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Mon, July 15 | Tues, July 16 | Wed, July 17 | Thurs, July 18 | Fri, July 19 | Sat, July 20 | Sun, July 21
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Saturday, July 20 That's the thesis of this John Maggs article in the latest National Journal. You'll need a subscription to see it, sadly, but here's a quote:
In the prosperous and partisan decade since he left office, the breadth and reach of Bush's achievements -- which were based on the now-antiquated notion of consensus -- have become much clearer. If his better-known successes in foreign policy appear grander with this perspective, his overlooked domestic achievements are arguably just as far-reaching. That he managed all this while opposed by one of the largest congressional majorities faced by any president is even more impressive.
What's odd is that this was also the thesis of an article Maggs's National Journal colleague Jonathan Rauch published two years ago in The New Republic. It's not
plagiarism; the two stories have similar arcs but hit different points along the way. But Tapped wonders if this is a new twist on an old tradition. It used to be
that glamorous political magazines like TNR regularly lifted story ideas from the unglamorous, under-read, but well-reported National Journal. Now
it's the opposite! [posted 3:00 pm]
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Friday, July 19
Josh Marshall has invited Josh Green to post on his site on the issue that Green currently owns, the Thomas White scandal. The post is pretty good, and explains why -- as we learned the hard way this morning -- the Democrats failed to nail White when they had the chance. [posted 5:00 pm]
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WE KNEW IT!!! Recently, we linked to and quoted this obviously questionable assertion by Terry Eastland of The Weekly Standard: "it is hard to imagine an adherent of the great religions of the West embracing cryonics and the overcoming of death it envisions." And sure enough, reader T.F.W. seems to have found just such an individual. Jerry B. Lemler, M.D., is president and CEO of Alcor, a cryonics company which describes itself as "formed...for the purpose of providing cryonic suspensions with the belief such procedures would become an integral part of the future." Lemler's bio reads in part: "In 1994, Dr. Lemler received the National Exemplary Psychiatrist Award form the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, and was honored by the Christian Cooperative Ministries with their Outstanding Benefactor Award in 1999 and 2000." This sure sounds to us like an adherent of one of the great religious of the West who has embraced cryonics!
And even if Lemler got the award but isn't a Christian himself, there appear to be myriad other examples of "adherents of the great religions of the West" getting into cryonics, which we're aware of courtesy of reader D.D. This book by cryonics guru Robert C.W. Ettinger mentions that when it comes to cryonics, "Catholics and Jews have expressed even fewer reservations than Protestant clergymen; as remarked elsewhere, on at least one occasion a cryo-capsule was actually consecrated by a Roman Catholic priest, with the approval of the bishop." This rabbi, meanwhile, also doesn't seem to think that cryonics is incompatible with Jewish theological tradition: "Its permissibility rests on the potential preservation of life that could result once successful revival is an accomplished fact."
So much for cryonics being a dark domain of atheism. [posted 3:15 pm]
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MORE ON TIPS. This spy-on-your-neighbor initiative sounds like it's really bad news. How do we know? Well, we hate it, and so does the libertarian right. (Via Charles Murtaugh.) [posted 2:50 pm]
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BET YOU DIDN'T KNOW... Tapped has been waiting for the next issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine -- which we got in the mail days ago -- to go online. We're not going to wait any longer. But suffice it to say that the latest issue contains at least two surprising bits of information that you probably won't hear anywhere else: 1) That pipe bomber Luke Helder was obsessed with ghosts and the paranormal to the extent that he "his motivation to plant bombs to kill and injure people came from his desire to enlighten the world to his beliefs and revealed truths," as Benjamin Radford writes; and that psychiatrist James S. Gordon, chair of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy, was "a follower of the late Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh whose cult carried out bioterrorism attacks on U.S. citizens in Oregon in the late 1980s," according to Tim Gorski, M.D. For more on the latter, see here. [posted 2:45 pm]
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THE DOW PLUNGES AGAIN. Now it's below 9/11 levels. If
Bush were smart, he'd instruct Denny Hastert to pass the Sarbanes bill pronto, and sign it next week. Otherwise it just gets better and better for the Dems. [posted 2:40 pm]
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TAPPEDA CULPA. A little bird told us that our previous post about Thomas White was very, very wrong. Actually, the Dems didn't do so well against White when they had him where they wanted him, as this Business Week item makes pretty clear. Tapped should have known better: After all, we read Joshua Green's smart item in Slate about how Democrats were going after White on the one thing he's probably not guilty of. Forget about our excuse for the mistake -- what's theirs? [posted 2:30 pm]
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WE LOVE... This Danziger cartoon about Ann Coulter. It ... kicks butt. Yeah. [posted 2:20 pm]
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COLEMAN ON THE STOVE. It seems Republican Norm Coleman wanted some free media up in Minnesota to help him out in his Senate race against Paul Wellstone. Coleman had a bright idea: "The campaign offered to give Minnesota newspapers a column that would be written by Coleman and called 'Norm's Coffee Shop Talk,'" writes Star-Tribune columnist Doug Grow. "Every week, Norm would discuss an issue relevant to your readers," the papers were promised.
