William Saletan. I take it that for most our audience the analogy between Obama repealing Bush's ban on stem-cell research (or, at least, defending this policy in terms Saletan does not approve of) and Dick Cheney's policy of arbitrary torture is so specious that to restate it is to refute it. But p...

One thing of note to add to this analysis of the Swiss health care system is that, as Ellen Immergut has pointed out, Switzerland is comparable to the U.S. in having an unusually large number of veto points that gave particularly high levels of power to minorities with a vested interest in the statu...

I have to agree that it's not accurate to say that John McCain is as bad as Herbert Hoover. He's much worse. And while the Obama administration is certainly infinitely preferable to this kind of cretin, it sure would be nice if their plan to deal with the banking system wasn't to hope that people wi...

The outcome looks bad from a policy perspective, although legally it must said that the argument for striking down Prop 8 in the abscence of a federally enforceable right are pretty weak. At least it appears as if the marriages that took place under the more just staus quo ante won't be nullified....

Peter Schuck asserts that "The Supreme Court's decision yesterday in Wyeth v. Levine gives unprecedented power to juries in deciding issues far outside their expertise." This is a very strange claim. The tort system wasn't created this Tuesday; juries, for better or worse, have had the authority to ...

In re: MoDo, what Chait and Yglesias and Benen said. In criticizing Dowd for focusing almost entirely on inane personal trivia larded with her bizarre gender obsessions, I might have implied that she should write more about politics and policy. This, however, would be misleading. This would be a bad...

It's hard to be a contender for "most apparently unwatchable movie released this week" when yet another attempt to turn a video game into a movie hits the screens, but the latest attempt to make a dumbed-down middlebrow Short Cuts about an Important Social Topic -- this one about immigration -- sure...

A third-stringer at Andrew Breitbart's new site Stalinist Aesthetics For Dummies starts us off with some boilerplate that reminds us that "politically correct" has become the most useless phrase in the English language: If you call 411 or customer service for almost any service-related company today...

Readers of this blog will know that I approve of the primary objective of this group of scholars and litigators, which is calling for the kind of judicial term limits that pretty much every other constitutional democracy has (and that the United States would probably have had if the initial unattrac...

Social Security is, as we all know, a very popular and very successful program. For a variety of reasons, centrist pundits in general and the Washington Post in particular have a huge fetish about undermining it in various ways. Recently, CeCi Connolly -- yes, the same one whose gruesomely bad campa...