Blog: TAPPED

TWO QUICK SCANDAL FOLLOW-UPS. Regarding Mike‘s take on Charlie Rangel, Nancy Pelosi, and Bill Jefferson, tensions between Pelosi and the Congressional Black Caucus (including Rangel) have indeed exploded since her move yesterday to have Jefferson step down from his Ways and Means Committee post. As for ABC News’s afternoon report about Dennis Hastert being targeted […]

EUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM. Scott McLemee has written a terrific, thoughtful critique of the deeply annoying Euston Manifesto; it’s well worth a read. Todd Gitlin‘s quoted comments in the piece strike me as particularly apt and refreshing. No one has really managed to top this short-and-sweet riff from Daniel Davies, however. UPDATE: This came […]

NOT CROSSING THE AISLE. Ed Kilgore and Matt game out some of the politics of immigration legislation, with Matt taking a slightly more hardline don’t-pass-anything position. Kilgore, however, fully acknowledges that a bill coming out of a House-Senate conference would be substantively worse than no bill at all if it leans in the House’s draconian […]

GORE WATCH. When I started this up, I had no idea it would be such a massive undertaking. But Gore‘s popping up all over the place. He hit John Tierney‘s column Monday, forming the inspiration for a fairly bizarre effort that lambasted Gore for getting global warming right before others did. “As therapeutic as this […]

UP IS DOWN, REDUX. People have been rightly concerned for a while now about seeing, in the current domestic discussion of Iran, a twilight-zone repetition of the dynamics of the prewar Iraq debate. Greg, looking at today’s Washington Post piece confirming Iran’s desire for direct talks with the United States and delineating a policy divide […]

MORE! Nathan Newman is certainly right about importing nurses and doctors from other countries. Not only does it head off excellent jobs that could be filled by native workers, but it deprives other nations of trained individuals necessary for their development. That said, we do have a supply problem for doctors and, particularly, nurses. We […]

THE NEXT 10 WORDS. Brendan Nyhan reports on John McCain‘s bold plan to end the violence in Iraq: “One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit,’” said Mr. McCain, according to Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, an invitee, and […]

INSERT SNOW PUN. Speaking of the unbearable lightness of John Snow‘s policy knowledge, check out gay liberal ninja Barney Frank disemboweling him during testimony last week. Snow’s embarrassment was so complete that even the Wall Street Journal, no friend of Frank’s, couldn’t resist highlighting it. Ah, schadenfreude. –Ezra Klein

IS IT JUST ME? Or does anyone else suspect that maybe half the reason Hastert et al. are so in heat over the Jefferson raid has nothing to do separation of powers and something to do with the fact that if they defend Jefferson and help him stay in the House, the corruption issue doesn�t […]

POLICING THE CAPITOL. I know this is an out of season remark and all good liberals should be both distancing themselves from corrupt Rep. William Jefferson and mocking the GOP leadership for suddenly taking issue with the problem of executive branch overreach under circumstances that appear designed to make it easier for congressmen to take […]