Trouble is, newspaper people generally aren't dumb, and it was obvious to them that Coleman was just trying to get good press. And on top of that, the campaign wouldn't admit it had made an error, according to Grow. Hey, maybe Coleman will beat himself with stupid stuff like this, and we won't have to worry about the Greens spoiling the race for Wellstone after all. [posted 2:10 pm]
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THE TIMES GETS IT WRONG ON BORDER SECURITY. In this story on a House plan to grant most of the president's wishes on the homeland security front, David Firestone and Elizabeth Becker write:
The White House, however, did not get everything it wanted. Only the enforcement and border protection functions of the Immigration and Naturalization Service would move to the new department, while services for immigrants would remain at the Justice Department. That is a victory for advocates for immigrants, who argued that dealing with an antiterrorism agency would become a stigma.
Not exactly. INS reformers like Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner have always wanted to split up enforcement and service functions of the new agency. Immigration advocates and their allies in the White House have generally wanted to keep them together, because doing so gives them budget and mission control (via the top INS bureaucrats, who are usually drawn from the service side of the agency or the immigration advocacy community) over the enforcement side. Tapped thinks they probably only accepted the split because they'd rather have a standalone services agency than a services agency under the thumb of
Homeland Security. Pro-reform forces within the administration may also have won some inside fights. But regardless, this is a victory for people who wants better border security. [posted 2:00 pm]
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DOUBLE INSANITY ON STUDENT TRACKING. The Chronicle of Higher Education
(subscription required) reports that the INS is dropping training seminars it had planned to hold on its "new" student tracking system.
(For background, check this post and this article.) It's not hard to see why. The top bureaucrats at INS actually oppose student tracking and have been looking for ways to slow or stop its implementation. That became a lot harder to do openly after 9/11 and even harder after the Mohammed Atta screw-up, after which INS commissioner James Ziglar promised to get the new system up and running. This latest is another slow-down tactic. If no one knows how to use the system, after all, then it's not much good. [posted 1:50 pm]
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INSANITY ON NATIONAL I.D.'S. The Des Moines Register argues, preposterously, that national standards for driver's licenses are "the stuff of totalitarian societies, not democracies." Look. This really isn't very difficult. The main point of national standards it to make sure that all the IDs are tamper-proof -- that every state's meets the highest standards, rather than the lowest.
P.S. As you read this exercise in know-nothing nattering, keep count of all the conditionals: could, would, might, etc.
P.P.S. And don't even bother sending in a bunch of e-mails asking what we were doing reading the Des Moines Register in the first place. We have our reasons. [posted 1:45 pm]
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SANITY ON THE MIDDLE EAST. Chuck Hagel has always been one of our favorite Republicans. (We're sure he's pleased.) He makes an excellent point in this op-ed about the futility of making Arafat's removal as the fulcrum of Middle East policy. This bit is particularly good:
The United States cannot excuse Arafat for his failings as a leader, his complicity in terrorism, and his inability to make the tough choices for peace. The Palestinian people and our friends in the Arab world have paid the price for Arafat's corruption, intrigues and limitations. They know their future does not lie with Arafat.But if we are serious about reform in the Palestinian Authority, then we must allow the Palestinians and the Arabs to deal with Arafat. Credible alternative Palestinian leadership will not step forward in response to a perceived American-Israeli demand for Arafat's removal. Change must come from within.
Bravo. [posted 1:40 pm]
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OVER THE TRANSOM DEPT. Most Opportunistic Press Release of the Day: "Noelle Bush Jailed for 'Failing' Drug Treatment Program; Drug Policy Alliance Expresses Support for Bush Family as It Confronts Challenges to Recovery" (from the Drug Policy Alliance).
