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Mon, September 16 | Tues, September 17 | Wed, September 18 | Thurs, September 19 | Fri, September 20 | Sat, September 21 | Sun, September 22
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Friday, September 20
Looking for a way to get into the
presidential race? Here it is. [posted 12:40 pm]
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THE LAMENESS OF PROJECT CENSORED. Sorry, but these guys at SF Weekly
really, really have it right on Project Censored, the annual exercise in lefty paranoia. Read it and weep. Then laugh. [posted 11:55 am]
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THEY THOUGHT WE WERE DISTRACTED. Yesterday Tapped noted that despite the administration's seemingly exclusive focus on plotting the war in Iraq, its assault on the environment continues. Here's another example of the unrelenting onslaught: The EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers want to reconsider rules about pollution in wetlands and non-navigable streams, after the Supreme Court set some limits on which waters the agencies could regulate. Who wants the current rules softened? Homebuilders and developers would be very happy with a clarification of what they can dump and where. Tapped is betting that regulatory czar John Graham won't have any problem with whatever the agencies come up with this time.
And in another blow to the environment, House and Senate energy conferees agreed yesterday to a new fuel economy standard that would increase consumption of oil. The auto industry is applauding. [posted 11:40 am]
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MEMORIZE THIS PLAY. Ever wonder how Bush does it? He's managed to silence any Democratic opposition in Congress to the Iraqi invasion. In today's Washington Post,
Dana Millbank smartly unpacks how Bush gets his way. We'd like to see some Democrats write down this game plan. [posted 11:40 am]
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THE IRAQ RESOLUTION. The Washington Post story on Bush's Iraq resolution is the best today. The resolution reminds Tapped of everything else the administration has ever done -- it's arrogant, unilateral, and self-aggrandizing. They want "unlimited powers." Why? What is it about the Constitution that the Bush administration finds so unappealing? Tapped thinks this resolution, as worded, is a bad idea. As the Post notes:
Bush's proposed wording would conceivably authorize military force anywhere in the Middle East and Persian Gulf region. The key concluding section of the resolution authorizes the president "to use all means that he determines to be appropriate, including force, in order to enforce . . . United Nations Security Council resolutions . . . defend the national security interests of the United States against the threat posed by Iraq, and restore international peace and security to the region."
The resolution is also inconsistent with Bush's U.N. speech. It treats the case against Saddam as closed and the U.N. as irrelevant. The Bushies need to make up their minds. [posted 11:15 am]
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THE IRAQ DEBATE. Several articles coming over the transom this morning will give you a good sense of how the Iraq debate has been evolving. One is Josh Marshall's Salon article, which takes you below the level of policy semaphore and provides an Iraq wonk's look at what the previous week's events really mean. (It's here, and it's premium, but it's worth it. And while you're at it, subscribe. You don't have to read the Sullivan crap if you don't want to.) In a nutshell, Marshall writes, the hawks lost; the Bush administration embraced the Kissinger-Powell strategy of consensus building through a demand for inspections:
[Bush] dared the U.N. to redeem itself by forcing Saddam to comply with its resolutions. Having said that, he has little choice but to let the U.N. try to force Saddam to make good on his pledge or see if he'll try to wriggle out of it. And, as many hawks are now beginning to realize, that could take months or even years. If Democrats now seem less skittish about giving the president a vote, it's likely because he now seems locked into a policy tied to the U.N. and one that might drag on for some time.
Two more articles, both in the new issue of the Atlantic, offer some other points. One is James Fallows' level-headed look at what it would actually mean to occupy Iraq after an invasion. Tapped supports regime change in Iraq -- we're still out to lunch on how to achieve it, though -- and would love to see a rebuilt, democratic, secular Iraq creating a new pole of power in the Middle East. But we worry that, unlike Fallows, the Pentagon's Iraq hawks haven't thought seriously about this issue.
