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Mon, August 19 | Tues, August 20 | Wed, August 21 | Thurs, August 22 | Fri, August 23 | Sat, August 24 | Sun, August 25
(For more info on "Tapped," our permanent link, our archives, or to e-mail us, click here.)
Friday, August 23 Definitely read today's top story, by Michelle Goldberg. It's about the "Crisis Pregnancy Center" scam. Basically, anti-abortion groups setup centers billed as clinics, then they try to lure women in with free pregnancy tests. If the women bite, they're subjected to graphic anti-abortion videos and other kinds of propaganda. Sadly, these organizations receive federal funding.
It's pretty revolting. We wonder what the folks at The Corner, particularly uberlifers Rod Dreher and Kathryn Jean Lopez, think about this. Is it okay to engage in highly deceptive advertising, to lie to women about how far along they are in their pregnancies, and to have unqualified personnel provide women with bogus or distorted medical information in the service of a cause? The people behind these centers do:
Robert Pearson, who opened America's first crisis-pregnancy center in 1967 and authored a manual for CPCs, was unapologetic about lying to patients. "Obviously, we're fighting Satan," he said. "A killer, who in this case is the girl who wants to kill her baby, has no right to information that will help her kill her baby."
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SIMON SAYS...YOU'RE TOAST. Poor Bill Simon. How embarrassing is it to get the president to fly across the country for a fundraiser only to refuse to appear in public with you? The trouble is that Bush, who has promised zero-tolerance (right...) on corporate wrongdoing can't be seen with Simon, who is California's poster boy for corporate wrong-doing.
So much for Bush winning California in '04. [posted 1:15 pm]
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GETTING MORE PRINCIPLED. Tapped readers may recall when we took a group called Citizens for Principled Conservatism to task for running a website about Ann Coulter with the URL anorexic-annie.com. Well, we now learn that the references to anorexia are in the process of being purged from the site -- see here for a version that's more "principled." We leave it up to you to decide whether the quotations marks deserve to be taken off that word. [posted 9:45 am]
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Thursday, August 22
This afternoon, the Federal Election Commission decided that political ads that reach you via your cell phone can be essentially exempted from federal election disclosure rules (which require ad sponsors to tell you who's paying for them). Great. All Tapped needs is for our cell phone to become just as clogged with crap as our Hotmail account. [posted 4:10 pm]
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LET US EXPLAIN. Wethinks InstaPundit is too impressed by this Josh Chafetz "Fisking" (ugh) of this Maureen Dowd column. Chafetz writes:
The showcase line in the column was "We used to worry about a military coup against civilian authority. Now we worry about a civilian coup against military authority." Maureen was very proud of this line. The NYT online even used it as the tag line for her column. But, um, what the hell does it mean? First, I hate to bring up a pesky little thing like the Constitution -- especially when dealing with a legal eagle like Dowd -- but Article II, section 2 does say, "The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States." In other words, the military is meant to be under civilian control. The idea of a civilian coup against military authority is completely incoherent in a democratic state.
God save us from literalists. (Don't they teach irony at Oxford?) Look. Here's what Dowd means: Isn't it odd that the invade-Iraq neocons at the Pentagon are almost uniformly opposed by the military brass? Yes, it is odd. The only people hot to fight this war are a bunch of nerdy chickenhawks brandishing grandiose plans to remake the Middle East. Tapped is still of draft age, even if Richard Perle isn't. [posted 2:45 pm]
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MORE ON MCKINNEY. Our colleagues-in-arms Nathan Newman and Max Sawicky respond to our previous post here and here. Okay: At the outset, let's acknowledge that lots of people were gunning for McKinney, that some of the press coverage of her campaign contributions was unbalanced, and also that she wasn't above a little hardball herself. (Especially those "endorsements" and what seems to us like a pretty plausible charge that operatives associated with McKinney tried to scare GOP voters away from crossing over to vote for her rival, Denise Majette.) Further, let's acknowledge that while the ability of special interest groups to have disproportionate influence in congressional races is an unsavory feature of our political system, that's just the way it is.
