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Mon, May 27 | Tues, May 28 | Wed, May 29 | Thurs, May 30 | Fri, May 31 |Sat, June 1 | Sun, June 2
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Friday, May 31 BONO AND O'NEILL ON TOUR. "Caught between a rock star and a hard place" is how Paul Krugman puts the dilemma that Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill is in. That hard place is Washington, where Republicans and Democrats alike would rather help the rich stay richer than divert a trickle of U.S. aid to Africa. (The latest: CNN reports that 10 million people are on the brink of starvation in southern Africa.) Here's the summary of his argument.So here are our priorities. Faced with a proposal that would save the lives of eight million people every year, many of them children, we balk at the cost. But when asked to give up revenue equal to twice that cost, in order to allow each of 3,300 lucky families to collect its full $16 million inheritance rather than a mere $10 million, we don't hesitate.
The Bush Administration's policy on this outrageous, and certainly not in America's best interests abroad. [posted 4:35 pm]
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GRAHAM'S CRACKERS, PART II. Yesterday the auto companies won and we lost. What's particularly disturbing about this fight is that even the regulatory body -- The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration -- first proposed a rule that would have better protected consumers. But it was rejected by the powers-that-be at the White House (read: a little-known, all-powerful bureaucrat named John Graham at OMB). Public Citizen is threatening court action. [posted 4:35 pm]
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TWO SMART PIECES IN THE FORWARD. One, an editorial, takes Amnesty International to task for its recent report on human rights abuses. (Tapped agrees with The Forward -- Amnesty is right on the details, but wrong on the big picture.) The other concerns internal disputes at Patton, Boggs over the lobbying shop's P.R. work for Saudi Arabia. [posted 4:10 pm]
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RIGHT-WING CLIPPING SERVICE ®, BUDDY! Jonathan Garthwaite wants the name for his promos. We had it first! We were actually referring to ourselves as the right-wing clipping service, since Tapped spends a fair amount of time each day scrolling through TownHall.com's dreary ranks of syndicated ideological hacks looking for outlandish punditry. Anyway, it's not Debbie Schlussel's attack on the WNBA per se that mystifies us, Jonathan. (Although the WNBA isn't really a "social experiment." It's a business -- a relatively new one. The NBA struggled, once, too.) It's the way Schlussel inflicts her own weird obsessions with Hillary Clinton, Gloria Steinem, Louis Farrakhan, the first names of black women, and lesbians onto a poor, innocent sports league. As Cliff Clavin might say, "What's up with that?" [posted 2:25 pm]
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A NICE QUICK TAKE ON LIBERTARIANISM. From Chris Bertram over at Junius. (Charles Dodgson has some thoughts, too.) Tapped once spent three days at a Cato Institute retreat at the Rancho Bernardo Inn near San Diego. We came away with the view that libertarianism -- especially the Ayn Randian kind -- is the Scientology of politics: If you accept the premises, it all makes perfect sense. Kind of like Dianetics. Certainly the Cato conferees seemed liked cultists. When Tapped told one of them we sorta believed in gun control, he turned to us, glared menacingly, and said "You're either ignorant, or evil. And either way, I'm going to take steps to protect myself against you." [posted 1:55 pm]
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THE BEST ROUNDUP YET OF THE STUDENT TRACKING DEBACLE... Is now available on Talking Points Memo. Josh Marshall does a better job of summarizing this stuff than the author of the original piece did! Check it out. [posted 1:25 pm]
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NRO, SAVING SILBERMAN. We're glad the folks from National Review Online read Tapped so closely. We're not surprised that they would want to defend the political activities of Judge Laurence Silberman. We'd expect nothing less. We did inadvertently misidentify the court on which Judge Silberman sits -- the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Maybe that's why Jonathan Adler had trouble figuring out that Silberman is still on the court. Sure, he has senior status, but so what? He's still hearing cases. David Brock can be fairly challenged on his credibility, but Silberman has a long and detailed record of engaging in inappropriate partisan activity while on the bench. Check out this 1998 Salon.com piece by Jonathan Broder for the full indictment. [posted 12:50 pm]
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YOGI BERRA AND THE FEC. Campaign finance officiandos must be experiencing a sense of deja vu all over again. The new regulations advanced by the Federal Election Commission under the new campaign finance law are filled with design flaws and lawmakers and reformers aren't hesitating to say it. You might recall that we wouldn't have had a soft money problem in the first place if the very same Commission hadn't written it into a 1979 regulation. [posted 11:45 am]
