Blog: TAPPED

MORE ON THE EFP. David at Danger Room has a couple very good posts on the possible origins of the EFPs being found in Iraq. He points out, as Andrew Cockburn noted last week, that the construction of these devices is easily within the means of any Iraqi insurgent with access to a machine shop. […]

MORE OSCARS. To continue on the Bossman‘s comments, I never understand why anybody tunes in early to the Oscars. I started watching around 11 and didn’t miss a single award I was interested in. Are folks really so eager to watch the unbearably, inevitably lame opening montages? Meanwhile, last night’s show really didn’t have A […]

SPRINGING FORWARD, OR MAYBE BACKWARD. Interesting that George Bush and Dick Cheney are finally talking tough with Pervez Musharraf, no? Bush has warned the Pakistani prez that Congress, now in unfriendly Democratic hands, might cut offaid to Pakistan if the Musharraf regime doesn�t get more aggressive about hunting down al-Qaeda operatives within its borders (so […]

BRAVO DEL TORO. I�m with Comrade Lemieux on Gump, although agnostic on The Departed (it�s just a weird personal thing; I got kinda bored with mob movies around the time of Goodfellas and I don�t go see that many of them, although this one sounds a little different than most). But the great victory of […]

BRIEFLY, ON PIRACY. Tom Zeller arrives late at the piracy party. Piracy off the coast of Somalia and in the Straits of Malacca has received a lot of attention in the past three or four years. The pirates, typically, travel in small gangs in small boats armed with AKs and occasionally RPGs. Most modern cargo […]

WHY SPECIFICS? Krugman warms my heart today with a column calling for substance from the presidential hopefuls and laying out an array of issues on which the electorate deserves to know specifics from those seeking to lead. I’m also fascinated by the counterargument he identifies, in which candidates need to be elected and adapt to […]

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: DEMOCRATIC STARS ALIGNING. Robert Kuttner marvels at the strength of the Democratic presidential field for ’08 and the crappiness of the GOP’s line-up. –The Editors

POLITICS IS CONFLICT. I see David Broder has penned yet another paean to the “bold” Unity ’08 project. (Broder’s next column: it would be a really “bold” idea to have a sitcom in which a dumb fat guy is married to a supermodel.) This whole thing is so stupid that it almost lends it too […]

THE POOR ARE GETTING POORER. So suggests a new McClatchy Newspapers analysis of the 2005 Census: The McClatchy analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. That’s 56 percent faster than the overall poverty population grew in the same period. McClatchy’s review also found statistically significant […]

THANK GOD FOR THE RAIN TO WASH THE TRASH FROM THE SIDEWALK. When it came out, I assumed that The Departed was too good and too alive to be competitive for Best Picture; I’m happy to be wrong, and it’s good that the greatest living American director got his award. I still can’t quite believe […]