The outstanding problem here is that the undertone of McKinney's supporters' criticism of what happened suggests that the Jewish groups were motivated by something other than McKinney's stance on Israel -- that is, the hoary old prejudice that the Jews are trying to keep a black (wo)man down. Let's go to the tape: When asked about McKinney's endorsement-fudging, her father, Billy McKinney, said: "That ain't nothin'. Jews have bought everybody. Jews. J-E-W-S." So while AIPAC itself is not a "nebulous" group, as Nathan points out, it's clear that at least some of those close to McKinney blame, broadly, "the Jews."
But what really happened here? A special interest group (AIPAC) was trying to beat a candidate (McKinney) whose views on an issue (Israel) that group opposed. They didn't care that McKinney was black. They cared that McKinney was, in their estimation, anti-Israel. How does Tapped know this? Because their candidate of choice, Denise Majette, was also black -- albeit pro-Israel. AIPAC will no doubt do their best to ensure that Majette wins the general election, too.
This is why Tapped thinks it's baloney for black leaders to raise a hue and cry over Jews "picking" other black leaders, and for the media to indulge them in it. We also think that it makes more sense to have an open discussion about the disproportionate influence of a single-issue lobby, AIPAC, than to overlay it with a dubious veneer of racial politics.
P.S. This Associated Press article cuts through a lot of the hype to suggest a number of non-Israel related reasons McKinney lost. In particular: the growth of a black middle class disenchanted with McKinney's brash style, and the emergence of a large bloc of black and white voters tired of the political machine that elected her. "While many blacks said they had abandoned McKinney," the AP reports, "analysts said the results suggest all constituents were hungry for change in DeKalb County, which has been dominated by the political machine that elected McKinney, her father and former Sheriff Sidney Dorsey, convicted of murdering his successor." In other words, this is the Newark election, only the new blood won. [posted 12:55 pm]
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WAR GAMING. We came to this story via Joe Conason.
Apparently, a Marine general quit in the middle of this month's massive, prep-for-invading-Iraq war games. He claims the thing was rigged. And it sure looks that way. Here's some coverage in The Guardian. Apparently some smaller regional papers in the U.S. have also picked it up. The Army Times has also covered the story. Why haven't the big dailies? [posted 12:00 pm]
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ATTACK OF THE KILLER TOLKIEN FANS. This one came over the transom and was simply too good not to share with you readers -- especially since it's a complaint about an article published a year ago by Tapped in another publication. We've added one link to the text but otherwise it's the unadulterated original:
I am sending this here because an article Chris Mooney did for Slate said he is a staff writer for American Prospect.This is in regards to his embarassing article from July 25, 2001, entitled "Tolkien's Hobbling Habit A warning for those about to read The Lord of the Rings".
It must be tough to have a job like Mr. Mooney. His words are there and impossible to deny. Then again, since he is a part of the American Prospect, he can quibble about the meaning of the word "is", like your hero, Slick Willie. It also assumes Mooney has the wit to be embarassed. I am not willing to make such an assumption.
Mooney's examples of Tolkien's "poetry" are clearly NOT understood by Mooney. These are the kinds of verse you might hear unsophisticated people sing in pubs, or at parties. Mooney didn't bother giving examples of other poetry Tolkien had in the Lord of the Rings, because they clearly would not have supported his rants. Mooney clearly has not read any of the other works Tolkien did and their examples of poetry. His poetry was designed to fit the characters. Sometimes it was meant to be amusing, others to establish a mood or rhythm.
Chris Mooney is an embarassing idiot. But thanks for being there to make conservatives look better.
