Blog: TAPPED

Thomas Barthold, the chief of staff of the nonpartisan Joint Tax Committee, testified on Wednesday that, if the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” became law, audits would get a lot more personal for female taxpayers. Barthold said that, if a woman got audited, IRS agents would have to figure out whether a woman used […]

If there’s any implication to my last post, it’s that Obama has always been something of an interventionist, and his decision to support one intervention over the other has more to do with political circumstances than it does with principle. As a politician in Chicago’s Hyde Park, Barack Obama was virtually obligated to oppose the […]

A judge in Wisconsin has temporarily blocked the implementation of a law that would strip public employees of their collective-bargaining rights. Dane County Judge Maryann Sumi issued the order in response to a lawsuit filed by the local district attorney. The lawsuit alleges that a Senate conference committee violated Wisconsin’s open-meetings law by failing to […]

As we approach the one-year anniversary of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, public opinion hasn’t really changed much, confounding the expectations of both conservatives (who thought all Americans would grow to hate it) and progressives (who thought Americans would grow to love it). As Ezra Klein argues after looking at some survey data, […]

Daniel Larison looks back at Barack Obama‘s 2002 speech against the Iraq War, and substitutes a few words: What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war….A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics. Now let me be clear […]

Late yesterday, the United Nations Security Council voted unanimously (with five nations abstaining) to create a no-fly zone in Libya and to use “all necessary measures” to ostensibly protect civilians who might be crushed in backlash against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Although the resolution allows for airstrikes and artillery fire, it prohibits the use of an […]

This, from Politico, is a nice headline summation of everything wrong with American political commentary: The wisdom of intervention in Libya notwithstanding, this is just a completely inappropriate way to describe the use of military force. Yes, in some narrow, superficial sense, a United Nations no-fly zone — enforced by American bombs — is a […]

In the last two months, conservatives and centrists have stumbled over themselves to sound tough on the deficit. Sen. Lindsay Graham threatened to vote against raising the debt ceiling unless Social Security saw cuts, and likewise, Sen. Joe Lieberman has insisted on cuts to entitlements, since “the sooner we deal with the problem, the less […]

Lately, Rep. Paul Ryan has used this line as an attack on President Obama‘s deficit-reduction credentials: “President Obama is going to have to decide. Is he an Erskine Bowles Democrat or a Nancy Pelosi Democrat?” Of course, between the Affordable Care Act and her opposition to the Bush tax cuts, Nancy Pelosi has done far […]

President Obama seems to have decided that the best way to deal with the question of where he was born is to joke about it: The president appears to be loving the whole Obama-wasn’t-born-here myth. At a lunch on Capitol Hill on St. Patrick’s Day, Obama told an audience that included plenty of Republicans that […]