The other Atlantic article is Robert Kaplan's vision for what the power center would look like. Kaplan, a kind of foreign policy depressive, has generally been aligned with conservatives on these matters. And he prefers a friendly dictatorship in Iraq rather than a
democratic government. But it's an interesting look at the power politics of the Middle East. [posted 10:55 am]
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Thursday, September 19
Reports that
Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott is keeping tabs on which corporations and trade associations are giving to whom reminds us of those stories of Tom Delay's strong-arm tactics that gave him the nickname "The
Hammer." Lott doesn't deny reports from a closed door meeting where he told of the ledger he's keeping, but he seems to justify the tough talk because of the tight race for control of the Senate. He claims that everything
he's doing is fair and square. That may be, but look at who wrote the laws that made this kind of political extortion legal. Don't expect any changes in these strong-arm tactics after the McCain-Feingold law kicks in. It didn't touch this everyday sort of activity; it just made it easier to get more money by doubling the contribution limits for individuals. [posted 5:20 pm]
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SNEAK ATTACK. No, not yet in Iraq. This time Bush has in his sights speeding up environmental reviews for major road construction and bridge projects. Environmentalists are rightfully howling. We liked what National Resources Defense Council spokesman Deron Lovass had to say:
"This administration wants to shoot the sheriff protecting our environment so the highway robbers can ride again." [posted 5:10 pm]
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YOU KNEW THIS ONE WAS COMING. If American soldiers can't buy hard-core porn at their base commissaries, the terrorists will have won. No, seriously. In reaction to the 9th Circuit's decision upholding a 1996 law banning such materials from base stores, Gerald H. Goldstein, who represented the plaintiffs, said:
The Taliban would have been proud of this decision. It's a shame that the kids willing to lay down their lives for this country are not able to enjoy the freedoms they are fighting for.
To be honest, though, this anti-porn requirement really is pretty silly.
P.S. The story also says that the military allows Playboy magazine but not Playgirl. What gives? [posted 4:35 pm]
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HACK ATTACK. Check out this sentence in Ann Coulter's latest screed, this one about the Shoney's terrorism "hoax" debacle in Florida: "Non-terrorist Muslims are crying wolf when they play these games -- talking about blowing up buildings in restaurants, taking a lighter to their sneakers on commercial aircraft, and spending a long time shaving in
airplane bathrooms. Intentionally or not, they are giving the real terrorists a cushion for the next attack." Think about the assumptions underlying that that phrase "non-terrorist Muslisms." Maybe we'll start using the term "non-racist Republicans." [posted 1:55 pm]
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EMERGING DEMOCRATIC MAJORITY WATCH. Stuart Rothenberg discusses Illinois' slow slide to the Democrats. [posted 1:15 pm]
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YOU GO BOY! The Times also reports that Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle sharply criticized Bush's economic policy on the Senate floor just a day after expressing support for the president on Iraq. This seems about right to us. And Daschle illustrates how the Democrats can walk and chew gum at the same time. Let's hope more of them pick up the game. [posted 1:10 pm]
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COME DOWN FROM THINE IVORY TOWER. Three M.I.T professors have written another one of those we-don't-see-any problem-with-money-in-politics books. This one covers why corporations don't give more political money, something we've always wondered about ourselves. The conclusion? Corporations don't give more because the money doesn't buy them anything. Our conclusion? Why give more than you have to?
Tapped hasn't read the entire study but the New York Times report suggests that Stephen Ansolabehere, John de Figueiredo and James M. Snyder Jr. have their heads stuck in the ivy. They reportedly say that 80 percent of money given to candidates comes from individuals, not corporations. Don't they know about corporate bundling? Money and politics research watchdogs like the Center for Responsive Politics burst the myth of the "individual contributor" years ago by analyzing bundling trends and attributing bundled money to the corporations that marshaled it. The three professors seem to be suggesting that a $25 contribution buys as much influence as the $5 million that AT&T bundled to candidates. Hello? Can they explain to parents of public school children, or poor people, why they don't get the same attention from Congress that commercial banks (which gave $24.9 million in the last election cycle) get? Tapped can't wait to get our hands on the book so we can debunk more of their myths. [posted 12:50 pm]
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IS THIS A BAD JOKE? Gov. Jeb Bush is calling on the Justice Department to help fix the Florida election system before November. Looks like he'll probably get turned down because the civil rights division's initial take is that the problem is bad management, not discrimination. Bush is blaming local officials, most of whom are Democrats. We're thinking that maybe voters in the state should hold Bush accountable. [posted 12:10 pm]
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CONTRIBUTING TO GRIDLOCK. Tapped was struck this morning when reading this status-of-legislation article by Helen Dewar in The Washington Post. She misses a key reason that Congress is gridlocked: Lawmakers are afraid of offending their campaign contributors. Sometimes this plays to progressive interests -- the Dems may be holding tough on labor rights issues in the Homeland Security Bill because labor has a hand on their wallet -- but more often it does not. Will the Republicans feel they must push the bankruptcy or energy bills -- which are currently stuck -- through Congress to please their contributors? The pressure will certainly be there to do just that. [posted 12:00 pm]
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SO GOES CALIFORNIA. California sets lots of trends, not the least of which is in the area of political fund raising. AP reports that
Gov. Gray Davis has reached new heights in his current campaign -- raising more than $56 million. In his last race, the total spending broke all records, with Davis raising $35 million. Davis isn't going to
be able to sneeze without some watchdog (rightfully) yelling conflict of interest when he reaches for a Kleenex. The article details potential serious conflicts of interest including Davis' decision to approve a large pay increase for members of the Correctional Peace Officers Association which bundled more than $2 million to his last campaign.
