Blog: TAPPED

OBAMA ANSWERS THE NYT. Proving once again that he’s got the fastest media operation in the race, Barack Obama has already gotten The New York Times to publish a second story following up on its front-pager this morning, in which he explains his finances at length — “At no point did I know” — and […]

FLIP ROMNEY. Michael Scherer at Salon takes a look at the down-and-dirty campaigning already going on in the G.O.P. field: The anonymous attacks peaked at last week’s Spartanburg County Republican straw poll, an entirely unscientific sampling of party activists from South Carolina’s textile country. The poll itself was little more than a gimmick to recruit […]

ON OCCASIONAL SOLIDARITY. I think this is an important post by Matt, and it’s worth adding that the substantive priorities of the labor-Democratic alliance are oddly rearguard. So retaining civil service protections in government agencies is of transcendent importance, but effecting actual change in the country’s organizing laws is not. Card check was, to be […]

WHO RUNS IRAN? Mark Kleiman is bothered, rightly, by the tendency to treat Iran as a sovereign, Western-style country whose actions “are the results of political conflicts and agreements among Iranian politicians, interest groups, and factions.” In other words, when we talk about Iran, we don’t take the complexities and oddities of its politics into […]

SHOULD WE BE IMITATING TERRORIST LABOR PRACTICES? Yesterday the Senate voted 51-46 to give 40,000 airport baggage screeners the right to unionize. The House supports a similar bill, but President Bush has threatened a veto, which there doesn�t appear to be enough votes in either the House or Senate to override. The New York Times […]

BREAKING PEOPLE. Jonathan Gitlin writes that interrogation practices: now aim to break down subjects through psychological means that leave no visible scars, and as a result they are far more palatable with the general public. Sleep deprivation, stress positions, sensory deprivation and the like are dismissed by pundits and defense lawyers as nothing like torture. […]

STANDING MATTERS. Yikes. The only two countries viewed less favorably than the US are Israel and Iran? We need to work on our people skills. Look, I know that folks on the right like to dismiss these international surveys as equivalent in importance to high school yearbook awards, but there’s a serious diplomatic point lurking […]

HUH? The New York Times this morning has a big piece on some of Barack Obama‘s financial deals which, at first glance, doesn’t take things much further than “raises questions” territory. A couple of paragraphs, however, really jumped out at me: Even so, the stock purchases raise questions about how he could unwittingly come to […]

THEY LOVE US NOT. A recent poll for the BBC World Service covering opinions in 27 countries has the United States taking the bronze medal as the third most negatively viewed country among the same 27 countries. Only Iran and Israel are viewed more negatively, on average. These findings partly follow the expected fault lines […]

GIULIANI’S HOMETOWN: Mark notes in his post on the varied hometowns of the presidential contenders this year that Giuliani is “certainly an only-in-New-York character.” Well, yes if you mean the New York region, but no if you mean New York City. Giuliani actually moved out to Long Island as a kid, and I think that […]