The Editors

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: BATTLESTAR GALACTICONS. Sadly, No!‘s Brad Reed analyzes the pervasive and frightening phenomenon of sci-fi-influenced conservative foreign policy punditry. Galacticons, dorko-fascists, and jingonauts — read the whole thing, it’s an eye-opening assessment. –The Editors

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: STILL THE RIGHT WAR. As the Iraq debacle has continued to lay bare the pitfalls of occupation, the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan and Western forces remain bogged down there, five years after the initial U.S. invasion. Some observers are now starting to reconsider the wisdom of that war as […]

RISK ASSESSMENT: SCHMITT CRASHES THE PARTY! Ok, not really. Mark Schmitt has swooped in with a worthy intervention into the Hacker-Klein-Yglesias discussion of The Great Risk Shift. Check it out, and wait for Hacker’s response tomorrow. –The Editors

RISK ASSESSMENT. Ezra‘s first submission in the exchange with Jacob Hacker is now up. Hacker will be responding to him and Matt tomorrow. –The Editors

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: PAST IMPERFECT. Historian Jason Sokol assesses Deval Patrick‘s historic gubernatorial bid in Massachusetts (a race that gets more brutal by the week) in the context of the Bay State’s checkered racial past. –The Editors

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: IT’S THE POLITICS, STUPID. Dana Goldstein assesses Gail Collins‘ tenure as New York Times editorial page editor and weighs in on the ongoing debate over women’s underrepresentation in political punditry. The lack of female pundits isn’t the real problem, she says; it’s the lack of female politicians. –The Editors

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: JAWBONE GEORGE. Matt does not think “diplomacy” means what the president thinks it means. Also in this column, Matt assesses the administration’s announced plan to achieve unilateral military hegemony over outer space. –The Editors

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: RISK ASSESSMENT. Per Ezra‘s post below, Jacob Hacker‘s new book, The Great Risk Shift, is getting some attention — in it, Hacker argues that increased risk is the central economic issue for working Americans, one that provides progressives new opportunities for shifting the political tide. This week, Ezra and Matt […]

HOT OFF THE PRESSES: THE NOVEMBER PRINT ISSUE. There remain too many Tapped readers out there who aren’t subscribers to The American Prospect. That’s a problem. The release of our November print issue might provide a nice occasion to reconsider this unfortunate state of affairs. For one thing, we have a truly must-read report by […]

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: ELECTROSHOCK. Genevieve Smith explains why worrying about electronic voting machines isn’t just for paranoid “conspiracy theorists.” Not only is the machines’ vulnerability to tampering real, but the potential for simple human error to cause major screw-ups is vast — and has been demonstrated in practice already. Take a look. –The […]