What better poster child could there be for real campaign finance reform? [posted 11:40 am]
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WHAT WE KNEW AND WHEN WE KNEW IT. The New York Times' James Risen has a must-read piece that's a kind of follow-up to this article from last week. The new article discusses Congress's effort to stop, backtrack, and figure out how the heck we were caught by surprise on September 11, 2001. It's clear now that we had many signals, going from
1998 all the way to September 10, 2001, that something was in the works. When you read the piece, the overwhelming sense you get is that the intelligence apparatus simply wasn't prepared, intellectually or bureaucratically, to take this threat seriously. (The Times fingers the FBI and its failures in particular, and though the author doesn't make much of it, let's remember that this was Louis Freeh's FBI.) [posted 11:25 am]
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BE GLAD YOU AREN'T AN IRAQI. Otherwise you'd have to have these kinds of
pictures of Saddam stuck on every wall on your house. Also of interest (though on a completely different topic): Geitner Simmons notes that "the resemblance between the rap culture's emphasis on hyper-sensitivity to imagined slights, and the hair-trigger resort to violence in the face of 'disrespect,' bears an uncanny resemblance to the values system of the antebellum Southern aristocracy, with its support of dueling and fixation on defending one's 'honor.'" We wish we had thought of that. (Both via InstaPundit.) [posted 10:55 am]
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Wednesday, September 18
Cynthia McKinney is gone. But now she's teamed up with some of her comrades on the crypto-left -- our old friends, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. The latest issue of CounterPunch reprints McKinney's remarks at a reception of the Congressional Black Caucus, at which she engaged in some more of the odious conspiracy-theorizing that convinced voters in Georgia to toss her
out. [posted 4:00 pm]
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DEMOCRATS, FEAR NOT. Alex Bolton of The Hill points out what should be obvious to fraidy-cat Democrats: Iraq is not a big issue in the minds of voters. Local issues are still key. Why exactly can't the Democrats have a two-tiered campaign -- a Washington debate and a congressional strategy that are separate? But even if the public did focus on a war on Iraq, it isn't clear that would hurt the Democrats. The New York Times' Tom Friedman debunks the myth of public support for the war here. Not authoritatively, we should point out, but anecdotallly -- and convincingly.
P.S. Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune also points out the obvious: Bush has done a major turnaround on Iraq policy. [posted 1:35 pm]
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SNUFFING THE CANDLE IN THE DARK. Have we said or written before that the Bush administration could give a damn about scientific expertise? Yes, we probably have. Well, the ignominy continues. [posted 1:00 pm]
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THE LIE THAT KEEPS ON LYING. Brendan Nyhan reports in Salon that the NEA Big Lie -- that is, right-wing slur that the group urged teachers not to blame al-Qaeda for 9/11 -- continues to move through the
commentariat. Ellen Sorokin, the Washington Times "reporter"/provacteur who wrote the original story, should really be ashamed. But so should Washington
Times managing editor Francis Coombs (who told Nyhan that the paper stands behind the story) and the blundering, overrated U.S. News columnist John Leo, who cited it in a September 9th piece and on Lou Dobbs' "Moneyline" a few days earlier. And we should also note that George Will, who recently made such a big stink about Howell Raines's supposed manipulations at The New York Times, has not bothered to retract his own endorsement of the bogus Washington Times story. [posted 12:55 pm]
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NEW CONTENT. We've just posted four articles: a defense of the U.S. News & World Report college rankings by TAP Online editor Richard Just; a piece on how competition among colleges isn't necessarily benefiting students by David L. Kirp and Jeffrey T. Holman; an Ellen S. Miller article on why progressives are increasingly turning to initiatives; and the cover story from our latest issue, a look at the state of anti-corporate activism by Nick Penniman. Enjoy. [posted 10:50 am]
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MAYBE WE BACK DOWN TOO FAST. In response to reader D.M.'s complaint that all sitcoms are about cityslickers, reader K.H. sends in the following tounge-in-cheek suggestions for television shows about non-city slickers:
