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Over at XX Factor they’re having an interesting discussion about whether Democrats who now say they’re going to vote for McCain are racists. As someone who wrote a whole book about why it’s a bad idea to make this particular accusation lightly, I have to agree with Melinda Henneberger that “supporting Hillary, or now McCain, over Obama does ...

Rick Hills has certainly read his Orwell more recently than I, and he is quite right to insist that Orwell attacked intellectuals frequently. I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise—only that his main targets in his best and most prominent work were politicians and bureaucrats. It’s true, as Hills reminds me, that Politics and the English ...

I've always admired Rick Hills' facility with some rather dense intellectual material, so I hesitate to attack him for anti-intellectualism, even though he applies the label to himself. Maybe it's because I've just come back from three weeks in Germany and France, but I want to defend what Hill's derides as obscure intellectualism. I'd agree that ...

Eric, I’m with you about the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. It sounds good at first: Everyone is worried about a Gattaca-type future* where people are shunned on the basis of genetic tests, leading to genetic manipulation, eugenics, and a dystopia where everyone lives in Frank Lloyd Wright-style buildings, wears Jil Sander suits, and ...

The LAPD announced yesterday that after investigating 320 claims of racial profiling, not one could be sustained. The police commission is incredulous—“I find it baffling that we have these zeros.” said one commissioner. But actually, it’s not baffling at all. The Los Angeles Times reports that the investigations concerned “allegations that ...

Doug, since you brought up Jeremiah Wright ... I think the biggest insult to the Obama campaign was that Wright didn't go hide under a rock somewhere. The Wright issue had just about died until Wright started jawboning on national television—he had to know that his speaking out in any way was bad news for Obama. And worse yet, what he said ...

I just can’t muster up a lot of outrage about Indiana’s Voter ID law. Tim is right that we have a de facto national ID now. The Indiana law is nothing like a poll tax: This law may or may not be attacking a nonexistent problem of voter fraud, but either way, it’s attacking it by requiring people to do something almost everyone ...

 Thanks Emily for pointing out the wrongheadedness of McCain’s opposition to the Equal Pay Bill. This very mild piece of legislation would have undone an incredibly bad Supreme Court decision in Ledbetter which held that the filing period to bring a Title VII action for discriminatory compensation begins running when the employer ...

A new poll that shows that 16 percent of Pennsylvania white voters who were asked whether “the race of candidate was important” said yes—80 percent saidno.   Of those who answered “yes” 54 percent said they’d support Obama in the general election—27 percent said they’d defect to McCain and 16percent said they’d stay home on election day and polish ...

I'm inclined to agree with Orin that John Yoo's memos, while wrong and at times pathetic in their attempt to defend the indefensible, would not be anything close to grounds for termination of a tenured professor had they taken the form of a law review article. I don't agree that such ends-driven argument is the norm in legal scholarship—here ...