Funniest Press Release of the Day: "Deficits v. Piss Christ: Congress Bets on Both: $160 billion federal deficit no hindrance to National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) funding, as 42 House Republicans join 191 House Democrats to vote for $10 million budget hike" (from -- where else? -- Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist's day job). [posted 1:35 pm]
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A RANT. Tapped really hates the way the elevators in our office building work. Get this: There are stairs connecting each of the eight floors, but for some godforsaken reason they're always locked or something, because nobody ever seems to use them. Instead, annoying people just joyride on the elevators. There's a whole herd of folks in the building who always seem to summon the elevators just so they can get from, say, floor 4 to floor 5. Or floor 4 to floor 6. This farcical arrangement created the following, very trying situation earlier today for Tapped:
We got on the elevator in the lobby with two other people. "Not bad," we secretly thought, "only two stops before we get to the 7th floor." And sure enough, one person pushed 3 and one person pushed 5. As a general rule, Tapped is impatient as hell, but this seemed bearable.
But then, after the first person got out on the 3rd floor, the elevator stopped on the 4th because someone had called it. (Steam was starting to come out of Tapped's ears at this point.) And on top of that, the new person pressed 6! Not 5, not 7, but 6! That means that Tapped had to stop on floors 3, 4, 5, and 6 before finally getting to our office on the 7th floor. The ignominy of it! We may have lost a half a minute that we could have spent blogging. Doesn't anyone understand how important the work that we do here is?!? [posted 1:25 pm]
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FILM FRIDAY. TAP Online's weekend film reviews are up: Noy Thrupkaew on K-19: The Widowmaker (here) and James Parker on Minority Report, both story and film (here). [posted 11:40 am]
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IF ONLY THEY WOULD LISTEN. Progressive political strategist Steve Cobble, writing in TomPaine.com, makes an urgent and reasoned plea to the Minnesota Greens to get out of the U.S. Senate race where Paul Wellstone's victory (or defeat) will hinge on what they decide to do. The political trade-off he suggests? Get Wellstone to endorse Instant Runoff Voting (a voting system that would avoid the "spoiler" problem. The details are explained in the article). And Cobble urges the Democrats to pay some attention to Green Party issues so that the continuing split doesn't have further and even more dramatic implications. [posted 10:40 am]
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YOU DON'T SAY. The press is reporting -- as if it is news -- that the Democrats' dependence on corporate cash might blunt the edge of their campaigns against Republicans in November. The issue isn't just how much soft money these two parties have gotten from corporations and the executives, but how much hard money (PAC and individual contributions) they get from the same sources. There is actually a hell of a lot more of that kind of influence-driven cash, about twice as much. This problem of contributions on both sides helped muddy the waters when it came to political fallout over Enron, and that could very well happen again here. [posted 10:10 am]
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WHITE OUT. Apparently at the conclusion of yesterday's hearing in which Army Secretary Thomas White defended himself, Barbara Boxer wrote to him saying his answers were "evasive, deceptive, argumentative, and not helpful in any way." We're not surprised. We're not even surprised that White is still in the administration. [posted 10:05 am]
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KRIST OFF. The Times columnist is still on the anthrax case, still referring to a mysterious "Mr. Z" despite the fact that everyone knows who that is, and still turning up pretty troubling revelations. The latest:
As recently as April of this year, anthrax spores were found in a hallway and administrative area of Usamriid -- shortly after Senator Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, visited the complex. Anthrax spores seem to have it in for Democratic senators.
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Thursday, July 18
WRONG AGAIN, JOE. The senator from Connecticut, who has helped lead the fight to prevent stock options from being treated as expenses, has argued that stock options are a pillar of the middle class. (An argument echoed by those who speak of the rise of the "investor class" in American politics.) But this fascinating (if horribly titled) article in the business section of the New York Times shows that the vast preponderance of stock options still belong to the wealthy and top CEOs. [posted 2:30 pm]
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40 SEATS IN NOVEMBER? That was Dick Gephardt's prediction in this stunning story by Ethan Wallison in Roll Call. Wallison quotes sources from a private caucus meeting at which Gephardt made his remarks; Gephardt's advisors have been backing away from the comment all day, suggesting that Wallison's sources heard wrong. They say he was only talking about the number of competitive seats, not the number the Democrats will win. That's probably about right. Forty is a little much. But the Dems could be headed for some decent gains -- maybe even in the double-digits.
