Blog: TAPPED

A PLEA TO OUR EXPERTS. For the reasons that Suzanne Nossel outlines here, I am tempted to think that a Chapter 7 Security Council resolution could offer the international community the necessary diplomatic leverage to get Iran back into the fold. And it is refreshing, for once, to see the United States and the EU-3 […]

A BAD CHOICE. Since Mike brought it up, I have to say I was really disappointed by Matt Santos‘s choice for secretary of state. Bill Clinton gave a key national security job to the GOP when he made Bill Cohen his secretary of defense, there was talk of John Kerry trying to give a foreign […]

PHILOSOPHY FOUL! Brad DeLong and Eric Umansky both praise today’s John Tierney column which deploys John Rawls‘s notion of a veil of ignorance to argue for a more liberal immigration policy. I agree with Tierney’s conclusion, but he’s abusing the philosophical material here which just happens to be drawn from my alleged former area of […]

WRONG AGAIN, TOMASKY. Nope, not about the Democrats and the common good. I�m basically right about that. But my daring prediction that Matt Santos would make Arnie Vinick his vice president on The West Wing went up in smoke Sunday night (and I wasn�t even around to see it — I was in an undisclosed […]

LIES AND THE LYING LIARS WHO TELL THEM. I believe I mentioned the $100 rebate plan on this fine blog yesterday. Matt might consider reading Tapped sometime. I will agree with him, however, that the current collapse of the Republican juggernaut is rendering the liberal blogging game mighty difficult. The post where I mentioned the […]

HARD OUT THERE FOR A PIMP AFTER ALL. One of the quirks of American society is that this is the kind of country where an intelligence official can admit to having partied with defense contractors known to bribe public officials in exchange for defense and intelligence contracts while simultaneously insisting that any allegations that prostitutes […]

BUSH V. NIXON. Via Kevin Drum, Jonathan Schwarz at Tiny Revolution graphs the approval and disapproval ratings of George W. Bush and Richard Nixon. The similarity of their trajectories doesn’t bode well for Bush’s effort to revive his presidency, although the graphs also make it very clear that Bush did benefit politically, at least in […]

THE COMMON GOOD VS. VARIOUS PARTICULARISMS. I was in Egypt last week (about which more later), so didn’t get a chance to weigh in on the great “common good” debate inspired by Mike Tomasky‘s magisterial piece in this month’s Prospect when it was in full flower, but a couple of the responses at the end […]

IT’S HARD OUT THERE FOR A BLOGGER. With the GOP all unpopular and mired in apparent disarray, there’s very little for a progressive writer to spend his time pushing back on. I think we here at TAPPED totally failed to acknowledge the goofy $100 rebate plan that was the Republican alternative to outlining an energy […]

MEMO TO THE CORNER: DON�T APPROPRIATE MY NEIL YOUNG! Just so John J. Miller knows, �Rocking in the Free World� did indeed capture the spirit of 1989, but not of jubilation after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The album it appeared on, Freedom, was released before the fall of the Berlin Wall. And if […]