Blog: TAPPED

DAVID BROOKS DOES ANDY ROONEY: In a typical display of the utter vacuity of conervative punditry in general and his shtick in particular, David Brooks wastes his New York Times column on a cranky, silly rant today. Instead of addressing any real crises in the world, like the escalating civil war in Iraq, or even […]

WHAT WE LOST WITH VILSACK: Of course everyone’s initial reaction to Tom Vilsack dropping out was to assume that nothing of substance was missing. Just another moderate technocrat to fail, right? But as Brad Plumer pointed out yesterday, Vilsack did have one thing going for him, “hands down, the most ambitious energy and climate-change plan […]

SUMMER INTERNSHIPS AT THE PROSPECT. The Prospect is accepting applications for summer internships in our D.C. office. Any Tapped readers out there who are interested in (or who know someone who might be interested in) spending the summer working at the office, helping out with the magazine and the site, should definitely apply. The deadline […]

A MAN AFTER HIS TIME. I think Badler‘s belief that Vilsack dropped out because he couldn’t fund up is only half the story. If Schwarzenegger could run, he’d have no problems fundraising. Romney, who is running, has no problem fundraising. Hell, even Huckabee‘s pulling in some dough. So while it’s of course true that candidates […]

A DISTRACTOR STORY. E.J. Dionne‘s column this morning on the Hillary Clinton–Barack Obama–David Geffen throw-down over who dissed who to whom made me really wonder about where this campaign season is heading. The whole flap is completely uninteresting and will, in six months, be as long forgotten as the Edwards blogger controversy, which I’ve been […]

VILSACK, RICHARDSON, AND MATT. I think Tom Vilsack‘s departure from the race provides an answer to the question Matt posed in his column the other day: Why is a popular second term governor from a swing state, like Bill Richardson, not being taken seriously by the national media? As Matt points out, those are the […]

MORE RAPE ALLEGATIONS IN IRAQ. Yet another woman has come forward with rape allegations against Iraqi security forces. Four soldiers allegedly raped the 50-year-old Sunni woman and attempted to rape her two daughters in Tal Afar. The fifth soldier, standing guard outside, came in and held his fellow soldiers at gunpoint to make them stop. […]

THE PRISON RAPE PANELISTS. Further adventures in the crimes statistics search led to the discovery that a Review Panel on Prison Rape was empanelled on March 29, 2006 over at the Department of Justice, and that one of its three members is Steven McFarland, a faith-based bureaucrat at DoJ. In light of the prison rape […]

GIANT SQUID! Ok, so not really “giant,” so much as “colossal.” Some long-line fishermen hooked the hefty cephalopod in the Ross Sea near Antarctica. Just how big is this thing? Dr. Steve O’Shea, the squid-hunter made famous by this awesome New Yorker profile from 2004, said if calamari were made from the squid, the rings […]

TOMMENTUM! So Tom Vilsack is apparently dropping out of the race, which is probably the best thing for all involved. This just isn’t a year that favors centrist technocrats who want to price index Social Security. The immediate impact of his decision will be to make Iowa significantly more important than it would otherwise be, […]