On the other hand, you only need to look back to 1998 to realize how potent undercurrents can affect an election in
ways no one can predict. In 1998, pundits on the left and right both expected the Republicans to pick up a number of seats, even a lot of seats. They were wrong, because nobody in Sally Quinn's Washington -- which hated Clinton -- understood how the impeachment was creating a backlash. The relationship between GOP-inspired laissez-faire, Bush's sketchy business dealings, and the corporate accounting scandals have a similar feel; you can almost see it all coming together in voters' heads. That may not add up to forty seats. But it could add up to, say, a six-seat gain -- and the House. Stay tuned. [posted 2:20 pm]
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AS PROMISED. We've now posted articles by our triumvirate of economics commentators from the next issue of the Prospect: Robert Kuttner, Jeff Faux, and Harold Meyerson. Each comes at the current debacle from a different angle. Kuttner's piece is the cover story of the issue. Enjoy! [posted 1:10 pm]
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TIPS FOR TATTLING. Yesterday we idly speculated that Michael Kelly may have been influenced by a recent Tom Tomorrow cartoon for his Post op-ed. Similarly, where else could John Ashcroft and his crack team at the Justice Department have come up with the idea for TIPS -- the Terrorism Information Prevention System -- but from this Tom Tomorrow gem?
Seriously, though, this is scary. The Orwellian pilot program will, according to its website, recruit "truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees" to report "suspicious activity" to authorities. The program begins next month and already has a million spies lined up. Senator Patrick Leahy has his doubts:
Trained FBI agents had (information about) radical Islamic fundamentalists trying to learn how to fly airplanes and they couldn't handle that, but suddenly they're going to be able to handle thousands of unsubstantiated tips from the person reading your electric meter? ... This doesn't make us more secure. I think this turns us into a nation of paranoids.
Well stated Pat. [posted 1:00 pm]
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AN AFFECTING TRIFECTA STORY. Brendan Nyhan at Spinsanity has been hammering away at Bush's trifecta lie for a while (admittedly, he's not the only one), and has gotten credit for it in the Washington Post and other places. And now it looks like it may all actually pay off: Bush reportedly may take the line out of his stump speech. That's what we journalists call victory. [posted 11:40 am]
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THE PITTS. Yesterday, SEC chief Harvey Pitt announced that, following his one-year cooling-off period, he will handle enforcement cases involving companies and accounting firms that were once his legal clients. (These entanglements have led him to recuse himself from about ten percent of all SEC cases during the past year.) Tapped sees three possibilities here. One, Karl Rove is on vacation again. (Why on earth would Pitt talk about this now, when everyone and his mother is calling for Pitt's resignation?) Two, the Bushies are simply so wrapped up in their own little world that they don't understand why this is really a problem, just as they thought it would be a swell idea to appoint Pitt in the first place. Three, the Bush Administration is carefully advertising its contempt for public opinion on the accounting scandals and flagging their intention to keep Pitt. (Robert Novak explains Bush's conundrum here.)
Actually, there may be a fourth possibility. Given Bush's press conference yesterday, maybe keeping Pitt makes a lot of sense. Bush told reporters he had "confidence" that the SEC would find that Dick Cheney had done nothing wrong. If Pitt is still in the driver's seat, Tapped supposes, Bush has every reason to be confident. [posted 11:10 am]
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A VICTORY ON PRESCRIPTION DRUGS. Paul Wellstone's bill to allow
reimportation of some drugs from Canada, where they're cheaper, passed the Senate yesterday. That's
good policy and good news. But check out the Bush administration's spin. They oppose this not because they're in hock to the drug industry. They oppose it because "The bill would create an incentive for unscrupulous
individuals to find ways to sell unsafe or counterfeit drugs that while purported to be from Canada may actually originate in any part of the world." Uh-huh. Even though Wellstone's bill includes a provision whereby the secretary of HHS must certify the reimportation process? Let's hope enough moderate Republicans feel pressured so that they help House Dems pass this one. Tapped would love to watch Bush try and veto it. [posted 11:05 am]
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SHADES OF POPPY. Isn't this the kind of thing that got Bush's dad in trouble in '92?
