Matthew Yglesias

HARD OUT THERE FOR A PIMP AFTER ALL. One of the quirks of American society is that this is the kind of country where an intelligence official can admit to having partied with defense contractors known to bribe public officials in exchange for defense and intelligence contracts while simultaneously insisting that any allegations that prostitutes […]

IT’S HARD OUT THERE FOR A BLOGGER. With the GOP all unpopular and mired in apparent disarray, there’s very little for a progressive writer to spend his time pushing back on. I think we here at TAPPED totally failed to acknowledge the goofy $100 rebate plan that was the Republican alternative to outlining an energy […]

COLBERT: EVERYONE’S GOT AN OPINION. Unlike everyone else across the ideological spectrum who’s weighing in on this, I refuse to open my Stephen Colbert commentary by saying I’m a “huge fan” of his show or whatever. I think the show’s okay, but it’s got an inconvenient time slot, so I’ve only really seen maybe five […]

ALLEN: ENSLAVING PEOPLE IS BAD. George Allen says he’s sorry about the whole slavery thing in a Washington Post article that mentions Ryan Lizza‘s look at his curious racial past. The Post article, though, is unclear on the really noteworthy part of Lizza’s story, which is that Allen isn’t some white Southern politician who used […]

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: THREE YEARS LATER. Three years is a long time, so it’s no surprise that late last week there were once again press reports that a drawdown of American forces in Iraq was in the works. But, of course, we’ve heard that at least half a dozen times since the end of “major” combat […]

BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE $4 BILLION? This article on revised Congressional Research Service estimates of spending on the Iraq War is pretty dull until the end, but then it starts to get interesting. The report apparently contains such phrases as “These factors, however, are not enough to explain a 50-percent increase of over $20 billion […]

THE FULL TANK. Err . . . I’ve been having some trouble dreaming up things to write about lately, but does my morning Washington Post really need not one, not two, but three columns on gas prices? Turns out there’s a lot of political posturing going on. Who knew? But in case you missed the […]

WHO YOU CALLIN’ STUPID? Methinks a lot of folks out there are too quick to underestimate the intelligence of highly trained professional politicians. The basic dilemma facing Democrats at the moment regarding gasoline goes as follows: High gas prices are very unpopular with the public. This presents an opportunity for the opposition party to score […]

TELEPHONE AND SADDAM’S TERRORISM. Based on a whole bunch of captured Iraqi documents, the Pentagon has assembled an Iraq Perspective Project report (PDF) on Saddam Hussein‘s regime which serves as the basis for this long article in Foreign Affairs on which Andrew Sullivan based this blog post concluding that “Those who sincerely marched against war […]

WORST. PROGRAM. EVER. Via Tyler Cowen, Human Events lists the “ten most harmful government programs,” two of which — income tax withholding and earmarking — aren’t programs at all. The super-popular pillars of the social insurance state — Social Security (#1), Medicare (#2), and Medicaid (#7) — all make the list, along with genuinely harmful […]