Blog: TAPPED

Amanda Terkel at the Huffington Post reports that House Republicans in Maine have proposed legislation to loosen protective child labor laws. The proposed bill, LD 1346, would reduce the minimum wage for anyone under the age of 20 from $7.20 per hour to $5.25 per hour for the first 180 days of work while, for […]

Dave Weigel raises the question of why birtherism won’t go away, but doesn’t really answer it directly (in an otherwise worthy piece), so I’ll offer an explanation. Here goes: To really go mainstream, a conspiracy theory like this one needs a critical mass of people who believe it, to get the ball rolling. The birthers […]

The Environmental Working Group looked at the data and found that 23 members of the 112th Congress or their families signed up to get farm subsidy payments. Six are Democrats, and the rest are Republicans. As I wrote last week, the problem isn’t subsidies per se. It’s how they’re distributed, who they go to, and […]

I wrote earlier this week that immigration activists are taking the same approach as gay rights activists in making a state-by-state push for the Dream Act. The concerns of both these groups dovetailed yesterday in an announcement by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services that gay couples who are married cannot apply for permanent […]

Greenwire reports on the White House’s push for a clean-energy standard and makes clear an important distinction: A clean energy standard differs from a renewable portfolio standard insofar as it permits utilities to derive electricity from more than just green fuels. Under Obama’s CES, firms could meet the standard using renewable sources, nuclear power, combined […]

Time‘s Joe Klein feels embarrassed for the country whenever he sees the current crop of Republican presidential candidates: I have never before seen such a bunch of vile, desperate-to-please, shameless, embarrassing losers coagulated under a single party’s banner. They are the most compelling argument I’ve seen against American exceptionalism. Even Tim Pawlenty, a decent governor, […]

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Obama administration has launched a quiet attack on illegal immigration. The Immigrations and Customs Enforcement division [ICE] has been auditing firms, rechecking employment data. Two companies in recent months, Chipotle and Harvard Maintenance, have laid off around 1,000 workers. Critics of U.S. immigration policies on the left and […]

Adam Serwer tells us that Republicans turned a hearing on Muslim civil rights into a hearing on whether Muslims have too many rights. Jamelle Bouie reminds us that Barack Obama has never been anti-war, and he has the record to show it. Laura T. Coffey relates the story of a small Seattle community battling health […]

To follow up on Monica Potts‘ post below, there’s a simple explanation for why the Tea Party has gotten more unpopular over time: they’re Republicans. What I mean by that is that at first, they worked hard to portray themselves as a movement that was above partisanship, just concerned with spending and critical of both […]

John Thompson spent 14 years on death row (and 18 total years in prison) for a crime he didn’t commit, because the prosecutors in the district attorney’s office that convicted him illegally failed to turn over exculpatory evidence. It may seem obvious that the office responsible for this gross denial of due process should be […]