Millions of people are unemployed, the stock market is unsteady -- and Bush says everything is hunky-dory. [posted 11:00 am]
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STICK TO THE MINORS, KID. Another awful column from Ben Shapiro, TownHall.com's whippersnapper correspondent. Tapped has nothing against youth and vigor. But this reads...well, like something you'd read in the Daily Bruin. It's not as awful as Debbie Schlussel, but it is as awful as Peggy Noonan. The
whole thing is fiction -- John Walker Lindh attends UCLA in 2022! -- and it says more about Shapiro himself than about Lindh. [posted 10:55 am]
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MAX SPEAK, MAXIMUM VOLUME. The Post this morning quotes liberal economist Max Sawicky on the problems with Alan Greenspan's testimony before Congress on Tuesday. But it doesn't identify him as blogger! (How dare they?) Sawicky gets a twenty plus word quote in the paper, but on his site he's got eight paragraphs. [posted 8:45 am]
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HUH? The quote of the day, from Republican Rep. Don Young of Alaska: "This isn't about turf, Mr. President. This is personal." Young was referring to his resistance to allowing the new Homeland Security Department to take control of the Coast Guard, over which Young had exercised oversight. Tapped was always under the impression that turf was a very personal matter. Are we missing something, or is Young? [posted 8:30 am]
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Wednesday, July 17
Unnamed sources have sent Tapped a possible explanation for Michael Kelly's odd claim that Clinton's moral shortcomings triggered the latest wave of corporate scandals. Could it be that he saw this Tom Tomorrow cartoon on Salon?!? (Inquiring minds want to know!) C'mon, Mike, Tom was making fun of the idea that Clinton's responsible. He wasn't being serious! [posted 6:10 pm]
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DUMP MICHAEL POWELL. Especially after this little shenanigan. The FCC, which Powell chairs, now allows phone companies to sell data on who you call to telemarketers and other pests. What a nightmare. [posted 5:30 pm]
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DID "THE POD" REALLY WRITE THIS? "Go on, Mr. President: Wag the dog. It would be good for the world, it would be good for America and it would be good politics as well." Yep. He did.
Ya know, Pod, if propositions one and two were true -- that invading Iraq was good for America and good for the world -- does it really matter if that last bit is also true? Or maybe propositions one and two are simply rhetorical cover for proposition three -- that invading Iraq would draw attention away from corporate scandals. Or maybe the Pod hasn't throught this through at all, and he's just phoning it in. (Via Rittenhouse Review.) [posted 5:25 pm]
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SPOOKY COVER REVEALED. A while back we made fun of the cover of the latest issue of Worldwatch magazine, which displays images of four individuals of various races, each of whose eyes have been doctored to appear bright, Aryan blue. This is supposed to demonstrate the scary potential of biotechnology, but of course it really only demonstrates the scary potential of contact lenses. Anyway, here's the link if you want to see the cover yourself. Just so you don't think we were making it up or anything..... [posted 1:30 pm]
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DEVIL INSIDE. Michael Kelly has gone, unfortunately but also predictably, for the ludicrous GOP spin that Bill Clinton is responsible for the accounting scandals because he encouraged loose ethics by example. Sure, this gives Kelly a chance to rehash some of his frothing, funny, bitter, New Republic columns from back in the day. But it's still a completely ridiculous proposition. Sometimes we think Clinton must be God, he gets blamed for so many things. (Oops, we mean Satan. Sorry. We've been reading too much about Stanley Fish's interpretation of Milton lately.) [posted 1:10 pm]
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SOCIAL SECURITY PRIVATIZATION, DEAD AS A DOORNAIL. Even the National Republican Congressional Committee seems to think so! Talking Points Memo has the goods. [posted 1:00 pm]
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STANDARDS, PLEASE! It would be too much to ask for Bill Kristol to recuse himself from writing about the Kass Council, even though its members include contributors to The Weekly Standard and the magazine itself is deeply devoted to promoting Kass and his views. But it might be good advice, because this latest piece is embarassing. It's pure fluffery. It's positively gooey with praise for the Kass Council and what a bunch of thoughtful, hardworking, hard-thinkin' folks they are. It's embarassing to read in the same way that press releases are embarassing to read. Ah well. Chris Caldwell's piece last week on Muslims in France was pretty good.