Whew. They're breeding an awfully right wing bunch of Tolkien fans lately, huh? The funny thing is that this is hardly the nastiest e-mail Tapped received after publishing an article saying that the poetry of The Lord of the Rings isn't very good. One reader wrote: "Annoyed, and sad that you were born." [posted 11:35 am]
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THE LATEST. Today we've got articles by Sasha Polakow-Suransky on a weird, all-white, anti-racism antiperspirant group that's going after Paul Wellstone (no kidding), and Jon Margolis on the "fee demo" battle over America's national parks -- an issue you've probably never have heard of, but one with a heck of a lot of political import. [posted 10:30 am]
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THE TALKING POINTS CONTROVERSY. Anyone who reads Tapped knows we're fans of Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo. So we're not unbiased on the question of this whole Terry Neal/Washington Post vs. Marshall thing, which is worth discussing here because ... everyone else is discussing it. (Here's some background; here are the results of Marshall's discussions with the Post and Neal.)
We think Josh wins this round. The point is this: Josh has been writing a very widely-read political weblog for over a year now. (Plenty of reporters on the Post's national desk are among his readers.) Terry Neal just started his. It would have been smart and good manners for the Post and Neal not to pick up the same name, whether or not Marshall owned the copyright on the thing -- because they really aren't fooling anyone by insisting that this Alan Schwartz guy and Bill O'Reilly both had Marshall "beat," which is true but irrelevant. (Schwartz' blog was obscure and is now defunct. O'Reilly runs a TV show, not a blog.) They thought no one would notice and, even dumber, that no one would care. And when Marshall nicely asked them to find a different name, please, they resorted to the lawyers. But Marshall wasn't making a legal point or threatening a suit. He was asking them for some professional courtesy.
Of course, the real loser here is Terry Neal, who has drawn a lot of attention to his column which, truth be told, is not particularly good. It's mostly generic campaign reportage and platitudinal Beltway CW. That's just an opinion, of course. So judge for yourself. [posted 9:15 am]
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Wednesday, August 21 Do not miss this article, last week's cover story in the Washington City Paper. (It'll be over at this address in a day or two.) It's Jason Cherkis's very funny article about the easiest job in DC: Washington police officer. Lest this sound like aimless liberal cop-bashing, we offer you this excerpt:
It's a well-known fact among cops: 10 percent of the force does all the work. These folks prowl the streets looking for perps, go hungry on stakeouts, do all the paperwork required to process arrests, and make it to court on time to net convictions.That, of course, is too much to ask. Your aim is to place yourself squarely within the other 90 percent. As a member of this not-so-select group, you do the exact opposite of the 10-percenters: You prowl the streets looking for hot chicks, you interrupt stakeouts for steak-outs, and you avoid paperwork like dark alleys.
You're wondering: How do I become a 90-percenter? It's easy, cops say: Come in second. If there's a robbery in progress, take your time getting there so that no one will expect you to find the culprits. If the dispatcher announces an assault in progress, wait for somebody else to take the call -- and then show up.
"You don't be the first unit to arrive on the scene," says an ex-sergeant. "Especially if there's a fight. You don't see it. You're just there to assist." In other words, you set out orange cones, light flares, and shoo away nosy old ladies. You're traffic flow.
This formula for loafing explains a phenomenon that every D.C. citizen has witnessed: cruiser overkill. That is, a cop flags down a suspect for an everyday infraction, such as speeding, reckless driving, or perhaps even a burglary. Then, out of nowhere, two, three, five auxiliary cruisers come rushing in, lights flashing, sirens blaring. They're rubberneckers. They're 90-percenters.