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THE POLL NUMBERS NEXT TIME. The Brookings Institution reported yesterday that the public's faith in government has declined sharply in recent months. Now only 40 percent of Americans say they trust the government to do what's right at least most of the time. (This is down 17 points from the finding in October.) Report co-author G. Galvin MacKenzie, a professor at Colby College in Maine, said "When government is trusted, it has broad latitude to take bold actions. When trust is low...everything is a harder sell for leaders." This should make it more difficult for Bush and his henchman in Congress to push through certain end of session goodies -- particularly the permanent repeal of the estate tax. And we also expect to see a slide in Bush's poll numbers. [posted 11:35 am]
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PROSPICIENCE. We didn't have a clue how to pronounce it or what it meant -- or even how to spell it -- but that's the word the 13 year Pratyush Buddiga of Colorado Springs, CO spelled correctly to win the national Spelling Bee. (It means "the act of looking forward.") But that word seems rather easy compared to the other ones that this kid worked his way through: tergiversation, deuterogamy, grobian, thremmatology, amole, oubliette, troching, repoussage and paraclete. We don't have a clue what they mean either. And if there are spelling errors here, you know why. [posted 11:00 am]
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HOW IS ANDREW SULLIVAN LIKE A CREATIONIST? When he believes something, or doesn't believe something, he isn't about to let empirical evidence get in his way. Can someone please tell this guy that that incredulity is not an argument? First, he did it with Geoffrey Nunberg's meticulous study of media bias, writing, "I ignored Geoffrey Nunberg's piece in the American Prospect in April, debunking the notion of liberal media bias by numbers, because it so flew in the face of what I knew that I figured something had to be wrong." And now, he's doing the same thing with our web traffic figures: "I'm not saying they're fibbing. They may be flubbing. But I don't believe it."
Andrew, why didn't you just ask us to explain the numbers to you? We would have been happy to. Indeed, if you'd like to examine our traffic reports yourself, provided by Wusage, you're welcome to come by any time. As for the question of "hits": Wusage doesn't provide unique users totals for Tapped or any of our article pages, it only provides them for the entire site. But by "hits" we meant "accesses," which is defined as "A request for a single document or other object on your web server."
At any rate, what Sullivan's really questioning is our monthly unique users figure, which Wusage does provide. The figure for May 1 through yesterday is 428,848. [posted 10:25 am]
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Thursday, May 30 ARI FLEISCHER MEGA-EDITION. Sometimes a fellow journalist performs an act of public service so profound you are left weeping with admiration. In this case, the journalist is Jonathan Chait, and the service was poring through what looks to have been hundreds of pages of White House press briefing transcripts to produce this taxonomy of Ari Fleischer's particular approaches to lying. (He has many.) Read it. And weep. Ron Ziegler's got nuthin' on this guy. [posted 4:45 pm]
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...he did not recuse himself, even though, as I said, he had been directly involved [in efforts to discredit Clinton]. I think it's clear that the kind of activity that Silberman was engaging in is not permitted. It falls into a category of the kind of partisan politics that's not permitted. And he was aware of this, because he would jokingly say to me that, when I would go to him for advice, he often started out saying something like well, it would be improper to advise you on this. And it was set [sic] sort of tongue-in-cheek, and then he would go ahead and advise me. So he was aware of what he was doing.
Silberman's still a sitting judge. Where's an impeachment committee when we really need it? [posted 1:30 pm]
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A MAN OF PRINCIPLE. Peter Edelman, who resigned in protest from the Clinton administration over the 1996 welfare law, had a very thoughtful Times op-ed yesterday on how people are really doing under the so-called reform. So good that we Tapped it a day late:
One story is of the women who found jobs...and the other is about those who are worse off. The latter are a remarkably large group; on any given day, something like 40 percent of former welfare recipients, or well over a million women, have no job, an indication of the 1996 law's failure as policy. The women who found work are the basis for the claim that the 1996 law is a huge success, but even there, one has to ask whether their families have escaped from poverty and what will happen to them if the current recession lasts...Employment of never-married mothers shot up, although that did not necessarily mean they escaped from poverty. (Today they make an average of just under $8 an hour working about 35 hours a week, which would add up to around $14,000 annually.) The earned-income tax credit helped a lot, adding about $4,000 to the income of a minimum-wage worker with two children. But averages are deceiving. If your job was, for example, a 20-hour position as a school crossing guard for $107 a week, or if you kept cycling in and out of jobs, you and your children were still threatened with homelessness and hunger. The main lesson of the 1996 law is that having a job and earning a livable income are two different things.
