I have no idea who Rory Cooper is.  But in light of Matthew Yglesias’s quoting of three Twitter comments by Cooper today, I can sort of guess: Rory Cooper @rorycooper You don’t want to reduce the debt just for the sake of reducing the debt. #WhiteHouseLogic Rory Cooper @rorycooper You don’t want to balance your […]

The National Republican Senate Committee put out a blast email today mocking Ed Markey as the next Al Gore—aka a politician whose opponents will lie about him in order to try to block him from claiming deserved credit for his legislative initiatives:* In case you missed it, Out of Touch Ed Markey — who has […]

Students of Windsor and Hollingsworth have always recognized a basic tension between the theories of gay-rights advocates in the cases.  The challenge to DOMA is undergirded by a sense that marriage is a matter for state rather than federal regulation.  The challenge to Proposition 8 is a direct challenge to just such a decision by […]

Final update: #scotus 80% likely to strike down #doma. J Kennedy suggests it violates states’ rights; 4 other Justices see as gay rights. –Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog, on Twitter And: “The question is whether or not the federal government under a federalism system has the authority to regulate marriage,” Justice Kennedy said during oral arguments. […]

Yes, that’s right. Scalia said Citizens United was wrongly decided. He said it yesterday, at the argument on the constitutionality of California’s Prop. 8.  He also said that the right to bear arms doesn’t, after all, preclude the federal government and the states from enacting gun-ownership restrictions as they wish, so the recent Court opinions […]

Breaking: 1st update- #prop8 unlikely to be upheld; either struck down or #scotus won’t decide case. More in 30 mins. This is the more important of the two gay-marriage cases.  Tomorrow’s argument will be on the constitutionality of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), but almost no one (best as I can tell), thinks […]

Okay, by now y’all know that I’m not an economist.  Nor a statistician.  Nor a mathematician. Nor even someone who can easily understand simple line graphs.  (Bar graphs work for me, though, I’ve discovered!) But I do know a tad about 20th century American history.  So when I read Paul Krugman’s latest blog post, titled […]

In his NYT column today, David Brooks employs his standard column-writing formula of plucking two or more unrelated facts from their context and specifics, putting them into a sequence, and–voila!–suggesting a causal relationship, or at least a relationship of some sort, and therefore some conclusory fact.   This time around, he does it in the […]

Everett McKinley Dirksen (January 4, 1896 – September 7, 1969) was an American politician of the Republican Party. He represented Illinois in the U.S. House of Representatives (1933–1949) and U.S. Senate (1951–1969). As Senate Minority Leader for a decade, he played a highly visible and key role in the politics of the 1960s, including helping […]

All of these bipartisan discussions are encouraging, and Republicans hope they will lead to real solutions that help American families. But presidential leadership is really what’s needed. By shifting the focus from charm to courage, and eventually action, we can guarantee our children a future where everyone has the opportunity to find work and pursue […]