Seems like new City Paper editor Erik Wemple, who also restarted the paper's media column, is starting to give readers a nice taste of the old, Shafer/Carr City Paper. Good news for us D.C. locals. [posted 4:15 pm]
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HOW TO FIX J-SCHOOL. Almost everyone Tapped has ever asked about journalism school has said, basically, the same things -- it's a waste of time, unless you can't get experience any other way than paying for it. (Which is not a bad
route if, unlike Tapped, you did not spend most of your college summers running coffee for magazine editors.) Don't miss Ron Rosenbaum's excellent take on the matter. [posted 3:10 pm]
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PROVING THE OBVIOUS. "Beer: Helping ugly people have sex since 1862." It used to be a funny poster. Now, it's science. [posted 2:45 pm]
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ON THE OTHER HAND. We're glad to hear the Bush administration is going to devote $25 million to pro-democracy intitiatives in the Middle East. The money will go towards training journalists, voter registration, and the like. It's not that much money by any stretch, but it's a good start. Tapped
once spoke with a prominent Middle East expert who pointed out that we don't really have any idea whether these countries are irreversibly anti-American, because a true balance of political sentiment has never been allowed to flourish. As we can now see pretty clearly, many
of the nominally pro-Western Middle Eastern governments, like Egypt, help keep themselves in power by funnelling political energy into anti-Western fundamentalist movements, with whom they broker a kind of truce -- we'll let you stone the adulterers if we can keep buying F-16s, so to speak. This distorts our measure of Arab public opinion; if the only option for dissent is fundamentalism, all you get is fundamentalism. [posted 2:20 pm]
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WE'D FEEL A LOT BETTER ABOUT THE IRAQ DEBATE. If it the Bush administration hadn't so blown their credibility on the question. There's not really any debate going on about whether we should go in after Saddam. All there is is a White House grasping at straws to find justifications for their already-made decision to invade. Granted, that's not much more laughable than these conservatives who are now complaining to Howard Kurtz that Howell Raines is engineering anti-war coverage at The New York Times. Charles Krauthammer's comparison of Raines to William Randolph Hearst is especially ahistorical. The Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot, meanwhile, actually gripes about the Times' giving too much attention to one Journal op-ed (!). (The one written by Brent Scowcroft, who opposes war with Iraq.) Gigot has the funniest quote, albeit unintentionally:
"If you're going to have subtle opinionizing, I thought the place for that was the editorial page," says Paul Gigot, the Journal's editorial page editor.What the heck does Gigot know about "subtle" opinionizing? Anyway, for The New York Times to be reportorially skeptical about a war opposed by most of the military leadership and supported by a handful of neocon ideologues is hardly beyond the pale. Next they're going to say the Times is anti-corporate because it's covering Enron. [posted 2:10 pm]
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CORRECTIONS. The school we referred to as the "University of Indiana" in yesterday's post is actually Indiana University. Also, Counterspin posts a slight correction to one of its posts, in this case one that we relied on. [posted 12:35 pm]
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FUN ON THE FRINGE. Tapped has always felt that Republicans make better use of their fringe people, like Bob Barr, than we do with ours. One political operative observed to us that in Barr's case, even though he made mainstream Republicans cringe, they encouraged him to go at Bill Clinton. They let him be the impeachment attack dog. They used him well. He took the heat, and last night became their fall guy. All mainstream Democrats really ever did for Cynthia McKinney, on the other hand, was to disavow what she said. [posted 9:55 am]
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THE SOUND OF MONEY TALKING. When special interests like NASDAQ want something, they sure know how to get it. There's nothing particularly new about this, except for the brazenness. [posted 9:45 am]
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Tuesday, August 20 Georgia Democrats will all vote against Cynthia McKinney if Georgia Republicans all vote against Bob Barr. We can even set up a special website for it! But seriously, folks. Our friend Nathan Newman is worried about McKinney's race against fellow black Democrat Denise Majette, which is in many ways playing out as a mini-referendum on the Middle East. He writes:
The Israeli lobby leaders might argue that these two incumbents [McKinney and the already defeated Earl Hilliard] just happened to be the most vulnerable incumbents with pro-Palestinian views, but being vulnerable is the nature of being a black elected leaders, especially in the South. If the dust settles and the only two incumbent Democrats defeated by largely unknown challengers this year are black, the Israeli lobby will have done more harm to Jews than the marginal gain of two votes in Congress could ever justify.To have large sums of Jewish money coming in from outside these districts is Louis Farrakahn's wet dream. Good going AIPAC!