These are things to keep in mind, senators, as you deliberate on this bill. [posted 1:00 pm]
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MORE FROM THE RIGHT-WING CLIPPING SERVICE. Reader D.B. alerted us to the latest column from radical Islam/professional sports expert Debbie Schlussel. This one is supposed to be about the WNBA, but it reads more like a transcript of whatever bizzare thoughts are running through her head -- sort of like Larry King, only Clinton-obsessive instead of senile. We're not quite sure to make of it. Why the obsession with the WNBA's "bearded ladies" and "muscular, butch giantesses," Debbie? [posted 11:25 am]
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DICK CHENEY AND HALLIBURTON. Reader B.B. sends in the following thought, a handy follow-the-bouncing-ball guide to the coverage you will see in the next few weeks:
1) As CEO, Cheney would have signed all Securities and Exchange Commission reports containing the possibly fraudulent financial statements.[posted 11:25 am]2) Any overstatement of Halliburton profits would have increased the value of Cheney's stock options and other incentive compensation at Halliburton.
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THE WORST. You may recall that on Monday we looked at the Toxics Release Inventory of the biggest polluting industries. Today there's another report out on the biggest polluters. This one is from the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, which was set up under NAFTA, and compares overall pollution in 1999 to the previous five years. No real surprises here -- Texas was at the top of this list. Interestingly, the report lists some of the facilities with the largest amount of carcinogenic releases: "the Kennecott Holdings Corp. copper smelter in Magna, Utah; an Elementis Inc. chromium facility in Corpus Christi, Texas; Chemical Waste Management of the Northwest Inc. in Arlington, Ore.; Occidental Chemical Corp. in Castle Hayne, N.C.; and a Monsanto facility in Luling, La." [posted 11:20 am]
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FIRE ME, PLEASE. The struggling energy company Dynegy, which once tried to acquire Enron, just dumped its CEO Charles L. Watson with a severance check that was $33 million more than he would have made if the company had allowed him to finish out his contract. The total amount of money he made as CEO is beyond Tapped's ability to calculate. [posted 11:15 am]
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TODAY'S FUNNY. Adam Felber has the chapter titles to Katherine Harris' new book. [posted 10:25 am]
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PARDON OUR CYNICISM. We think environmental activist Philip Clapp got it just right about the recent political showmanship by President Bush down in the Everglades yesterday. The government is going to spend $115 million to buy back oil and gas leases about 30 miles off the coast of Pensacola and $120 million to retire mineral rights in the Big Cypress National Preserve, something Clapp called "a $235 million campaign contribution to the Re-Elect Jeb Bush Committee, courtesy of US taxpayers." Bush's action is counter to the entire thrust of the administration, which has been to undermine environmental laws and regulations at every turn. [posted 10:10 am]
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PITT INVESTIGATES CHENEY. This is one we are going to stay on top of. Seems like Dick Cheney's old company, Halliburton, is under investigation by Harvey Pitt's SEC for "aggressive" accounting practices that allowed the company to postpone possible losses of hundreds of millions of dollars without telling their investors. This all occurred under then-CEO and now Veep Dick Cheney's watch. The Times reports that current and former company employees said that Cheney was a "hands-off executive" who left the daily management to a former Arthur Andersen partner -- David Lesar -- who was Cheney's number two. Tapped is seeing some patterns here. [posted 10:00 am]
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WE'RE (BASICALLY) ACCUSED OF LYING. About our web traffic numbers, no less. (Scroll down or search for "TAP.") Based on any evidence? Well, just the fact that when Tapped makes fun of Townhall.com columnists, not many of your readers follow the links that we provide; whereas when the National Review Online links to Townhall a lot more people do. Um, that makes sense, actually, given that NRO both has much higher traffic and is probably praising the columns a lot more, since both sites are conservative. But anyway, for the record, here are The American Prospect Online's numbers of unique readers from May 1-May 29: 414,250. So, we will either reach or come close to 450,000 this month, which was the number the Columbia Journalism Review published and that Eric Alterman cited yesterday. (We have been both below and above 450,000 in recent months.) Those numbers, incidentally, are for our entire site, not just for Tapped. It seems that for the month of May so far, Tapped has received about 70,000 hits. Once again, we thank all of our readers. [posted 9:45 am]
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OUR MAN MUSHARRAF. He sounds a lot like our man Arafat, according to Salman Rushdie in today's New York Times: Tapped doesn't think we've been hearing enough of this back story lately. [posted 9:10 am]Mr. Sharif, too, had much to gain from war fever -- fed by the various Muslim terrorist groups operating in Kashmir. The hawkish Pakistani general then responsible for communicating with and training those terrorist groups was one Pervez Musharraf. (By the way -- just so we're clear on who Mr. Musharraf, now Pakistan's president, really is -- some of these groups were almost certainly sent by Pakistan's intelligence service to Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan.) When Nawaz Sharif succumbed to American pressure and promised to rein in the terrorists, General Musharraf was furious. A few months later he overthrew Mr. Sharif in a coup and seized power.