1. Drama set in hospital emergency room in Illinois.2. Sitcom about a spunky young single woman in Minnesota.
3. Animated show about a family in an unidentified midwestern state.
4. Sitcom about a sheriff in a small Southern town and his son.
5. Sitcom about a psychologist in Illinois.
6. Sitcom starring an acerbic comedienne as the mother of a working-class family in a medium-size midwestern city.
7. Late night variety show hosted by a Nebraskan.
Well, those aren't all sitcoms. And "E.R." takes place in Chicago, which is solidly Blue America. But you get the point. When you think about it, Red America isn't exactly ignored by the entertainment industry. [posted 10:30 am]
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Tuesday, September 17 Tapped got a lot of good mail on our Guilty Coastal Cityslicker Elite vs. Guilty Southern White Boy post. First things first: There are apparently several Checkers in Washington, D.C.. (Funny, though -- none in Georgetown!) Also, USA Today doesn't come out on Sundays. So, reader, insert whatever Southern regional franchise you want in place of Checkers, swap Reader's Digest for USA Today, and swap Sunday for whatever day Reader's Digest comes out on. You get the point. On to the substantive stuff. Reader E.S. writes:
Judis and Teixeira are concerned with a national coalition: what policies or issues can translate into a long-term Democratic-populist majority in Congress and the White House. I think they're right -- but local elections have always been different. The centrist platform that will win the country couldn't get you elected dog-catcher in Helena, Montana -- yet the Dem Senate is only possible with the help of Max Baucus.The strongest parts of the Democratic party right now, based on electoral success, are not the most liberal. In Georgia, Alabama, and across the Deep South, Democrats enjoy strong Congressional and statehouse presence, frequently controlling one if not both houses, governorships, and senate seats. Yet the Democrats in these seats are much more conservative than Republicans from New England -- Zell Miller and John Breaux are still to the right of Jim Jeffords. For them, the NASCAR-hunting-and-barbecue strategy is a crucial predicate to any serious discussion of economic issues, right-to-work repeal, race, or poverty.
Tapped believes that the Democrats must be competitive in the South at the local level, including congressional elections, and that for every Zell Miller ticking off liberals there's a George Pataki ticking off conservatives. But that doesn't answer the question of whether the party should, as Miller argues, orient itself to win in the South and Mountain West. Miller is a good example of the following quandry: What good does it do the Democrats for the Millers of the South to have "credibility" on economic issues when their support for Bush's tax cut pre-empts traditional kinds of Democratic economic interventionism?
Perhaps the empirical question is whether, as Democratic-trending "blue" areas grow and amass a majority of the nation's House seats, Democrats will still need to rely on their Southern conservative colleagues as much to move policy. (We mustn't forget, though, that Wyoming will always have two Senate seats no matter how much its population shrinks -- a fact of constitutional life that guarantees the Mountain West disproportionate power in American life.) We would love to see Judis and Teixeira match up the ideoloposises with the congressional and electoral maps, and figure out how their growth translates into actual distribution of political power.
Reader D.M. opines:
I suppose I am a GSWB, since I'm from Georgia, and I'm a liberal, and since I was a little boy I have been deeply ashamed of slavery, segregation and Lester Maddox (in case you are too young to remember him, he was the segregationist governor of Georgia immediately before the election of that prototype GSWB, Jimmy Carter).But I must protest your little bit of big-city provincialism. How many sitcoms were set in the New York City area? Off the top of my head, in recent years, we have "Seinfeld", "The King of Queens", "Mad About You", "Friends", "Spin City" in addition to "Sex in the City". Going back a ways, we have "Taxi", "Barney Miller", "The Dick Van Dyke Show", "The Honeymooners", "I Love Lucy". I would say that we red-staters have had quite a lot of exposure to sophisticated big-city life. In contrast, what do New Yorkers know about southerners and midwesterners? "Beverly Hillbillies", "The Dukes of Hazzard" and "The 700 Club" are not really very representative.
