Blog: TAPPED

FEVERED. Someone please show me a single act of public political courage undertaken by John McCain since he won the New Hampshire primary in 2000 that he hasn’t hedged, trimmed, or walked back completely. The Bush campaign trashed his wife and daughter, and he’s spent the years since trying to get a job as the […]

BENEFITS WITHOUT COSTS. As a follow-up to Tom’s point, I think it’s critical, when discussing potential outreach to religious voters, to consider the potential negative consequences of such strategies. One thing the journalist Peter Boyer has been guilty of is asserting benefits that would come from running more anti-choice candidates that completely ignore the costs […]

GOP MIDTERM CRAPITUDE WATCH. How to outspend your opponent 24-to-1 and lose ground. –Sam Rosenfeld

MILITARY DEMOS CONTINUED. Brad Plumer writes in to point me to this Heritage Foundation analysis showing that, due to the post-9/11 enlistment boost, the army is both a bit richer and more educated than the population as a whole. So there you have it. While on the subject, you’ve really got to check out The […]

HUMAN CAPITAL. Ezra, I think that the lower middle class is more or less the correct answer, although I don’t have ready statistics on the socioeconomic backgrounds of military personnel, either. The military still provides a ready avenue for upward mobility, which means that people on lower economic rungs will find it correspondingly more attractive. […]

FL-GOV: TWO-WAY CONTEST BECOMES THREE-WAY DEBATE. The suddenly-interesting gubernatorial race in Florida took a surprising turn last night, when self-financed independent Max Linn won a court order 20 minutes before the final gubernatorial debate and joined state Attorney General Charlie Crist (R) and Rep. Jim Davis (D) on the stage. As the Palm Beach Post […]

WATERBOARDING: AS NEW ENGLAND AS YACHTING AND LOBSTER ROLLS! Jonah should be ashamed himself for posting this “without comment”: I was recently reading Richard Norton Smith’s biography of Col. Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. It seems that when McCormick was a student at Groton he was subjected to the school tradition of “pumping.” In […]

NANCY. Kevin Drum, Bob Somerby, and Dana Goldstein all offer good comments on this New York Times profile of Nancy Pelosi. Defending Pelosi against petty or mailcious attacks — mainly from her right, but also from her left — used to be a priority of mine before I got too busy, but needless to say […]

WHO FIGHTS? Man, The Corner’s really in damage control mode lately. Depending on the day, you’ll have dozens of posts on Santorum‘s just-around-the-corner comeback, James Webb‘s novels, Casey‘s corruption, Kerry incorrect wording the astoundingly banal point that Ivy League grads are underrepresented in Iraq, etc. Thankfully, on Tapped, we’re still talking about John Kenneth Galbraith […]

TO WREAK HAVOC, KIDNAP. As Spencer notes below, for the past five days, U.S. troops had been encircling Sadr City in order to find a missing soldier they believed was kidnapped by the Mahdi Army, the militia of fiercely anti-American Shi’ite cleric Muqtada Sadr. Sadr denies involvement, but the brother-in-law of the kidnapped soldier says […]