Blog: TAPPED

TRANSIT FUNDING RULES: Brad Plumer has an enlightening addition to my recent argument on this website for a shift in federal transit funding from highways to mass transit. He writes, Under federal rules, transit projects have to undergo far more scrutiny. Before Congress hands out money for transit, they demand a cost-benefit analysis of the […]

NEOLIBERALISM VANQUISHED: When David Brooks sticks to territory he knows, like elite political journalism, rather than, say, the nuances of how yuppies dress their babies, he makes a lot more sense. Case in point: his column today on “The Vanishing Neoliberal.” His basic history is essentially correct. He says: Neoliberals coalesced around two small magazines, […]

RONNIE WELLS HAS PASSED. When the music programs in public schools began dwindling — and as D.C.’s great jazz musicians found fewer and fewer venues in which to share their art with regular people — singer Ronnie Wells founded the East Coast Jazz Festival, a singular event that drew together the greater area jazz community, […]

POOR RICHARDSON. The Politico takes a look at the rumors that have been swirling around New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson for the past few years, and it’s about time. I’ve never come across a candidate who has been the subject of more unsubstantiated whispering among the press corps. Some paper with real resources needs to […]

SURGING TO WHERE? It’s impossible to overstate the respect Gen. Petraeus elicits in Washington’s chattering classes. Left or right, young or old, journalist or expert, everyone I talk to pulsates with admiration for the guy. And his willingness to call the surge inadequate only enhances that reputation. But even while he inspires mash notes and […]

THOSE AREN’T RETIREES — THEY’RE LOBBYISTS. I couldn’t hope to match Ezra‘s skewering of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a new think tank whose $7 million in funding achieved its obvious goal, which was to produce a single glowing David Broder column. But I will note two things: 1. What portion of the $7 million was […]

VINDICATION! Just under a year ago, I got into the mother of all blog kerfuffles by calling for greater online disclosure by bloggers. And so today I was thrilled to see that Markos Moulitsas Zuniga‘s site DailyKos has finally come around and listed its contibutors bios and (for the most part) real names, as I’d […]

MR. E. AND THE WOMEN. John Edwards is conducting a surrogate operation involving the former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, Kate Michelman, who had this to say about the former North Carolina senator, according to The New York Sun, as compared to the senator from New York: “I’ve gotten to know a lot of political […]

CALM BEFORE THE… It was a good day for the 57th Military Police Company. The call came as the company commander, Captain Rob McNellis, was leaving a routine check of an Iraqi Police station off of Haifa Street in western Baghdad: residents in this run-down and heavily Shiite area had spotted a car they hadn’t […]

THE ALINSKY ELECTION. Ryan Lizza, whose byline has been missed of late, is back with a New York Times magazine-length treatment of Barack Obama‘s Chicago years, which graces the cover of the new New Republic. Ryan digs down into the community organizing that Obama did in Illinois, and how his understanding of power politics was […]