Blog: TAPPED

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: OUR BEST SHOT. Ann reports on the debate over making the HPV vaccine mandatory for all sixth-grade girls. Missing from too much of the discussion, Ann says, is the question of funding; this vaccine is most important for low-income girls, but if states pass laws mandating the vaccine without ensuring the […]

THE OBAMA MESSIAH WATCH. Timothy Noah of Slate is planning to make this a regular feature: I therefore inaugurate the Obama Messiah Watch, which will periodically highlight gratuitously adoring biographical details that appear in newspaper, television, and magazine profiles of this otherworldly presence in our midst. What a wonderful idea! I’m sure that Noah had […]

PEE-WEE ARGUMENTS. Jonah Goldberg loooves hypocrisy arguments. It’s his very favorite thing. Get into an argument with Goldberg on a given substantive issue, and nine times out of ten he will turn it promptly into a discussion of how different liberal X made the same argument he was making on different topic Y � so […]

PRIZE WINNER? If ever anyone deserved to win something as a form of redemption, this man deserves this prize, for which he was nominated today. –Tom Schaller

GLAD WE’VE CLEARED THAT UP. Jonah Golberg: In response Matt admits to “actually knowing nothing about the historical record of Lindbergh” but seems to take offense to the comparison nonetheless — even though I pretty clearly don’t buy the conventional mythology of Lindbergh as a virulent anti-Semite (nor, I would like to think, would any […]

SENATORS AND THE PRESIDENCY. Robert Geilfuss smartly shreds the idea that Senators are obviously disadvantaged as presidential candidates because their voluminous vote records present some sort of near-insurmountable problem: While Harding and Kennedy were the only direct Senate-to-White House candidates, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman, Benjamin Harrison, Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce, John […]

ONLY IN ITALY. In a perfectly Italian story, the wife of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi had La Repubblica, a paper hostile to Berlusconi, publish a front page letter to her husband demanding a public apology for his shameless and shameful flirting with other women. This has not only become an encompassing political story, it’s […]

TOMCAT SUNSET. The United States Navy no longer flies the F-14 Tomcat, not because the plane isn’t combat capable (it remains an excellent platform) but rather because the maintenance costs are very high compared to the F/A-18. Consequently, the Navy now has a vast surplus of spare F-14 parts. DoD is in the habit of […]

CONDUCT UNBECOMING. Last month, I spoke on the phone with a former army officer, S.P., who told me he had been invited to Fort Lewis, Washington, by Lt. Ehren Watada. Watada, as you may recall, became a minor media celebrity last summer when he refused to go to Iraq because he did not support the […]

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: ORGANIZATION MAN. The SEIU’s presidential primary-related programs; Americans Against Escalation; They Work For Us. Even with Change to Win something of a fizzle, Andy Stern remains liberalism’s most innovative architect. Harold makes the case. –The Editors