P.S. Kristol writes that "even the most cold-blooded scientific researchers will find something in this report to temper their unrestrained enthusiasm for creating an industry of embryo experimentation." Wait, so embryos are potentially human and deserving of respect, but scientists are reptiles? [posted 10:45 am]
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ALSO JUST POSTED. For those of you who don't quite comprehend the complicated rhythms of American Prospect magazine publication, here's the gist: After publishing our last issue with a special supplement, we took a brief hiatus. Now, however, we're back with another issue just sent to press. The first item from that issue accessible on the web is this smart piece on Bush's dangerous foreign policy moves by John Judis, just posted. We hope you enjoy it. We'll be posting pieces by Robert Kuttner, Jeff Faux, and Harold Meyerson tomorrow. [posted 10:35 am]
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DON'T BE FOOLED. It may sound like the House Republicans are "moving" on
accounting fraud. In fact, that's the what the lede of this odd little AP piece says. But if you read down to the end, you'll find that, in fact, House Speaker Dennis Hastert resisted calls to vote directly on the strong Senate version of accounting reform and instead crafted a different bill. It's interesting. The House GOP bill includes criminal penalties for white-collar criminals, which Tapped loudly applauds -- these are not victimless crimes, and they shouldn't be treated that way. But the end of the story says that the House bill is widely considered weaker than the Senate's bill, authored by Paul Sarbanes. And if you read the Washington Post's take, you'll see that House leaders are simply buying time, hoping to dilute the Senate bill in conference. [posted 10:30 am]
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TAPPED RESPONDS TO INSTAPUNDIT. The Good Doctor asks us if our headline yesterday ("The Bush Economy Goes South") means we think the "good times were part of the 'Bush Economy.'" For the record: No. Two reasons. One is that, fairly or unfairly, presidents take the credit and blame for what the economy does on their watch. (Hey, it's not our rule.) So the good times were the Clinton Economy.
Certified Professional Economists may nevertheless note that the economy began to sputter back when Bill Clinton was still in office. Still, it seems plausible that the market drops of last week and early this week -- somewhat ameliorated by today's reports of good second-quarter earnings -- were a reaction to the Bush administration's refusal to take a tough approach to accounting reform, without which no investor can be confident. And that's the "Bush Economy," plain and simple. [posted 10:25 am]
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JUST POSTED. TAP Online -- not exactly the same thing as Tapped, remember -- has just published a piece by Eli Kintisch, Washington correspondent for the Forward, on the tensions experienced by Jewish and Arab journalists working in Washington. Here's one startling passage:
On Friday, June 28, I attended the annual convention of the American Muslim Council (AMC), an organization with which I have a pretty good professional relationship. I was there covering a story about Muslims in American politics. But when I attended a panel called "American Muslims in the Media," Abdurahman Alamoudi, a former executive director of the group, approached me and asked if I wanted to talk about the story outside.Out in the foyer, I interviewed him, as I have in the past, and then thanked him and returned to the session. At the time, members of the 100-plus in attendance were asking questions at the microphone; one was saying something about September 11 and the question of who was behind the attacks. Before I had a chance to sit down, Alamoudi approached me again.
"It is not good for your health that you are here," he told me suddenly. I was confused. Was he threatening me? He repeated what he said, and I felt immediately intimidated. It was clear he was worried about what the audience members were saying at the microphone, and about how I would report on their comments. "They are not aware that you are here," he explained.
Read the rest of the story here. [posted 9:10 am]
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KASS COUNCIL: STILL NOT STACKED ENOUGH. William Saletan says the Kass bioethics council's 10-7 majority in favor of a "moratorium" on research cloning is largely a mirage, because council members Francis Fukuyama, Rebecca Dresser, and Paul McHugh were swing voters who "wanted to regulate research cloning, not ban it, and...endorsed [a moratorium] as a means to develop such regulations." Saletan doesn't even mention the fact that Stephen Carter, another council member, abstained from the vote. But in any case, this just helps to confirm our first intuition about the council's report: That the outcome is probably too complicated and confusing to be of much use to anybody, on either side.
The person who really looks dumb here, of course, is George W. Bush. Not only did his official bioethics body ultimately reach a conclusion on research cloning contrary to his own (Bush wanted to ban it). The complexity of the Kass report, the nuanced positions taken by the members, the difficulty in interpreting exactly what was and wasn't resolved -- all of these factors suggest, at the very least, that research cloning is a complicated issue. Yet the president treated it as anything but. Bush prided himself on supposedly "thinking hard" about stem cells (thought Tapped never bought into all the public agonizing about his decision). But when it came to the closely linked issue of research cloning, Bush was calling for an outright ban and criminalization months ago, long before the Kass report was released. Even if Bush did think hard about stem cells themselves -- a dubious proposition -- he clearly didn't think very hard about the morality of cloning embryos to get them. [posted 7:45 am]
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HOW THE OTHER SIDE THINKS. Tapped found this column by conservative commentator Paul Greenberg instructive. Greenberg basically agrees that Harvey Pitt has to go. But he weirdly pairs up Pitt with Norman Mineta, arguing that Mineta, too, ought to be booted from the administration because of his opposition to racial profiling and arming pilots. (There's no mention of Thomas White.) We could of course object to this logic, to the notion that Pitt's conflicts of interest are rivaled in their scandalousness by Mineta's unwillingness to endorse particular policies. But right now we'd rather just sit by and marvel at it. [posted 7:25 am]
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Tuesday, July 16 You guys have been kicking up quite a dust storm about two of our recent posts, one about Michael Newdow and one about Stanley Fish. And you know what? You're half right. We shouldn't have referred to Newdow as a "loser." It was just plain low. We were shocked to learn that Newdow's personal life stood a good chance of blowing a hole in his legal claim, but that didn't justify our language.
