TODAY IN TAP...

Moore's movie is only superficially about health care. It uses the subject -- and also sick days, and vacations, and child care, and maternal support policies -- as a way to critique unthinking American exceptionalism, to challenge the tautology that states that the way we do things is the best way to do things because ... it's the way we do things. The particulars of the account all add up to the larger question: Is the America we live in the America we think we live in, and the America we want to live in?

Also on the site today, Sudhir Muralidhar reviews A Mighty Heart, starring Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl, wife of kidnapped and slain WSJ journalist Daniel Pearl; Dana Goldstein catalogues some of the issues that second-tier Democratic presidential candidates are championing, and that the frontrunners ought to; and Terence Samuel reports on Claire McCaskill's visit to Iraq and pending investigations into war contracting abuse.

--The Editors