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VISIT SALON. Why? Because they seem to actually realize that the World Cup starts tomorrow, and, U.S. myopia notwithstanding, they've put it on the cover of their site. Tapped will be rising early tomorrow morning to watch the first match, France v. Senegal. And yes, we might also watch the NBA Playoffs tomorrow night. If we're not too sleepy. [posted 8:35 am]
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TAPPED THROWS UP OUR HANDS IN DESPAIR. What else can one say about Ann Coulter at this point? She's been denounced, criticized, fired, parodied -- none of it seems to work. She keeps coming back with more and more ridiculous and offensive columns. At this point, there's just one thing left to do -- quote. From her latest column:
[Transportation Security Agency head John Magaw's] other airline safety improvement was to reject the idea of a "trusted traveler" program, which would allow passengers to avoid three-hour airport security lines after submitting to an intrusive background check by the government. As reported by The New York Times, Magaw spurned the trusted traveler idea on the ground that "he is not sure who could safely be given the card."I don't know, how about ... NO ARABS? (Religion-of-Peace Update: As they prepare to stone a rape victim to death in Pakistan, the latest suicide bombing in Israel claimed the lives of a 70-year-old woman and her 18-month old granddaughter.)
From this we gather that Coulter still doesn't understand that not all Arabs are Muslims and not all Muslims are Arabs. [posted 8:20 am]
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COHEN ON CLONING. The strong arguments in favor of the cloning of human embryos for research continue this morning with Richard Cohen's Washington Post column -- the only weakness of which, as far as Tapped can see, is his incorrect description of former president Gerald Ford as pro-life. What's great about Cohen's column is that he comes out and states the obvious: That the cloning fight is simply the abortion battle in a different form. Or, perhaps, the battle for freedom of inquiry:
But [Brownback's] bill is nothing less than an attempt to impose a religious doctrine on the rest of us. It is not that far removed from the Vatican's attempt to silence Galileo because he supported the Copernican theory that the earth revolved around the sun. It is an attempt by legislative fiat to stop science in its tracks: Thou Shalt Remain Ignorant.
Must read. [posted 7:55 am]
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Wednesday, May 29 SPEAKING OF MICHAEL KELLY. Eric Alterman has also picked up on Kelly's latest column. (And our circ figures -- thanks!) Looking through the column again, we note that the intrepid Kelly has once again attempted to answer the following question: How many angry letters can I generate with 1) A surfeit of edgy-sounding riffs designed to take up column-inches without really saying anything ("We are now entered into a serious time, a time of protracted conflict"); 2) A sprinkling of straw men (Noam Chomsky again, Mike? But Nader is just begging for it!); and 3) A minimum of reportorial effort (Tapped's sources at National Journal have previously regaled us with tales of Kelly drafting assistant editors for Lexis duty an hour before his Post deadline). We're told Kelly, who is top dog at both The Atlantic and National Journal, is a great editor, although we don't know what he sees in P.J. O'Rourke. But there's nothing more annoying than a newspaper columnist phoning it in. Tapped hates to play Kelly's game, but the man needs his own Watchblog. We nominate Alterman, who's pretty much performing this dreary-but-useful service already. [posted 3:15 pm] THE CHURCH IN CRISIS. When the May issue of the Catholic magazine Crisis (www.crisismagazine.com) arrivedon Tapped's doorstep, we were surprised that the current crisis in the Catholic Church didn't make the cover. Still, we gave Crisis the benefit of the doubt and chalked it up to their production schedule. But lo and behold, June's issue of Crisis arrived today, and its cover still only devotes a few words in the bottom corner to "The Sex-Abuse Scandal" that has made front-page headlines in all the nation's major newspapers. What does Crisis have to say about the scandal? "The crisis is mostly, however, about active homosexuals in thepriesthood." The magazine's free e-letter elaborates on this point in great detail: blame the gays, not the church. This is lame beyond belief. So, Tapped has a few questions it would like Crisis to investigate, if it wants to live up to its name. Namely: Do you really think conservative Catholics can keep blaming the current scandal on eternally damned, sinful homos? Isn't there anything wrong with the Church trying to absolve itself of blame at all costs? Has there been no abuse of priestly authority? No taking advantage of naively trusting children? If a Catholic magazine called Crisis can't address this matter, then God help us all. [posted 3:20 pm]
