Free Republic

Kevin Drum is a liberal blogger but is always worth a read. He was with Mother Jones. He now appears to be on his own with his Jabberwocky blog. When liberals mocked Republicans for making the national security case regarding admitting scores of Syrian refugees, Drum said that stance was “absurdly out of touch.” He also said Senate Democrats forced him to side with the National Rifle Association when the Left wanted to push prohibiting those on terror watch lists from buying guns. There are serious constitutional issues with this policy, the least being the lack of due process and...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/did-bernie-sanders-just-hand-trump-the-election

I had almost given up on anyone helping me understand what Scott Walker meant when he explained why he opposed abortion exceptions not just for rape and incest, but also to save the life of the mother. "There are many other alternatives that can also protect the life of that mother," Walker said during Thursday's debate. "That's been consistently proven." But then a reader came to my rescue, and it turns out that Jonathan Allen had it right in the first place. It really does derive from the Catholic doctrine of intent in medical care. Bryan Fischer of the American...

Imagine a Yankees-Red Sox game during which the Yankees broadcasters acknowledged mistakes by their team and good plays by the Sox, while the Boston announcers ranted relentlessly that the Yankees stank and were lucky not to finish 0-162.   According to Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, something similar happens routinely in political media. Drum believes that both in general and regarding Obamacare specifically, liberal pundits are far more likely than their conservative counterparts to discuss their side's failures and give the other side credit where it's due. From Drum's Friday post (emphasis added): "Watch the right search desperately for bad...

By now, you've all read my story about the link between the decline of leaded gasoline and the decline of violent crime, right? Here's an update from an unexpected source: the state of São Paulo in Brazil. Obviously the United States isn't the only place that got rid of leaded gasoline, which means the United States isn't the only place that should have seen declines in violent crime. But other countries made the switch at different times, which means their declines in violent crime should also have taken place at different times. Rick Nevin has done a lot of work...

The following 65 names are confirmed members of the now-defunct JournoList listserv. 1. Ezra Klein 2. Dave Weigel 3. Matthew Yglesias 4. David Dayen 5. Spencer Ackerman 6. Jeffrey Toobin 7. Eric Alterman 8. Paul Krugman 9. John Judis 10. Eve Fairbanks 11. Mike Allen 12. Ben Smith 13. Lisa Lerer 14. Joe Klein 15. Brad DeLong 16. Chris Hayes 17. Matt Duss 18. Jonathan Chait 19. Jesse Singal 20. Michael Cohen 21. Isaac Chotiner 22. Katha Pollitt 23. Alyssa Rosenberg 24. Rick Perlstein 25. Alex Rossmiller 26. Ed Kilgore 27. Walter Shapiro 28. Noam Scheiber 29. Michael Tomasky 30....

Back in the 1960s, Seymour Martin Lipset and Richard Hofstadter and other liberal sociologists, historians and political scientists, puzzled that anyone could support Barry Goldwater rather than Lyndon Johnson, concluded that Goldwater supporters were deranged. They didn't say so directly, of course. They said that members of the radical right were emotionally disturbed victims of "status anxiety." The evidence? They didn't vote the way that Lipset and other academics thought that they should vote. Therefore they had to be crazy. In the decades since, far better scholars than Hofstadter and Lipset, for whom history and sociology are not exercises in...

National Journal sets the stage for today's Senate vote on a bill banning the CIA from using torture: Supporters will need 60 votes to advance the bill, meaning they will need some Republicans to cross party lines. [Harry] Reid said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., could be a major swing vote, given his previous support for legislation against torture. But a spokeswoman for McCain, a Republican presidential candidate who has been trying to bolster support from party conservatives, did not return telephone calls and an e-mail late Tuesday seeking comment. And why was the famously anti-torture and press-friendly senator avoiding phone...

.Ed Kilgore says that he's got no problem with Howard Dean: "Every party chair spends a lot of time speaking to Democratic activists, and inevitably serves up a lot of red meat. Dean's recent "controversial" remarks would have been completely unobjectionable, and probably unnoticed, if they had been uttered by his predecessor.....The media's tendency to distort and then hype Dean's rhetoric is predictable and unavoidable. In a NewDonkey post congratulating the Doctor on his victory in the DNC chair race, I observed that he would be playing by "Hillary Rules," which means exceptional and unavoidable scrutiny of every single word...

Kevin Drum, writing in a blog for Washington Monthly in response to an argument from Juan Non-Volokh, enunciates what may become the new Democratic argument for the filibuster: you can't change the rules in mid-stream. He writes: "My broader point is that the real issue in the filibuster fight isn't the filibuster itself — or blue slips or Rule IV or any other specific rule — it's the general principle that rules shouldn't be cynically changed en masse just because your guy is in power and you've decided they're no longer convenient. As it happens, I'm not much of a...

I'm very confused. As this is not news to many, let me be more specific. Last week, my friend Peter Beinart wrote a much-discussed cover story for The New Republic arguing that the Democratic party needs to become a "fighting party" that takes Islamic totalitarianism seriously. As I wrote in my syndicated column , I thought it was a wonderful and serious article, even though I thought his prescription was, if not naïve, then certainly overly optimistic. Beinart opens with a flashback. "On January 4, 1947, 130 men and women met at Washington's Willard Hotel to save American liberalism." Their...

Kevin Drum and TNR complain CBS' handling of the forged Killian memos is no worse than Fox News' alleged treatment of doctored Vietnam-era photos showing John Kerry side-by-side with Jane Fonda. Fox accepted the photo as real and never issued a retraction, they claim. Yet, as Stuart Buck demonstrates, Fox didn't fall for the fake photos -- and repeatedly told viewers about the doctored pictures making their way around the internet.

For a couple days this week, one of the most reviled men in the blogosphere was Jonathan Klein, formerly an executive at CBS News. Speaking on Friday about the scandal at 60 Minutes, which last week based part of a story on documents that were probably forged, he stuck up for the show he used to oversee by sneering at its online critics: "You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances [at 60 Minutes] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing." Since then, dozens of those pajama-clad bloggers have...

ARE THE KILLIAN MEMOS REAL?....The big question swirling around the blogosphere at the moment is whether the "Killian memos" that CBS aired last night on 60 Minutes are real or not. Powerline appears to be the central clearinghouse for amateur discussion of typefaces, terminology, signatures, etc. For what it's worth, I spoke to someone a few minutes ago who's familiar with how the documents were vetted, and the bottom line is that CBS is very, very confident that the memos are genuine. They believe that (a) their sources are rock solid, (b) the provenance of the documents is well established,...