Sam Rosenfeld

LOSERS WALK. Joe Lieberman and John McCain will be holding their joint press conference at AEI shortly. As if it were not bad enough already that they — rather than any single one of the 42 House, Senate or gubernatorial Democrats who won newly-captured seats from the Republicans in 2006 — were the invited guests […]

ELLISON. To follow up on Tom‘s flagging of the wonderful Keith Ellison/Jefferson‘s Koran story, it’s worth plugging this month-old TAP Online piece profiling the new congressman. It does a good job conveying the guy’s overall hard-charging liberalism and the sense that he’ll be a freshman to watch. –Sam Rosenfeld

MCCAIN’S DOCTRINE, EDWARDS’ GUTS. I’m not sure how far John Edwards is going to get in his presidential bid — what he ought to do is shake up the race by joining Al Gore right now, thereby pairing the better of the two presidential nominees and the better of the two vice presidential nominees from […]

INVEST IN COPPERTONE. Happy new year to Tapped readers; I hope 2006 went well and 2007 will be even more joyful and prosperous. Not to be a downer, but one thing 2007 promises to be, if the year gone by is any indication, is hot. According to the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and […]

SO SORRY NOT TO HAVE MISSED IT. Gee, thanks, Brother Sam, for not letting that essay by the junior senator from Connecticut slip by me. I was really trying hard not to see it; I saw the headline and said, ugh, him again. Then I turned the page — only to have it turned back […]

GOOD CALL, CONNECTICUT. Joe Lieberman — he’s ruining my holiday vacation. I’m a bit late in getting digs in at Lieberman’s appalling Washington Post op-ed backing escalation in Iraq, but everyone really should take a look at this thing in its entirety. The out-of-the-blue insertion of Iran as our central threat not only in Iraq […]

YOU’RE VOTING FOR WHO? There must have been 10 or so of us, sitting around a table at the Commons dinner hall at Goddard College, all examining the absentee ballots we had received from our home states. The year was 1976, and this was the first time any of us would vote to elect a […]

FORD ALMOST CAUGHT HOOVER. Gerald Ford’s death got me to thinking about the power (and length) of recent post-presidencies. Because presidents are living longer after leaving office, there’s increasingly more to say about them once they leave the White House but before they depart for the big sleep. When Ford took over the presidency after […]

CENTERED. Kevin Drum takes a light knock at Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker‘s hefty post-midterms revision of the thesis of their own book Off Center, which had implied if not quite guaranteed that the GOP’s mastery of various tricks and structural advantages would assure continued, “off-center” right-wing rule. (They were more explicitly bearish on the […]

RIGHT-WING SCI-FI. Dave Weigel has a good op-ed in The Los Angeles Times today about the new rash of right-wing sci-fi visions of dystopic futures under Islamist, radical leftist, or combined leftist/Islamist rule. Be afraid, conservatives. If you survived the victory speeches of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and allowed yourself to think, “Things can’t […]