Blog: TAPPED

ANOTHER BORING POST ABOUT IRAQ. After reading it, Al Gore‘s actual statement on Iraq strikes me as significantly more open-minded and conciliatory than Garance‘s gloss below or the one ABC News gave to it made it sound. By which I mean that, as a member of the anti-war base, I find Gore’s take on this […]

GORE SHOWS HIS ROOTS. Via Mickey Kaus, Al Gore raised questions about setting a deadline for withdrawing from Iraq during his This Week appearance yesterday. Some will say that this puts Gore to the right of likely ’08 presidential contenders John Kerry, Russ Feingold, and, after his recent comments, perhaps even Evan Bayh, but I’d […]

DEMOCRATS ‘O6: CATCH THE ‘BETTERNESS.’ It looks like Harry Reid has begun ending his e-mails with the Democrats’ dreaded 2006 catchphrase: “Together, America can do better.” Without some better wordsmiths, though, the Democrats apparently can’t. I’m reminded of Geoffrey Numberg‘s riff on the line from his forthcoming book, Talking Right: Given the slogan’s resounding vacuity, […]

KRISTOL ON HADITHA. This article is rather repugnant, but I think it contains a pearl of accidental wisdom: “Liberals may want to win a war on terror without fighting, and are shocked that in a war, crimes and abuses occur. But here’s the hard, Trumanesque truth: In war, terrible things happen, including crimes and abuses […]

COMMON GOOD WATCH. The voters love it, as you’ll see in this survey. One question, though, about this finding: “68% of voters strongly agree that the ‘government should be committed to the common good and put the public�s interest above the privileges of the few.’” Does that seriously mean 32 percent of voters say government […]

THE DISTRIBUTION’S THE THING. Conservatives puzzling over this weekend’s New York Times op-ed on “Freakoutanomics” would be well-advised to stop focusing so obsessively on growth numbers and begin paying a bit more attention to the distribution of growth numbers. That’s basically the point of the op-ed, which argues that the 1870’s saw a strong macro-economy […]

ENFORCEMENT FIRST. Tyler Cowen makes a valuable point in the immigration debate, noting that the seemingly commonsense principle that “at least we should enforce the law” is actually a bit odd. Lots of laws are very imperfectly enforced and this isn’t necessarily a problem. The police deliberately downplay the level of resources they dedicate to […]

WHY WE CAN�T “ALL JUST GET ALONG.” I am the author of “Homeward Bound” (The American Prospect, December 2005), where I argued that women quitting their jobs to stay home are making a mistake, work in the public and market world is more likely to produce a flourishing life, and, if men did more domestic […]

THE ESTATE TAX. The Washington Post has a nice set of dueling op-eds on the estate tax today. They’ve matched up Sebastian Mallaby with doltish Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, which is a bit like setting a monkey in intellectual combat with his banana. It’s proof, no doubt, that the editorial page’s overlords treasure the estate […]

GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT. Greg Anrig has a great post over at TPMCafe about the convoluted decision making process at the Department of Homeland Security and the way its evaluation criteria led to the current controversy over the new formula for funding didfferent localities. He’s also unearthed a fact sheet (PDF), written by Department of […]