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YUCKING IT UP. We liked the headline on this piece about the bind that Nevada Republican Senator John Ensign finds himself in when it come to defending his constituents' interests in the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage fight. Sounds like Ensign's armed with lots of facts and figures, and that he might even be making some headway with his Senate colleagues. We hope so. This is a bad idea whose time has not come. [posted 12:40 pm]
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AND WE JUST PAY MORE. A new study by the health insurance industry has come up with some startling findings: Most drugs approved by the FDA in the 1990s were not terribly innovative; and only 15 percent were medicines that provided for significant clinical improvements and used new active ingredients. Yet the drug companies are fond of claiming that they are entitled to charge such outrageous prices because high profit margins help fund their "innovative" research. We'll remember this study next time we hear that. [posted 12:30 pm]
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HAS HE COMPLETELY LOST IT? Brent Bozell says The New York Times intimidated George W. Bush with its gay agenda, perpetuated by Frank Bruni, Rick Berke, and others. We're not kidding; here's one astonishing quotation:
When George W. Bush campaigned in 2000, trailed daily by openly gay reporter Frank Bruni, and also analyzed by openly gay national correspondent Rick Berke, what effect did that have on how he handled homosexuality on the stump? One could argue it thoroughly intimidated him. He barely mentioned it then, and he's barely touched on it up to this day.
Take it away, Andrew Sullivan. [posted 9:50 am]
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HOW MANY TIMES DO WE HAVE TO SAY IT? Sacagawea wasn't a "guide" to the Lewis & Clark expedition! Take heed, John McCaslin. [posted 9:45 am]
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SHAKEN-UP, NOT STEERED. That the FBI has had serious organizational challenges is no surprise to anyone who's followed its adventures either in the short term or the long term. But the agency doesn't just need an organizational shake-up, more agents, and more high-tech computers. It needs an attitude adjustment. Like, for example, every agent and every administration person from top to bottom asking themselves every morning: "Hey, what's our job?" So please forgive us for being a bit skeptical about the ambitious "reorganization" pronoucements we are going to hear today from Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller. [posted 9:25 am]
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THE EDUCATION PRESIDENT. Bush's education reform legislation is now being used to lend credence to the ridiculous notion of "equal time" in the classroom for the unscientific hogwash known as "intelligent design" -- the latest covert Creationist attempt to unseat the teaching of evolution. Tapped doesn't know whether or not this is a fair reading of the Bush bill. But we do know that while campaigning, Bush himself supported the teaching of Creationism alongside evolution. We're ashamed. [posted 9:15 am]
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THANKS AGAIN, RALPH. That's what Eric Alterman has to say about the Green Party strategy of running a candidate against Minnesota's progressive Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone -- and, it seems, against Gray Davis in California. (Scroll down for Alterman's post.) Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds, linking to Tapped's previous post about the Greens and their Minnesota candidate Ed McGaa, has this to say: "Being of Native American extraction myself, I'm particularly offended by the Greens' comments on Native Americans' mental abilities." Tapped wonders what Lionel Jospin would have to say about the Greens' current strategy. [posted 8:55 am]
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WE'RE PLEASANTLY SURPRISED. Why? Because it looks like President Bush is showing some gumption when we least expected it. [posted 7:55 am]
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DISTINCTIONS, PLEASE. From the latest column by Michael Kelly in the Post:
You can take seriously, or pretend to take seriously, the likes of Chomsky -- or the likes of Gephardt -- when you can afford to. But that sort of thing is a frivolity, of a grim sort, for a frivolous time.
