Blog: TAPPED

With the country growing less white by the year, and Democrats currently enjoying huge electoral advantages among the nonwhite, will the Republicans double down on their strategy of stoking white grievance? Our Adam Serwer says yes, Jonathan Chait says probably not, or at least they’d be dumb to do so. But it’s worth thinking about […]

Jonathan Cohn notes the final end of compassionate conservatism: House Republicans want to cut funding for health programs abroad and for community clinics here at home. And although the projected savings are small, at least relative to the size of the federal budget, the philosophical shift they signal is big. This is the end of […]

Tomorrow, Rep. Paul Ryan will unveil the Republican budget proposal for 2012, which he typically bills as a plan for tackling the country’s long-term fiscal problems. For instance, here he is in yesterday’s New York Times: “We want to get spending and debt under control, and we want to get the economy growing, and we […]

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has a plan to save the state’s cash-strapped Medicaid program: Charge $50 to obese people on the plan who fail to make improvements under a weight-loss regimen, and smokers. The proposal is a nice case study in conservative policy-making. Via The Wall Street Journal: Republican Gov. Jan Brewer proposed the idea […]

It’s worth revisiting this Robert Reich op-ed from two days ago in light of today’s jobs numbers. Reich points out that while job growth has grown slowly though not at the rate needed for recovery, consumer confidence is at it’s lowest since the Great Depression, largely because of the rise in fuel and commodity prices. […]

Ben Adler writes that Democrats could actually cut the deficit and redefine foreign policy by going after defense spending — if only they were brave enough to try. Scott Lemieux tells us that John Thompson spent 14 years on death row because prosecutors withheld evidence, but the Supreme Court refuses to hold them accountable. The […]

The Hill’s E2 Wire is reporting that a Senate vote on EPA carbon regulations won’t happen until next week. Although the White House handed out some tepid reassurance that it would not sell the EPA down the river, it doesn’t sound like the administration will jump to the agency’s defense. At the base of this […]

Pressure around the issue of deportation of undocumented immigrants appears to be coming to a boil, the Associated Press reports. The anger comes from a statement by President Obama at a Univision town hall that he couldn’t use executive orders as president. Obama had said that using executive orders “would not conform with my appropriate […]

History’s greatest monster. (Flickr/Nelson Piedra) Jonathan Chait noticed that the Weekly Standard loves hippies an awful lot; he put together a slideshow of Standard cover illustrations depicting hippies engaged in various acts of malfeasance. “Though the influence of hippies culture has been on the wane for the last, oh, 40 years,” he notes, “on the […]

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released employment numbers for March today and found that both the unemployment rate, at 8.8 percent, and the number of Americans without jobs, at 13.5 million, stayed the same from the previous month. Most of the important indicators were unchanged from February, but, overall, it’s a slightly better picture than […]