Blog: TAPPED

MARCHING TOWARD DEMOCRACY? Yesterday the WaPo reported that China’s People’s Daily published an article attributed to Premier Wen Jiabao that suggests a “socialist system is not contradictory to democracy.” Read what Jim Mann and Robert Kuttner have to say on the subject of China and democracy in March’s issue of TAP. —The Editors

INKY RICKY. So Philadelphia magazine reports that the Inquirer is in column-writing discussions with Rick Santorum. This, the mag says, is the brainchild of Inky publisher Brian Tierney, about whom the mag article contains this amusing paragraph: Tierney, a longtime Philadelphia adman and PR guru, has deep ties to the GOP. In 2000, he reached […]

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. Alex Rossmiller argues that the debate over Hillary Clinton‘s refusal to apologize for her 2002 Iraq war vote misses the point; the crucial question for all the Democratic candidates is what have they actually learned from the war’s failure. Meanwhile, Mark Leon Goldberg explains how the ICC investigation of Darfur […]

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION’S IMMIGRATION RECORD. Interesting graph from The Wall Street Journal tracking immigration enforcement over the last few years: As you can see, enforcement drops through the first few years of the Bush presidency. That is, in part, probably a function of the tax cuts. When you defund government, government has less money to […]

WANK 2 D XTREME. I’d be inclined to go a bit easy on Richard Cohen re. Al Gore, if only because some of the examples culled by Media Matters could generously be described as Cohen defending Gore in a singularly unhelpful and damaging way. But since Cohen is responsible for the craziest damned Gore/Bush column […]

GORE’S OBSTACLE. Media Matters has a good response to Richard Cohen, who blames nameless “colleagues” for the interminable media smear campaign against Al Gore in 1999 and 2000, while conveniently forgetting his own frequent participation in said campaign. This does remind us of a point indirectly raised by Ed Kilgore. Not only is Gore exceptionally […]

FIRST TIME AS TRAGEDY, SECOND TIME…, THIRD TIME…? There’s a lot of long-form reading out there this week: Seymour Hersh’s article on the “redirection” of U.S. policy toward a war on Shiites — even as we supposedly are on the side of the Shi’a government we installed in Baghdad — is mind-boggling. As Josh Marshall […]

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: A TALE OF TWO LOSERS. In his column this week, Mike assesses Tom Vilsack and Mitt Romney — two candidacies whose rationales have a musty, outdated feel to them. –The Editors

STABBING BLINDLY.Max Boot blunders into an interesting point. In denouncing our allies for being insufficiently militaristic, he manages to ask an interesting question. Here’s the dreck: Britain is hardly alone in its unilateral disarmament. A similar trend can be discerned among virtually all of the major U.S. allies, aside from Japan. Canada is a particularly […]

HIGH ANXIETY There was a bit of high anxiety at the courthouse today in the Scooter Libby trial. At the end of the day yesterday the jury sent the judge a note with a question, and the judge put off until this morning discussing it with the parties before responding to the jury. Nobody knew […]