Blog: TAPPED

DAVID BRODER: REPUBLICANS PRESUMED INNOCENT; DEMS PRESUMED GUILTY. You really couldn’t ask for a more perfect illustration of the punditry’s double-standard when it comes to “authenticity” than today’s Washington Post column by David Broder. After approvingly quoting the view in Joe Klein‘s new book that Al Gore and John Kerry were “trimming their public positions […]

FUN WITH SURVEILLANCE. Turns out the NSA, with the collaboration of every phone company except Qwest, is monitoring all of our calls — not to listen in to what’s being said, but simply to gather data about the calls and draw inferences from that. It’s important to link this up to the broader chain. One […]

DEAN’S BURN RATE DEJA VU. The Washington Post reports this morning that Rahm Emanuel, head of the DCCC, stormed out of a meeting with DNC head Howard Dean over worries that Dean was spending too much money in too many states in a way that was not geared to winning this fall’s congressional elections. Emanuel’s […]

WATERS WARS. Let me recommend Jon Margolis‘s fascinating piece on TAP Online about Canada’s strange, and potentially untenable, refusal to export their fresh water. As Margolis writes, “Canada has 20 percent of all the world�s fresh water, to slake the thirsts and irrigate the crops of only 0.5 percent of the world�s population. [And] with […]

TRUTHINESS IN THE STYLE SECTION. Inspired by Friends With Money, The New York Times decided to inflict a little ignorance on the American people, informing their readers that economic barriers to friendship are growing in salience because “other barriers have been broken down.” After all, people make friends in college where “Students from country-club families […]

STATES’ WHATS? The Washington Post‘s invaluable business columnist Steven Pearlstein has an elegant little takedown of this week’s round of supposed health reforms. “The Republicans,” he writes, “are engaged in a largely cynical exercise to blame government regulation for everything that’s wrong with the insurance market while offering to reward their friends in the small-business […]

A SIMPLE PLAN. Pondering the common good versus individual rights while in line for a burrito just now, a thought occurred to me: Why do you need to opt-in to be an organ donor? I’m not going to take such a stridently collectivist line as to suggest that we harvest organs against people’s wills, but […]

IF A, THEN A. Good to see my colleague Harold Meyerson continuing the GOP-has-no-ideas argument. As he notes, their case for retaining Congress isn’t an agenda, but a tautology — if the Democrats win Congress, then the Democrats win Congress. It’s an unsettling thought, to be sure, though when pollsters ask, “Overall, which party, the […]

A COUNTERINSURGENCY TACTIC BY ANY ANOTHER NAME. I think there’s more heat than light to my disagreement with Fast Leon, since we’re in pretty close agreement about reasonable policy responses to the situation in Sudan. On the semantic issue, I — and the U.N. — want to say that a given mass killing is either […]

CONTRA MATT. My friend over the cubicle wall does a disservice to the debate over Darfur by calling into question some basic facts about the genocide. First, he falls into a trap that paralyzed international responses to genocide following the holocaust. Namely, that �genocide� primarily means the German slaughter of the Jews of Europe. The […]