David Brooks on rescue packages: The Bush and Obama administrations have compensated foolishness and irresponsibility. Remind me again who hired Bill Kristol?

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Radley Balko has been doing absolutely heroic work exposing the professional malfeasance of forensic examiners Steven Hayne and Michael West, whose willingness to dance to the prosecutor’s tune over—in Hayne’s case—some two decades has probably tainted thousands of trials in Mississippi and Louisiana. Thanks in no small part to his reporting, Hayne was finally dropped […]

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Recently, some gang of semiliterates styling themselves the Republican Liberty Caucus of Illinois apparently decided it was necessary to wage a little vendetta against pernicious “liberals” like Radley Balko who oppose censorship, which (in whatever bizzaro universe these folks inhabit) all true champions of freedom favor. What ensues is a series of own-goals so spectacular […]

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Late to the ball as usual, but anyone else think this lede was massively misleading? President Obama warned Republicans on Capitol Hill today that they need to quit listening to radio king Rush Limbaugh if they want to get along with Democrats and the new administration. “You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get […]

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It’s with some bemusement that I viewed an anti-abortion ad apparently being run by an organization called CatholicVote. Partly I was amused to see that after months of mocking Obama as “the One,” we have a conservative group making a clear variant on the bizarre and confused old Beethoven argument, but plugging in Obama for […]

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Please.  That George Bush got to leave the White House in a helicopter, rather than dragged from the rear bumper of a Buick, is a testament to the almost mindboggling restraint of the American people.  It’s an act of mercy bordering on injustice that the man is facing execration rather than execution. “Derangement” at this […]

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Please raise your hand if you gave any credence whatever, even for an instant, to the unsigned press release on Drudge Report claiming that tepid stand-up comic Ann Coulter had been “banned for life” from NBC for daring to claim the media exhibits a liberal bias. Raise ’em especially high if you believed that a […]

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I hadn’t realized quite how bad it had gotten. Glenn Reynolds is now apparently linking the likes of this post.  One of the many sad things to watch over the past eight years has been the erosion—and in some cases collapse—of the boundary between sane conservatism and the cuckoo-bananas fringe. I’d hoped the election would […]

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It’s a week old now, but this Feministe post exhibits a type of category error that crops up in other contexts, so I figure it’s still worth saying a few words about it. The touchstone is this Rolling Stone postmortem of the battle over Caliornia’s Proposition 8, which concludes that the anti-gay amendment could have […]

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In something like six years of blogging, this may be the most spectacular act of institutional tone deafness I’ve seen—certainly from an institution that’s supposed to be all about using new media to advance a political agenda: This is Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO of the Center for American Progess Action Fund. Most readers know that […]

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