No doubt urban cosmopolitan culture is dominant in the sitcom world. (Tapped believes, for instance, that "Will & Grace" has accomplished more for gay equality in America in a couple of years than the Human Rights Campaign has in its entire history -- not because HRC are goofs, but because pop culture is a far more effective vector for the transmission of cosmopolitan values than politics. "Will & Grace" is why the religious right is slowly losing the culture war.) Yet somehow, when it comes to the political debate over Red America and Blue America, there's an assumption, especially on the right, that it is Blue America that needs to pay more attention to Red America -- or that Red America is the authentic culture, Blue America the corrupted one. We want to know why.
Finally, Mark Smith of Flyover Country says:
Well, now, hold the phone, there, city slicker. For starters, not everybody here in Flyover Country knows or cares about NASCAR, or watches The 700 Club. The cultural landscape is a little more chaotic than that. Some of us actually read The American Prospect or even The New Yorker, which I'm guessing disqualifies us from true Bubba status in the eyes of City Mice.And:
The thing that bothered me most about this article is that they chose to single out the egregiously pointless NASCAR and The 700 Club as if they typified popular rural culture.
Hey, we're not coming up these examples. The apostles of Bubba culture -- Zell Miller, Steve Jarding, Mudcat Saunders, and, er, Andrew Sullivan -- are. [posted 3:40 pm]
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DUH. There is just so little question that Al Gore is going to run again in 2004 that we don't know why his spokespeople even bother to deny it. All part of the game, we guess. [posted 3:25 pm]
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KARL ROVE'S BRAND NEW BAG. Remember how Karl Rove used to tell reporters that George Bush was going to be the next William McKinley? That is, that Bush was a GOP prez who would foresee America's coming economic transformation (from an agricultural to an industrial economy then, and from an industrial economy to an information-based one today) and use that insight to build a new Republican majority that could endure for decades? It was never a very robust argument, even when Rove bothered to elaborate, which he almost never did. But now he's got a new paradigm, baby! According to the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, Rove "has invited historian Robert Remini to lecture senior officials at the White House Thursday on similarities between Bush and [Andrew] Jackson," the nation's seventh president:
Jackson clashed with Congress and the judiciary as he sought to build the president's power. Opponents accused him of eliminating civil liberties and cartoonists portrayed him as King Andrew. The Bush administration has battled with Congress over intelligence sharing and war powers, and with the judiciary over the rights of the accused.
Well, at least Rove doesn't have delusions of grandeur or anything. Kudos to Milbank for stating the obvious:
Superficially, such a comparison is absurd. Jackson led a populist revolt against concentrated wealth in undoing the Bank of the United States; Bush is closely allied with corporate interests. Jackson lost a disputed election in 1824 to the son of a former president; Bush, as son of a former president, won such a disputed election. Jackson was an uneducated war hero and father of the Democratic Party. Bush, of Andover, Yale, Harvard and the Texas National Guard, came to office in hopes of imitating McKinley, who defeated Jacksonian style populism in building the modern Republican Party a century ago.
Next up: Rove discerns a new model for Bush -- Herbert Hoover. [posted 3:15 pm]
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OKAY, SO MAYBE SHE DOES READ TAPPED. Looks like Janet Reno is going to concede to Bill McBride today. Onward -- to brother Jeb. [posted 3:05 pm]
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WHY BOB GREENE SHOULD BE REINSTATED. It's amazing to Tapped that Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene was asked to resign by his editor, Ann Marie Lipinski. Let's cut through all the hype for a second and ask what he did that was unethical. Tapped certainly doesn't think much of a man Greene's age (55) shacking up with a woman described as "in her late teens." But it's not illegal. The woman was of the age of legal consent. That makes it Greene's life and his business, not the Tribune's.