Newman may be right, but who's to blame? We're not especially eager to see AIPAC expand its influence in Congress. But if black voters decide to blame McKinney's defeat on a nebulous Jewish conspiracy, they're the ones with the problem. And why is it okay for Arab groups to pour money into McKinney's campaign but somehow sleazy for Jewish groups to pour money into Majette's? We would ask the same question of James Zogby, president of the Arab-American Institute, who seems eager to fan the flames. [posted 5:20 pm]
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THE POLL STORY. Counterspin reports that the president is now at 63 percent, according to Charlie Cook -- still good, but still going down. The Polling Report now has Americans who would definitely vote for Bush in 2004 down to 41 percent. And in the Fox poll, Al Gore is back up to his pre-9/11 matchup level with Bush, 37 to 50. That doesn't make Gore a giant slayer. But it does suggest that Gore's attacks on Bush, including his speeches and his op-ed, are helping Gore, not hurting him. [posted 5:10 pm]
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INDIANIMALS. The University of Indiana has been named "best party
school" in a survey undertaken by those mavens of higher education, the Princeton Review. Priceless quote, from a university official: "I think there are some serious questions about the methodology of the study and it really calls into question the credibility of the ranking." [posted 3:00 pm]
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SPEAKING OF THE TIMES MAGAZINE. Tina Rosenberg is an outstanding journalist and her book The Haunted Lands, about Eastern Europe after the fall of commmunism, is amazing. Neither do we have any quibble with the substance of her cover story in the Times Magazine this past weekend. It's smart, well-reported, forward-looking, and thoughtfully prescriptive. Her thesis -- that the real problem with globalization isn't trade itself but the way the rules are rigged against the world's poor -- is a compelling one. The only thing that bothers us is the notion that no one else has made this point before.
The mainstream media, including the Times, have often played the globalization debate as, essentially, dumb youthful protestor versus Tom Friedman. It's been a source of enduring frustration for our mothership, The American Prospect, that many of the more thoughtful and well-informed critiques of globalization -- including some that have appeared in TAP, from Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Kuttner, William Greider, and many others -- have often been ignored or downplayed, though they've been making many of the same arguments that Rosenberg does. (In particular, that the problem isn't trade, but the way institutions of global trade subvert democratic government to stack the rules in favor of particular industries, corporations, or countries.)
That said: Read Rosenberg's piece. [posted 2:45 pm]
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THIS IS A STORY WORTH READING. Newsweek has a major expose on an alleged massacre of Taliban troops by the American-allied Northern Alliance. It's a chilling read. Now, Tapped is
not extraordinarily surprised by these revelations. We already knew that the Northern Alliance, composed as it was largely of bloodthirsty warlords -- like Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, whose troops may have committed the
slaughter -- was not a band of angels. Their chief virtue to us has been their opposition to the Taliban and willingness to act as, essentially, mercenaries for the U.S. But Newsweek's coverage reveals a broader problem that almost inevitably emerges when the U.S. uses local forces this way, whether as part of a large-scale proxy battle a la the Cold War or in the more complicated world of peacekeeping, nation-building, and the like. The bottom line here is that if the U.S. is truly interested in rebuilding Afghanistan, it cannot leave the work to local warlords. It cannot restrict American ground troops to Kabul, as the Bush administration has insisted on. We have taken on this burden, and now we must pay the price. Michael Ignatieff's argument in the New York Times Magazine on the case for "enlightened imperialism" is sounding better and better. [posted 2:35 pm]
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WHAT LEFT? Camille Paglia thinks there's something wrong with "the Left" (via Arts & Letters Daily). She may be right. But besides an opening brief mention of Ralph Nader, in her column she refers throughout to a monolithic "Left" without bothering to identify one single leftist thinker or publication. It seems that she's talking about everybody -- and, of course, nobody. What the hell good is that? [posted 12:30 pm]
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GETTIN' WEBBY, SO WEBBY. Paul Krugman has done it again. And no, we don't mean he's embarrassed the Bush administration. Krugman, as is increasingly becoming his wont, has gone and prominently cited a web journalist. Last week it was Brendan Nyhan of Spinsanity. Today it's Josh Marshall. At a time when a lot of dour print columnists still pretend the online world doesn't exist, Krugman is writing columns that increasingly need hyperlinks. Could it be because he's discussed so much in the blogosphere? [posted 9:15 am]
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Monday, August 19 The increasingly erratic Paul Craig Roberts suffers some kind of breakdown in print:
Today in the United States white people have no political representation. Whites have to struggle in the courts against government opposition to claim any resemblance to equal rights. Explicit government policies have made whites second class citizens. Whites are a dispossessed majority in their own country.Why did the white majority allow themselves to be stripped of the equal protection clause of the Constitution? Why do whites remain loyal to the political parties that took away their rights?
