Blog: TAPPED

When Al Gore made Joe Lieberman his VP pick in 2000, it was refreshing that there wasn’t much anti-Semitism in evidence. Instead, conservative religious figures made much of their friendship with Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew. It seemed at the time to be evidence that the ground of the religious culture war had shifted somewhat, so […]

Even with rabid conservative opposition to health care reform, and his role in crafting Massachusetts’ system of universal health care, Mitt Romney remains the prohibitive favor for the Republican presidential nomination. He has plenty of cash, a strong national organization, and substantial support from the GOP establishment. That said, given the religious composition of the […]

The situation in Libya is very serious, and lives are at stake. But let’s put that aside for a moment. I noticed this in the New York Times: As night fell, the opposition fighters set up a defensive position outside of Bin Jawwad. Others wandered aimlessly around the Bin Jawwad checkpoint, firing guns in the […]

The new AT&T T-Mobile merger has raised fears among Internet-privacy folks that further attacks on Net neutrality may be forthcoming. If anything is a testament as to why the Internet should stay free, open, and available to all, its Ushahidi — a crowd surfacing platform that allows users to input data to create crisis maps; […]

If you haven’t already, I recommend watching — or reading — the president’s address on the intervention in Libya. It’s not especially persuasive, but for those baffled by the president’s current actions — and wondering what happened to the Barack Obama of 2008 — it provides an opportunity for inquiry: It is true that America […]

Back when I was in my 20s, a friend of mine told me he had considered, as a birthday present to me, placing my name on the ballot for the presidential primary in New Hampshire. When he found out that the filing fee was $1,000, he thought better of it. I mention this as a […]

As I’ve written before, to call public furor thus started “astroturf” or phony misses the point; people can try to make an idea catch fire, but it only does so if it genuinely meets the emotional or political needs of a mass; and the need to pretend that the only reason anyone is against public […]

With the announcement this morning that the administration has a new proposal to cut spending by $20 billion for the rest of the fiscal year, the liberal blogosphere is generally agreeing that the final compromise will be about $30 billion in cuts. If that number sounds familiar, it may be because it’s the number Republicans […]

Jonathan Chait has a characteristically glib response for liberals who associate “fear of crime” with white racial anxieties: From the 1960s through the 1990s, crime weighed heavily on the public mood, but liberals tended to dismiss it as mere code words for racism. One measure of the liberal mood is political movies like “The Candidate” […]

For the reasons that TAPPED’s Paul Waldman discussed earlier today, it’s rather remarkable that the constitutionality of Arizona’s campaign-finance law is even in question. Actual restrictions on campaign spending present a difficult question, as First Amendment values are put in conflict with democratic equality. Regimes like Arizona’s, on the other hand, do not have the […]