collect at the […]

I know I’m the original Cock-Eyed Optimist, but the latest CNN poll results suggest that it wasn’t completely cock-eyed to imagine that the Debt Ceiling nonsense would hurt the Republicans and the Teahadis in the eyes of the public. Between mid-June and early August, the GOP went from 41% favorable/55% unfavorable (already their worst score […]

I’ve been convinced for some weeks that Barack Obama was very likely to find himself facing Rick Perry in November 2012. Against what must be the weakest field of Presidential candidates a major party has ever assembled, Perry has name recognition, fund-raising capacity, and good relations with all three wings of today’s GOP: the plutocrats, […]

This morning, I got an email from a friend who isn’t involved in the War About Drugs but knows a great deal both about drug abuse and about my views on the topic. Like me, he is neither a hard-core warrior nor a flat-out legalizer. He had just received a fund-raising pitch for the Drug […]

When Rick Perry announced that New York’s approval of gay marriage was within its powers and therefore “fine with me,” I was pleased for the country but worried as a partisan. It seemed like quite a shrewd move for the man who now seems – as the sole candidate acceptable to the plutocrats, the theocrats, […]

Vince Cable, an economist, is the Business Secretary in the UK center-right coalition government. Remarking on the irony of all the attention being focused on the Greek crisis and the future of the Euro when developments in the U.S. are so financially scary, he said yesterday: The biggest threat to the world financial system comes […]

Is Emmett Tyrell, editor of the American Spectator, a fool or a scoundrel? From his latest musings (at Clownhall) on the anti-Catholicism of Michelle Bachmann’s church, it’s hard to tell. The backstory is the Bachmann just resigned from the Wisconsin Synod Lutheran church which she had attended for years, after it came out that website […]