What is the future for whites in a political system where both political parties pander to third world immigrants and support racial privileges for minorities? Having lost equal protection of law, what will whites lose next?
That sound you heard was Tapped's jaw hitting the floor. [posted 5:25 pm]
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THE SECRET BUSH PLAN. To convince us of the dangers of an unaccountable International Criminal Court: Kangaroo justice for "enemy combatants"! Reader L.W. writes:
The great danger inherent in the ICC, they tell us, is that it could be used by a lawless regime to deny citizens of the United States their Constitutional rights. Maybe the Justice Department, by summarily stripping citizens of the United States of their Constitutional rights, is really trying to illustrate the threat posed by the ICC. Could it be that, by informing the courts that the war on terrorism voids their jurisdiction to determine whether or not the rights of a citizen have been violated, they are just trying to warn us that a rogue regime could imprison our citizens using a similar pseudo-legalistic pretext?
Nah. [posted 5:15 pm]
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DIDN'T LIKE "DANCES WITH WOLVES" WATCH. James Surowiecki explains why I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, the new documentary of the band Wilco, is, in fact, not very good. The folks at
Slate even subtitle it "Everyone's wrong about the new Wilco movie." A classic of the genre. Next up: Why Elvis is the worst musician in history (possibly by Dale Peck). [posted 2:35 pm]
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PROPER POPULISM. If you still haven't read Ruy Teixiera and John Judis's piece on populism in the Prospect, go read it now. Then read Teixiera's excellent follow-up in the Century Foundation's "Public Opinion Watch." Ruy is about as smart an analyst of the broad trends in American politics as you'll find anywhere. Indeed, this whole "Opinion Watch" edition is a nice response to Joe Lieberman, William Saletan, and other critics of Al Gore's "populism." (We at Tapped still feel it's a distraction to call it that -- everyone ends up debating semantics.)
Teixeira is especially good at taking apart Mark Penn's bogus "Office Park Dads" theory (with an assist from fellow analyst Karl Agne). Since Penn has been so vague about just who these "OPDs" are, Agne took the information Penn has given -- they broke for Bush in the 2000 election and now prefer the GOP by 25 points; they constitute "about 15 percent of the electorate"; they tend to live in the suburbs -- and tried to deduce a little bit more. Here's the money graph:
Apparently, the only way to arrive at the 15% figure given in the Penn presentation is by including all non-union white men ages 25-50, regardless of education, income (remember that 72% are reported in the Penn data to be stockholders), marital status (remember that they are defined as being part of "two-career couples"), or the area in which they live. If we accept the characterization of OPDs offered in the New Democrat Network strategic memo - "married, suburban, and independent" - then OPDs are reduced to approximately 5% of the likely electorate. If we use the broader definition of non-union white men ages 25-50, we have successfully defined the most reliably Republican segment of the entire voting population, nearly 40% of whom are identified as "unreachable" in the Democratic Voter Choice Scale in the Democracy Corps surveys.Public Opinion Watch thinks the media and certainly anyone involved in political campaigning should be very careful indeed before taking any analysis based on OPDs very seriously. OPDs are obviously a catchy label in search of some real meaning. I am not optimistic that meaning will ever be found.
