Blog: TAPPED

AGAINST FALSE COMPLACENCY. Brad Plumer has a good piece about how any Republican President will almost certainly try to replace John Paul Stevens with a doctrinaire reactionary in the mold of Sam Alito. To add to his point, I think it’s easy to be lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that […]

NOW WITH THE PIGEONS. Coming hard upon the heels of the Chinese anti-satellite test, and the report of US Navy foolin’ around with sharks, it appears that China is attempting to create an army of cyborg pigeons. Scientists with the Robot Engineering Technology Research Center of east China’s Shandong University of Science and Technology say […]

POLITICIZED NATIONAL SECURITY, CIRCA 2003. Yesterday, I was traveling back from my unsuccessful effort to — no joke — talk to Al Gore at the Governor’s Ball (he didn’t show before I left), so I missed the excitement in the Scooter Libby trial over the juror who got booted for exposure to media coverage of […]

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: CHENEY FOLLIES. In his column this week, Matt ruminates on Vice President Dick Cheney — national joke, national nightmare. –The Editors

PRIMAL FEAR. As Ezra notes, questions about Mitt Romney‘s religion could be getting too much attention, given the fact that it is Romney as an individual people will either be voting for or against. But the Romney campaign is obviously acutely aware of the question of whether conservatives will consider Romney “one of us” or […]

PLAN B-ACKLASH. There’s apparently hell to pay when you point out that there’s no scientific or medical reason to deny women over-the-counter access to emergency contraception. Although the Bush administration and Congress requested and allocated a full $4 million in funding for the Office of Women’s Health, the FDA plans to withhold more than a […]

FIND BETTER EXAMPLES, PLEASE. David Greenberg, who’s a really smart guy and TAP contributor, makes the case for letting Scooter Libby walk in the latest New Republic. Because liberals are “supposed to be champions of the First Amendment and foes of overzealous prosecutors,” he argues, they should have avoided “partaking in some hypocrisy of their […]

OSCAR UPDRAFT. I checked the total signatures at DraftGore.com on Saturday, around noon, the day before the Oscars. The total number of signatories was roughly 39,300. As of noon today, the total is up to 44,470, or about a 13.15 percent jump in just 72 hours. –Tom Schaller

IS THAT DIXIE BEHIND US, AND WHISTLING I HEAR? Things can get a bit buried here at Tapped, so let me recommend that folks click down to Schaller‘s convincing post on how, at the Senate level, the non-Southern strategy is already occurring, and will probably accelerate as we enter 2008. Indeed, I’ve long thought Tom’s […]

A MAN IS MORE THAN HIS BIO LINE. I think Karen Tumulty gets this exactly right: That same USA Today story had a poll in which 24% of those surveyed said they wouldn’t vote for a Mormon. By comparison, only 11% felt that way about a woman candidate and 5% about a black. That’s the […]