But on the Stanley Fish front, we think he has been well debunked, both by Edward Rothstein but also by others. For more information we refer you to this article by Peter Berkowitz. Not that we expect you to be convinced if you're not already. After all, we can hardly expect defenders of postmodernism to be able to get out of their own worldviews and be able to see into ours.... [posted 3:55 pm]
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"BOURGEOIS RIOT," REVISITED. Remember when Paul Gigot, the urbane Wall
Street Journal editorial page editor, decided it was a good thing that an election be decided by mob rule? Tapped does! In fact, Tapped keeps a poster on our wall: A picture culled from a security camera at one of the election board offices, which shows several young, pale, sweaty, angry Republican Hill aides -- obviously not natives of Florida -- waving placards and shouting. Anyway, these were all small-wigs that Tom DeLay and Denny Hastert had had flown down for an expense-paid protest. According to this article in the Miami Herald, however, quite a few soon-to-be big- and medium-wigs were also involved in the recount battles. They include Bush's deputy chief of staff, Josh Bolten; his national field director, Ken Mehlman; lobbyist Matt Rhoades, and even U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick. The Herald even gives their salaries -- six figures and up for the top guys. Now
we know why they were so motivated. [posted 3:30 pm]
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THE BUSH ECONOMY GOES SOUTH. Bush gives another supposedly soothing statement about reform. The market again tanks. Look, Dubya, investors aren't like swing voters in Omaha. They actually pay attention to what you say and read the fine print. And guess what? They don't trust you or your promises.
Democrats: This is your argument. Go for it. [posted 3:00 pm]
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NICE TRY. The Bush administration released its long-awaited homeland security plan today. It was clearly supposed to displace the other story on today's front page, which is the Senate's passage of a strong accounting reform bill. How does Tapped know this? If you read the Post story, you'll notice the plan has been under consideration for nine months. So why now? (The Post, incidentally, wasn't fooled and played the accounting story much bigger, albeit not in the lead slot.)
Tapped is willing to put our head out and predict that, if the accounting scandals continue to flare, the Bush administration will soon announce a) another vague terrorist threat warning; or b) the capture of another terrorist (who was actually captured a month ago). You heard it here first!
On the other hand, kudos to the administration for including national driver's license standards in the plan. This common sense measure is opposed by wingnuts who think it will lead to a national ID and, hence, totalitarian
government. But all it does is force states that issue easily-faked IDs to raise their standards. (Ever seen Alaska's ID? Even the real ones look fake.) Incidentally, for homeland security wonks, there's a great clearinghouse of information over at the Century Foundation. [posted 3:00 pm]
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MORE ON POLLS. Again, we here at Tapped aren't pollsters. However, since yesterday we linked a Zogby poll indicating that Bush's approval ratings were shooting down, today we're linking a Gallup poll that shows no such trend. [posted 2:40 pm]
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BAD NEWS FOR BUSH. Though we've occasionally been guilty of it ourselves, Tapped has always thought the chattering classes tend to make too much of George W. Bush's job approval ratings. Dubya is a popular guy. But we suspect that in wartime, those numbers aren't a particularly reliable indicator of a politician's vulnerability. Why? Tapped is no pollster, but we intuit that during a war, people are inclined to tell pollsters they support the president regardless of how they feel about the person who actually is the president. Americans are a patriotic people; they're not going to crap all over the guy in the Oval Office when asked a non-specific question like "do you approve of the job the president is doing."
Our practice is to look not only at the job approval rating, but also at another, different poll number: The percentage of Americans who would actually choose to re-elect Bush were the election to be held today. We think this disaggregates people who like Bush from people who support "the president." And by that measure, the latest numbers from the Ipsos-Reid/Cook Political Report are bad news for Dubya: Last weekend, only 42 percent of the public said they would vote for Bush were an election to be held today. (His rolling average from mid-June to mid-July was only slightly higher, at 45 percent.)