Tapped -- oops, sorry, "the likes of Tapped" -- takes Gephardt seriously, but not Chomsky. What does that make us? Besides un-ideal readers of Kelly's column (!).... [posted 7:50 am]
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Tuesday, May 28 WELCOME TO THE CLUB, GUYS. Our friends at the Democratic Leadership Council have a new issue of Blueprint out; the cover article, by conservative and McCainiac Marshall Wittman, is titled "Bush's Achilles Heel: How the GOP Buckles to Corporate Power." Our first thought: Apparently the DLC had to import a Republican to figure this one out for them, which isn't actually all that surprising. Our second thought: How about a follow-up on how the DLC gets most of its money from the same K Street lobbyists and corporations Wittman eviscerates so effectively? Oh, wait, Robert Dreyfuss already wrote that one -- for TAP, natch. [posted 5:55 pm] NO MATTER HOW YOU SPELL HER LAST NAME... Amity Shlaes is still wrong. Max Sawicky, fast becoming essential reading for Tapped, has the goods, albeit not the correct surname. [posted 5:55 pm] THE CASE FOR SINGLE-PAYER HEALTH CARE, IN A NUTSHELL. Who says Bloggers are trivial? Ted Barlow does as good a primer as Tapped has ever read on the costs and benefits of single-payer. And Tapped is a Certified Professional Journalist ® ! It's cogent, informed, thoughtful -- and convincing. (It's also old, but we were reading up on Barlow for Best Liberal Blogs.) Read it, pass it around, send it to your friends. And send it to Howard Dean, who, although he's for national health care, is against single-payer. [posted 3:30 pm]
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We certainly concede that this is the direct meaning of the phrase and that we probably should have said that. However, in context the "atheists in foxholes" saying has long been used to slight atheists in the military, with the obvious implication that there's a strong correlation between religious belief and courage under fire. Tapped went and dug up some examples, including a September 8, 1996 Washington Post article by Sue Anne Pressley, reporting that "Gordon B. Hinckley, leader of the Mormon church, told the national convention of the American Legion, 'as you once knew so well, there are no atheists in foxholes,' adding, atheism is a threat to American ideals and must be the new battlefield."
Atheist and freethought organizations have long been on the lookout for uses of the "atheists in foxholes" slogan that they find demeaning, and have even created atheist military organizations to represent themselves. So, while we might not have presented the primary interpretation of the phrase, we certainly weren't making up this connotation. [posted 3:35 pm]
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WHEN DID PLUMBER'S CRACK BECOME HIP? Salon.com's Janelle Brown has the scoop. Sorry, we couldn't resist. [posted 2:00 pm]
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ANOTHER GOOD REASON FOR THE MILITARY TO USE OPEN SOURCE. Alert reader D.M. sends in this link to a funny 1998 article, in which a U.S. destroyer, newly outfitted with a Windows NT-based computer system, suffed a system crash and had to be towed back to port. Looks to be a true story. [posted 1:30 pm]
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JUST IN TIME (ALMOST!) FOR MEMORIAL DAY. Tom Brokaw drafted Stephen Ambrose for another "Greatest Generation" NBC special last night. Warning: Ambrose and Brokaw are something of an obsession for Tapped. To learn why these two characters, along with Steven Spielberg, have done a great to deal to pervert the meaning of World War II and dishonor its veterans, read this article we published in The American Prospect last year. (Hint: It has nothing to do with the plagiarization, although that alone should have kept Ambrose off the air.) [posted 12:55 pm]
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INVADE IRAQ? Tapped just got through reading next month's cover story in The Washington Monthly -- a timely piece by Josh Marshall on the neoconservative-chickenhawk obsession with invading Iraq. In a nutshell, he argues that the neocons are right about the need to invade Iraq, and wrong about almost all the particulars: How many troops it would take, how we should lay the groundwork, whether we should have allies, etc. Having read the piece, Tapped is wondering whether Point 2 doesn't obviate Point 1. That is, if the neocon armchair generals can't come up with a credible plan for invading Iraq, and the professional soldiers think it's a bad idea on the merits, maybe that's a good enough argument against the whole enterprise. In any case, it's an excellent article and one that the foreign-policy wonks will be picking apart for a few weeks. Check it out. [posted 12:55 pm]
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THE SECRET EVIDENCE PRESIDENT. One of the sad ironies of the Bush Administration is that, even though Bush and attorney general John Ashcroft actually campaigned against the use of secret evidence -- Ashcroft on principle, Bush as a Grover Norquist-inspired pander to Arab-Americans in Michigan -- they have been expanding it even more than Bill Clinton did. While Tapped generally supports tighter immigration enforcement (see here and here), the increasingly wide and unexamined use of secret evidence is a real disaster. It's un-American in the most basic way. (Law-and-order conservatives, please note: The use of secret evidence was allowed before 9/11. All the USA PATRIOT act did was eliminate the judicial and bureaucratic oversight that kept secret evidence from being abused.) And we wish that Ashcroft, at least, would have the courage of his convictions. The always-excellent Atrios has the quotes. [posted 12:55 pm]