Lipinski's editor's note says Greene met her in "connection with his newspaper column." That's a little
vague, but the story has become clearer: According to the Post, "Greene wrote about the woman in his column, asked her to dinner and had a sexual encounter with her." We hate to say it, but this situation doesn't strike Tapped as shockingly unethical. We'd wager that Greene wasn't the first journalist to try something like that and he won't be the last. [posted 11:00 am]
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Monday, September 16 The overriding annoyance in Bai's piece (see previous post) is his Guilty Coastal Cityslicker Elitist problem. The "G.C.C.E." is the opposite of Mickey Kaus's G.S.W.B. (Guilty Southern White Boy). Whereas the G.S.W.B. overcompensates for being from the South by being excessively liberal on race, the G.C.C.E. overcompensates for not being a Southern country boy by being excessively solicitous of Bubba culture, even though there's no earthly reason why Bubba culture is more virtuous or authentic than coastal urban culture. For instance, even though he's a Brit, Andrew Sullivan is a born G.C.C.E., yammering on in his blog about the decadent coatal elites and extolling the virtues of the heartland while summering in Provincetown and displaying not the slightest urge to actually live in, say, Laramie, Wyoming. Tapped believes G.C.C.E. are actually far more condescending to the Bubbas than any Upper West Sider, since the latter are at least honest about their preference for Zabar's and the U.S. Open.
Bai certainly has a bit of G.C.C.E. syndrome going. But he's not that bad. By way of comparison, the worst offender is the G.C.C.E. category last year was David Brook. In his shockingly bad Atlantic Monthly article, titled "One Nation, Slightly Divisible," Brooks -- a conservative who lives in Bethesda, Maryland but whose heart is apparently in Kansas -- wrote:
Sixty-five miles from where I am writing this sentence is a place with no Starbucks, no Pottery Barn, no Borders or Barnes & Noble. No blue New York Times delivery bags dot the driveways on Sunday mornings. In this place people don't complain that Woody Allen isn't as funny as he used to be, because they never thought he was funny. In this place you can go to a year's worth of dinner parties without hearing anyone quote an aperçu he first heard on Charlie Rose. The people here don't buy those little rear-window stickers when they go to a summer-vacation spot so that they can drive around with "MV" decals the rest of the year; for the most part they don't even go to Martha's Vineyard.
Well sure. And sixty-five miles from that place, back here in Washington, D.C., is a place with no K-Mart, no Checkers, and no gun stores. No USA Today bags dot the driveways on Sunday mornings. In this place nobody complains that Jeff Foxworthy isn't as funny as he used to be, because they never thought he was funny in the first place. In this place you can go to a year's worth of barbecues without hearing a Hillary joke first heard on Rush Limbaugh's show. And for the most part people here don't head to Branson, Missouri for the summer.
Our point is that in this rural-urban dialectic, it's always assumed that the urban folks are supposed to pay homage to the rural folks -- that we should know all about Dale Earnhardt. Well, screw that. We're half
the country, too! How about this? If they watch "Sex and the City," we'll watch "The 700 Club." Maybe. [posted 5:15 pm]
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ALSO FROM THE TIMES MAGAZINE. Matt Bai has an interesting article on Steve Jarding and Mudcat Saunders, two Democratic consultants who are experts on the Bubba vote. Bai's piece approaches the "should-Democrats-focus-on-rural-areas?" debate as a profile of these two men. It's a fascinating piece, and it hits some points along the way that liberals should ponder. For instance, Bai argues that the Jarding-Saunders strategy -- sponsor NASCAR entries, commission bluegrass songs, and in general appeal to the folkways of Southern life -- was essential to the victory of Mark Warner in Virginia:
Once Warner shed the image of a Washington Democrat, he was able to talk to voters in the more remote southern part of the state about their economic crisis: namely, a disappearing job base that forces children to leave home in search of education or work. Rural voters responded enthusiastically.
Bai's got a point. But is this a model for other Dems? The big question, after all, is how many elections the Democrats will really need to win in rural states over the next decade or so. Bai notes this, saying that "some Democratic strategists believe that since rural areas are shrinking anyway, the party shouldn't waste critical resources appealing to them." But then he brushes it off by saying that "It's not an especially convincing argument; much of that fading rural population is relocating not to suburbs but to the fast-growing ''exurbs''...which often retain a rural sensibility, and which tilted heavily for Bush in 2000."
