Michael Hiltzik recently published, and then apparently deleted, this post on his blog:

As commenters to this blog–and especially to my recent posts on partisan criticism of the press–are well aware, my policy on comments has always been exceedingly tolerant. Comments have been welcomed and have been unmoderated, even when the opinions they express are immoderate. Throughout this week, I have seen fit to delete almost no comments on a topic that has provoked intense and sometimes quite emotional reaction on all sides.

One commenter has now queered this setup for everybody. Despite my polite request to him to cease posting inappropriately, he has continued to do so. Therefore, comments to this blog will be moderated, by me, hopefully temporarily. My intention is not to block comments simply because they’re critical, even when they’re pointed and, in my opinion, wrong. The purpose is merely to keep one particular user from fouling the whole pond. (You know who you are.)

Accordingly, there may be delays between your posting comments and their appearance on the site. These delays may run to a few hours, if I am away from the computer. But the delays will be as brief as I can make them. I hope everybody else continues to offer comment.

Unmoderated commenting will resume as soon as possible.

Hiltzik’s post is gone (it was originally posted here), but it shows up in his RSS feeds, which say that it was posted Friday afternoon.

It is apparently a reference to someone who left comments regarding The Times‘s circulation as an indication of reader dissatisfaction. The culprit explains here, and publishes an e-mail from Hiltzik in which Hiltzik calls the commenter’s comment a “lie” and “too stupid to countenance.”

I wonder why Hiltzik’s post is gone. The last time that posts of his disappeared, it turned out that there was an innocent explanation: a Typepad glitch. But the Typepad status page is currently indicating no problems with Typepad.

What’s going on here?

Today, the L.A. Times gives you true facts that create a completely misleading impression: that Supreme Court nominee Sam Alito might provide the fifth vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.

We’ve been through this before, back when the L.A. Times tried to imply that Justice Roberts might be that fifth vote. Even if you assume that Roberts will be an anti-Roe vote — which is a big assumption — you still can’t count to five votes against Roe. At most, there are currently three: Scalia, Thomas, and Roberts. If Alito replaces O’Connor, it could be as many as four. But it won’t be five.

So how does our old friend David Savage get around this obstacle, to make Alito seem like a potential fifth vote to overturn Roe? Watch how effortlessly he does it:

That effort to overturn the ruling ultimately fell short by one vote when two Reagan appointees — Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony M. Kennedy — joined a 5-4 majority to affirm the abortion right in 1992.

If confirmed, Alito would succeed O’Connor.

See? Just like that, Savage creates the impression that replacing O’Connor with Alito might create a Court with five votes against Roe. What he “forgets” to mention is that, after the 1992 Casey decision reaffirming Roe, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a staunch vote for abortion rights, replaced Byron White, who dissented from the original Roe decision. So we aren’t 5-4 now, we’re (at best) 6-3 — even counting Roberts as an anti-Roe vote.

If you didn’t know that, then Savage has fooled you. And I think that’s just what he’s counting on.

In the “New Year’s Resolution” version of the L.A. Times “Outside the Tent” column, one of my proposed resolutions was for the paper: “To make it clear in stories about judicial nominations that opposition to Roe vs. Wade is not the same as opposition to legalized abortion.”

I wish that for the editorial board of the New York Times as well.

The editors are publishing a screed against Alito today that says:

In a new Harris poll, just 34 percent of those surveyed said they thought he should be confirmed, while 31 percent said he should not, and 34 percent were unsure. Nearly 70 percent said they would oppose Judge Alito’s nomination if they thought he would vote to make abortion illegal – which it appears he might well do.

Ed Whelan says it well:

Thirty-three years after Roe v. Wade, does the New York Times really not understand that a vote to overturn Roe (which is unambiguously what the editorial is referring to) is not a “vote to make abortion illegal” but rather a vote to restore abortion policy to the democratic processes in the states? . . . [T]o misunderstand or lie about what is actually at stake ought to disqualify one from being taken seriously in public discourse on the Supreme Court.”

But does anyone really take the New York Times editors seriously on this topic?

P.S. That Harris poll does indeed ask exactly that stupid question: “If you thought that Judge Alito, if confirmed, would vote to make abortions illegal, would you favor or oppose his confirmation?” Polls ask ridiculous questions like this all the time, which is one of the main reasons I hate pollsters.