Blog: TAPPED

To leave the Paul Ryan beat for a bit, Bryan Fischer — “Director of Issues Analysis” for the American Family Association — has weighed in on welfare. In short, he doesn’t like it. Why? Because it encourages “fornication” among black people: Welfare has destroyed the African-American family by telling young black women that husbands and […]

Ecologist Susanna Hecht is studying El Salvador’s response to climate change, and she tells Yale Environment 360: El Salvador and Central America take climate change seriously because they are getting nailed by these intense storms. As I always say, I never thought the future would come so soon. Last year El Salvador got hit so […]

Carina Diaz worked in fields in upstate New York for seven years, picking tomatoes, planting onions, and growing other specialty vegetable crops like beets. During that time, she says, she and the other women she worked with were sexually harassed by their supervisor and his friend. Her supervisor groped the women, made vulgar comments and […]

Tim Pawlenty is high on life, and the Paul Ryan budget proposal: Likely presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty (R) on Tuesday praised House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) for proposing his tough budget. “Thanks to Paul Ryan in Congress, the American people finally have someone offering real leadership in Washington,” the former Minnesota governor said […]

The budget deficit is one more reason why I think we should be doing something on immigration. There are 12 million people in this country without documentation. A portion of them are already paying taxes, but imagine if all of them did? There are 65,000 undocumented kids a year graduating from high school without a […]

As I’ve mentioned before, the centerpiece of Paul Ryan‘s budget plan is its “reforms” for Medicare and Medicaid. To quickly summarize, the Ryan plan would eliminate Medicare as a single-payer health care program, and replace it with a series of means-tested vouchers that seniors would use to purchase health care on the private insurance market […]

In the controversy over whether we ought to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, NPR and PBS have tended to be lumped together under “public broadcasting.” But as Mark Oppenheimer argues, the two entities are in dramatically different situations, mostly because radio and television are such different animals today: Why the diverging fortunes? First, to […]

Given his influence among Beltway elites, and the actual substance of Paul Ryan‘s budget, I honestly think that this is the most pernicious column David Brooks has written in recent memory: Over the past few weeks, a number of groups, including the ex-chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisers and 64 prominent budget experts, have […]

Mother Jones has a disturbing article on condom re-use in Kenya. The author argues that sexual health campaigns are working, but the problem is that getting access to condoms are difficult. The author raises the point that cuts to global sex-education programs proposed by the GOP will only add to this crisis, making it even […]

Old. New. Three years ago, Barack Obama took a scrappy young font called Gotham and made it the world’s hottest typeface. If you pay attention to these sorts of things, you would have seen Gotham — a font that is self-assured without being showy, articulate yet not oversimplified — cropping up everywhere anyone wanted some […]