That's not very convincing. The questions Bai doesn't answer are: a) What percentage of exurbs tilt Republican; b) How long do they stay that way in the face of suburbanization; and c) How do they stack up against John Judis and Ruy Teixiera's "ideopolises," described in this article, which vote Democratic, have the highest absolute growth in the country, and accounted for 43 percent of the country in 2000 alone? [posted 5:05 pm]
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THROWING LIKE A GIRL. Don't miss Charles McGrath article on Title IX, which he rightly calls "one of those rare pieces of legislation that are so truly transforming and, by and large, so clearly beneficial that you would have thought they no longer need to be defended." McGrath ducks the broader debate -- conservatives argue that it's wrong for schools to have to
downsize men's teams to make room for women's teams (Title IX requires parity of spending) -- but brings up an interesting point: Female jocks are beginning to have the same academic profile as male jocks. Uh-oh. [posted 3:35 pm]
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THE AMNESTY SEDUCTION. Tamar Jacoby, in The New York Times, tries a new tack in the debate over immigration and security. Unlike most opponents of immigration reform -- the National Immigration Forum, La Raza, the Chamber of Commerce, the Cato Institute, and others -- Jacoby concedes that the border security bill passed in May is basically a good thing. Likewise, she concedes that:
Other measures enacted in the past year look sensible on paper but, given the size of the immigrant population, may be all but impossible to implement. It makes sense in theory, for example, to track whether those who come here as students are actually studying. It sounds reasonable in the abstract to check that all those who enter the country on temporary visas leave when they say they will, to ask that noncitizens report to the government when they change their addresses and to make sure that aliens without proper papers do not get driver's licenses. It's also hard to see what's wrong with the federal government enlisting local police departments to enforce immigration law.The problem is that the Immigration and Naturalization Service can't hope to follow through on many of these measures. (Imagine it trying to process change-of-address cards from the millions of foreign-born people who move each year, for example.) Not only do several of these initiatives place undue burdens on hardworking, law-abiding immigrants, but if they were enforced across the board all would run aground among the vast illegal population -- an estimated eight million people -- who would only clog the enforcement process, draining precious resources that ought to be directed at tracking down terrorists.
Jacoby is either naive or very wily. Let's dispel a few myths, first. Not only does it make sense in theory to track foreign students and temporary visitors, it is entirely possible, as a prototype system developed after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 showed. The start-up costs are significant, but the size of the population being tracked isn't really the biggest hurdle -- it's making sure the data entry is comprehensive and as automated as possible. (For instance, credit-card-sized visas that you would swipe through a Customs reader at the airport.) As proponents of such systems like to point out, if Wal-Mart can track precisely the millions of products that fly off its shelves every day, why can't the INS track visitors to the U.S.?
Well, they could. But the forces arrayed against better immigration regulation have expended a great deal of time and energy over the past several years subverting bureaucratic reforms that would make such tracking possible. (They
tried to kill the legislation that Jacoby speaks so highly of, among many other things.) And you can bet that if the INS instead tried to use a kind of selective racial profiling to single out terrorists, they would raise
another hue and cry. This is why we suspect Jacoby of being a wolf in sheep's clothing. Instead of one big system that tracks everyone and doesn't discriminate -- which would stop German visa overstayers as well as Saudi-born terrorists -- she wants to implement a system that is bound to offend a much wider array of interest groups and doom itself to failure, while mothballing much more promising efforts. [posted 2:50 pm]
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DON'T MISS. The new Boston Globe Sunday ideas section, especially this very important essay by Michael Berube on Democrats, the left, and Iraq. We like this concluding note: "The challenge, clearly, is to learn how to be strenuously anti-imperialist without being indiscriminately antiwar. It is a lesson the American left has never had to learn -- until now." [posted 10:00 am]
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HUH? Okay, The Nation seems to have redone their website and added weblogs. Only, er, they're not like any weblogs Tapped has every seen. They don't, for example, have any links. (See also here and here.) What gives? Something tells us the blogosphere isn't going to like this new and passing strange riff on blogging very much. [posted 10:00 am]
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Note: This section is currently a work in progress.....
Altercation: Eric Alterman has the best-named blog we know -- and the content's great too.
Instapundit: Glenn Reynolds is blogging's 800 pound gorilla.
The Nation: Bizarre link-less blogs. Weirder than naked mole rats!
What is "Tapped"? Click here to find out.
Tapped Archives: Click here for all the crazy things we've said in the past.
E-mail Tapped: tapped@prospect.org
Permanent Link: www.prospect.org/current/tapped (right click to bookmark)