Office Park Dads, incidentally, sound a lot like Patio Men, David Brooks's apparent counter-example to the Bohemian Bourgeois. (And likely future book subject.)
P.S. How much is Al From paying for this crap? [posted 2:30 pm]
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PROGRESS. The New York Times has announced that it will now accept civil union notices for the weddings page in its Sunday Style section, which is required reading for yuppies and quasi-yuppies like Tapped. This is good news, as is George W. Bush's progressive (for a conservative Republican) effort to make sexual orientation a non-issue for members of his administration. On the issues of gay equality, at least, the right's culture war has become a failure -- even if they continue to win largely symbolic "victories" like the Defense of Marriage Act or the Boy Scouts' ability to ban gay scoutmasters. (Here's a good example of their frustration.) [posted 2:20 pm]
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THINK IT THROUGH. Richard Perle, ideologue armchair general, says we don't need allies to win in Iraq. Wesley Clark, real general, explains why we do. You decide who to believe. [posted 1:45 pm]
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HILLARY IN 2004? Not a chance, even if it is a favored parlor game. Why not? Here's a good primer. [posted 1:40 pm]
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GOOD NEWS FOR IMMIGRATION REFORM. INS head James Ziglar is out. This could be very good news for proponents of immigration reform and better border security -- but a lot depends on who replaces him. As we noted in this article, Ziglar's patronage had shielded a top INS official, former Cato Institute staffer Stuart Anderson, from being pushed out for his opposition to student tracking after 9/11. Ziglar had needed Anderson's Senate connections to stop his agency from being split up; but that battle appears to have been lost. Stay tuned. [posted 1:35 pm]
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MORE ON GALATOIRE'S. You may recall that about a month ago, Tapped weirdly inserted itself into a brewing controversy surrounding the New Orleans restaurant Galatoire's, which snooty French Quarter traditionalists were trying to defend against invading hordes of tourists in blue jeans. More offensively, they were also trying to defend their favorite high class waiter, a chap named Gilberto Eyzaguirre, calling for him to be brought back to the restaurant even though he had been dismissed for sexual harrassment (a charge that didn't rattle the boys' club one bit). Well, now the Los Angeles Times has taken up the story, and their report contains plenty more appalling behavior on the part of New Orleans Brahmins. To wit:
In a letter posted on Gilberto's Web site, Jules Jordy Jr. dubbed the evolution of Galatoire's "an inexorable slide of Western culture toward a so-called classless, lowest-common-denominator type society.""Just imagine some sweaty tourist in a baseball cap and sneakers, from Dallas or Kansas City, with toothpick twirling between his lips, demanding A-1 sauce for the trout amandine and ketchup to put on the soufflé potatoes," Jordy wrote.
Don't just imagine that such snobbery still exists in America -- it actually does. [posted 10:40 am]
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AN EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES. Just what you've been waiting for -- another Tapped post in which we plug our own magazine and web articles. This time, at least, there's something of an excuse: We've got tons of new stuff, both from the print edition of the magazine and online only. Here's the list: Paul Starr's cover story on the telecom meltdown; John Judis and Ruy Teixeira on why Democrats must be populists; Robert Kuttner's column on Bush's absurd economic summit; Brendan Nyhan on why Democrats need a new theory of internationalism to deal with the Iraq issue; and Alex Kellogg on last weekend's over-the-top pro-reparations demonstration on the Mall. We hope you enjoy it all... [posted 8:30 am]
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