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BABY BOOM. Case in point on the immigration system: This article (registration required) in today's Los Angeles Times on pregnant, mostly affluent Korean women coming to the U.S. to deliver their children, who then become U.S. citizens with U.S. passports. This practice isn't illegal. But maybe it should be. The U.S. is one of the only countries in the world that considers anyone born on U.S. soil to become a U.S. citizen; it's a policy that nicely expresses the notion that America is, fundamentally, a nation of immigrants -- a polity based on ideas, not blood or land. But flying in-country just to deliver is really an abuse of that generosity and a debasement of citizenship. Why should liberals care? Partly because the notion that citizenship amounts to little more than a set of entitlements is what underlies the cynical conservative drive to strip legal immigrants of social services. And partly because there is no better way to drive down domestic support for generous immigration policies than for Americans to become convinced that those policies are being abused. [posted 12:55 pm]
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THE PRESIDENT'S ENGLISH. New misuses and abuses of the common tongue by our commander in chief -- or should we say, our "president in a bubble"? [posted 12:10 pm]
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JUDGMENT CALL. The Washington Post says Pat Leahy shouldn't push the Justice Department too far to figure out whether D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals nominee Miguel Estrada should get this lifetime appointment. But there are serious questions about Estrada's judicial temperament, and what else is Leahy supposed to do to resolve them? Estrada has been criticized by his former superior at the Solicitor General's office, who said that he sometimes misrepresented and misconstrued precedent to suit his own beliefs. Juan A. Figueroa of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF) told Senator Leahy in a letter that "[W]e have reason to believe that Mr. Estrada may not have the compassion, open-mindedness, sensitivity, courtesy, patience and freedom from bias that an individual with the requisite judicial temperament must have to be an effective jurist on any court." And the list of some of his former clients and the positions he's argued certainly raise our eyebrows. [posted 12:00 pm]
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THERE IT IS. Tapped is pleased to inform you that the latest batch of articles from the current issue of The American Prospect is now available from our homepage. Or, if you don't want to see the cool graphic we got to go with Gershom Gorenberg's article about the curiously amorphous boundaries of Jerusalem, then you can get them directly by clicking here for Harold Meyerson, here for Nicholas Confessore, and here for William R. Gates, Sr. and Chuck Collins. Robert Kuttner's latest column also just went live. [posted 10:05 am]
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NOW GO DO SOMETHING. Sounds like Vassar seniors got the kind of kickass commencement speech that Tapped thinks all college graduates should hear. Playwright Tony Kushner (of "Angels in America" fame) told the students, "Damn the critics and the bad reviews. The world is waiting for you. The world needs you desperately. Organize, Speak the truth." We'd only add, "to power." [posted 9:40 am]
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RADICAL INCOMPETENCE UNIT. Now we learn that the FBI's Radical Fundamentalists Unit (hilariously misspelled "Radical Fundamentalist Unit" by CNN) received both the "Phoenix memo" and all the information about Zacarias Moussaoui prior to 9/11 -- and still failed to connect the dots. Yesterday Tapped had some fun with the non-P.C. nature of the unit's name. Today, we'd like to take that a step further by proposing a new appellation for this unit. Let's keep the anti-P.C. flavor, but get something more accurate to what the unit actually does. How about "The Bureaucratic Jihad"? [posted 9:00 am]
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DISPATCHES FROM KAMINO. There's some smart writing in The Boston Globe and The New York Times this morning about cloning. The Globe, in an editorial, helpfully connects the budding embryo cloning debate to last summer's stem cell debacle, arguing that "Congress should both reject the Brownback ban and overturn Bush's 2001 compromise so that federal funding could be used in work with new embryo cell lines, cloned or uncloned." And writing in the Times, Harvard philosopher Michael J. Sandel notes the argumentative weakness of the position that supports mining discarded fertility clinic embryos for stem cells but opposes the deliberate cloning of embryos for research purposes:
If the creation and sacrifice of spare embryos in infertility treatment is morally acceptable, why isn't the creation and sacrifice of embryos for stem cell research also acceptable? After all, both practices serve worthy ends, and curing diseases like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and diabetes is at least as important as enabling infertile couples to have genetically related children.Of course bioethics is not only about ends, but also about means. Those who oppose creating embryos for research argue that doing so is exploitative and fails to accord embryos the respect they are due. But the same argument could be made against fertility treatments that create excess embryos bound for destruction, which is the common practice in this country.