Dem presidential wannabes, pay attention. [posted 12:30 pm]
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PLAYBOY'S WOMEN OF ENRON. A good argument for why conservatives should support accounting reform. [posted 12:25 pm]
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FACT CHECK ANN COULTER: MEDIA DARLING AL GORE. This, gentle reader, is the mother of them all. Make sure you're sitting down. Thanks to Coulter whistle-blower K.M.
On page 139 of her new book, Slander -- now a bestseller -- Ann Coulter describes how cruelly the media treated George W. Bush during the election. By contrast, she reports:
[T]he press maintained radio silence on stories embarrassing to Gore. For example, Al Gore couldn't pick George Washington out of a lineup. In a highly publicized stop at Monticello during Clinton's 1993 inaugural festivities, Gore pointed to carvings of Washington and Benjamin Franklin and asked the curator: 'Who are these guys?' He was surrounded by reporters and TV cameras when he said it. Only one newspaper, USA Today, reported the incident.
Coulter isn't wrong if, by "only one newspaper," she actually means "dozens of newspapers." In the immediate aftermath of the incident, references to Gore's gaffe appeared in USA Today, Newsday, The Washington Times, London's Evening Standard, and, the coup de grace, two articles in Coulter's favorite bulwark of liberal bias, The New York Times. The Associated Press also ran a story with the incident in its headline, so many local papers probably picked it up.
But wait! There's more! The authors of one of the New York Times articles were none other than Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich, two of Coulter's most reliable liberal scapegoats, who were both reporters in 1993 when the incident occurred. If these two are co-leaders of the vast, left-wing conspiracy, they sure dropped the ball.
Had enough of the love? We're still not done yet because Coulter also misquoted Gore! His actual words were "Who are these people?" not "Who are these guys?" It's a small error, but it obviously makes Gore sound more disrespectful of the founding fathers, and even the USA Today article Coulter did find got the quotation right.
DEGREE OF DISHONESTY: 7
ANALYSIS: Either Coulter is purposefully lying, or she is breathtakingly incompetent, even using her favorite research tool, LexisNexis. Have you no sense of decency, madam, at long last?
Previous Coulter fact checks: Chapter 1: In which we announce the plan to fact check Coulter, and catch her on Jim Jeffords' voting record); Chapter 2: In which we discover that she needs to get a calendar; Chapter 3: In which she spouts off (embarrassingly) on Hardball; Chapter 4: In which she viciously abuses LexisNexis (not for the last time!); Chapter 5: In which she repeats the Gore Love Story howler; Chapter 6: In which she abuses LexisNexis once again; Chapter 7: In which we show that Coulter's wrong about whether liberal women get called "ugly"; Chapter 8: In which Coulter misrepresents the end of the Cold War. More to come! [posted 11:55 am]
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O BRAVE NEW WORLD, THAT HAS SUCH PUNDITS IN IT. Tapped has no particular brief for Julian Bond. But this attempted takedown by conservative pundit Ben Shapiro is excruciatingly lame. Shapiro basically resorts to calling his opponent dumb (while denouncing Bond for name-calling). He claims that Bond "is obviously not intelligent enough to understand what he is advocating"; accuses him of "piddling attempts at reason"; and describes a recent Bond speech as a "hodgepodge of nonsensical blabber." How did Shapiro himself become such an Einstein? Well, according to his bio, he was "brought up in the home of two Reagan Republicans, where intelligent conversation about politics and philosophy was encouraged." As a result, he "quickly developed into a reasoned political thinker and a powerful writer." And there's good reason to expect Shapiro to become even more sharp in the near future. He's still a teenager! [posted 11:45 am]
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REFUTE THIS. Okay, readers. This statement by Terry Eastland in an online Weekly Standard article seems to us rather dubious:
Ted Williams described himself as an atheist, a fact of possible relevance. Not every atheist would approve of cryonics, but it is hard to imagine an adherent of the great religions of the West embracing cryonics and the overcoming of death it envisions. "To die is gain," wrote the Apostle Paul, contemplating heaven.
Now, even if it's mainly atheists who want to cheat death, surely there must be some followers of the "great religions of the West" who have been interested in cryonics. We don't have any examples handy, but we'd love to know if you've come across any. You know the e-mail. [posted 11:00 am]
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THINKING ALIKE. Both Paul Krugman and Nicholas Kristof are mucking around in Bush's Texas past this morning, and each of them lingers on the Texas Rangers. Hey, guys, don't cross the streams! [posted 7:45 am]
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B.S. WATCH. Tapped has been