Tapped has confidence that the silly Bush distinction, that Sandel skewers, will eventually collapse under the weight of its own analytic flabbiness. [posted 8:35 am]
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AXIS OF EVIL II? From today's Washington Post:
After China, the three countries with the most executions were Iran (139), Saudi Arabia (79) and the United States (66).
Do we really want to be keeping this kind of company? [posted 8:20 am]
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Monday, May 27 Tapped is going out to enjoy the remainder of our Memorial Day, and won't be posting again until tomorrow morning. Still, there are a number of posts from today to check out below if you haven't seen them yet. Also, tomorrow we will be putting up selected content from the new issue of The American Prospect, including articles by Nicholas Confessore, Harold Meyerson, Gershom Gorenberg, and, last but hardly least, William R. Gates, Sr. and Chuck Collins. So, check back tomorrow! [posted 12:20 pm]
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HE'S BUSHED. This AP report is the only one we've seen to capture some of the gaffes and embarrassing moments on President Bush's European swing. Seems our president is tired and crabby because he's jetlagged. Hey, we're sort of sympathetic to the problem (Tapped travels a lot). But shouldn't it make us all a little nervous that Bush doesn't seem to be able to function if he can't be tucked into bed by 9:30 PM? How many hours of beauty sleep does he need? [posted 10:45 am]
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SURF'S UP. Looks like the Republicans have a new consultant who's planning on using the Internet to launch web based marketing campaigns. It's the very same man -- Larry Purpuro -- who as deputy chief of staff at the RNC moved the GOP way ahead of the Democrats in the use of the Internet for politics. Now it sounds like he's moving into more focused marketing, beyond the "traditional" uses of the web. Tapped hears that a New York Internet guru is working with the DNC to bring them into the 21st century. Wonder what that mystery entrepreneur's plans are? [posted 10:40 am]
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GET TO THE BOTTOM OF IT. David Rosenbaum neatly unpacks the presidential and congressional doublespeak about whether we should establish a independent commission to determine the cause of pre-September 11th intelligence failures (as opposed to allowing Congress to conduct its own investigation). Tapped favors the independent route because we think it will lead to a more thorough examination of the systemic intelligence failures. (Mary McGory cleverly reminds us just how "cover-up" oriented this administration is: "remember the formerly topless, now decently draped aluminum hussy in the Great Hall of the Justice Department?")
Indeed, how much more incentive could we possibly need to get to the bottom of all this than FBI agent Coleen Rowley's memo to bureau head Robert Mueller? If you don't want to take the time to read the full 8-page memo (courageously published by Time), read William Safire's column this morning. He starts with a Q & A:
Why did F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller desperately stamp "classified" on last week's memo to him from the Minneapolis agent and counsel Coleen Rowley?Answer: Because he is protecting the bureau's crats who ignored warnings from the field before Sept. 11, and because he is trying to cover his own posterior for misleading the public and failing to inform the president in the eight months since.
These aren't the times for political gamesmanship. The country's best interests need to be put ahead of the potential for embarrassment for current or past administrations. Period. [posted 10:25 am]
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MONEY TALK. Kevin Phillips, writing in The Washington Post yesterday, presented a stunning and cogent indictment of the modern Gilded Age. He says:
The 30 largest U.S. family and individual fortunes in 1999 were roughly ten times as big as the 30 largest had been in 1982, an increase greater than any comparable peacetime period during the 19th century. In 1999, the single largest U.S. fortune, the $86 billion hoard of Microsoft's Bill Gates, was 1.4 million times greater than the assets of the median U.S. household; that exceeds the ratio attained by John D. Rockefeller, whose early 1900s wealth was 1.25 million times larger than the median household of that time....Which brings us to the politics. The Repub
