Blog: TAPPED

REBOUND. In a last minute turnaround, House GOP leaders struck a deal with rebelling appropriators late yesterday and narrowly revived their lobbying reform package. A vote is set for next week. Leaders won over the Appropriations Committee members by assuring them that an extension of earmark reforms to the authorizing and tax committees would be […]

THE FULL TANK. Err . . . I’ve been having some trouble dreaming up things to write about lately, but does my morning Washington Post really need not one, not two, but three columns on gas prices? Turns out there’s a lot of political posturing going on. Who knew? But in case you missed the […]

STILL DOING NOTHIN’. Faux lobbying reform bogs down in the House. The total collapse of the Republicans’ legislative capacity is quite remarkable. John Boehner really needs to trot out some of those awesome Famous People quotes he included in his goofball “For a Majority that Matters” manifesto and get his caucus in line. Perhaps Walt […]

NOW THERE’S A BOLD PLAN. It seems almost too obvious to point out, but if the White House press secretary’s job is to build favorable coverage for an administration too often seen as opaque and insular, it’s probably a bad idea to ban all television cameras from the press room, thereby infuriating reporters and further […]

THE DEATH OF MULTICULTURALISM. Ensconced in TimesSelect’s fortress, David Brooks weighs in today on Mike‘s essay. Brooks sees Tomasky’s call for supplanting rights-based liberalism with a new(-old) common good liberalism as reflective of a sea change among Democrats and activists — “over the past few years,” he writes, “multiculturalism has faded away” as a pillar […]

WHEN I WAS YOUNG AND RACIST, I WAS YOUNG AND RACIST. Ryan Lizza‘s new profile of George Allen is the sort of article that can sink a candidacy. Lizza reaches deep into Allen’s past and, like a magician pulling endless amount of ropes from a tiny hat, emerges with decorative nooses, a string of confederate […]

A QUESTION ABOUT KARL ROVE’S SELF-DEFENSE. Can anyone explain this? Here’s how today’s Washington Post described part of the testimony that Karl Rove offered yesterday: Rove’s testimony focused almost exclusively on his conversation about Plame with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper in 2003 and whether the top aide later tried to conceal it, the source […]

WHO YOU CALLIN’ STUPID? Methinks a lot of folks out there are too quick to underestimate the intelligence of highly trained professional politicians. The basic dilemma facing Democrats at the moment regarding gasoline goes as follows: High gas prices are very unpopular with the public. This presents an opportunity for the opposition party to score […]

TELEPHONE AND SADDAM’S TERRORISM. Based on a whole bunch of captured Iraqi documents, the Pentagon has assembled an Iraq Perspective Project report (PDF) on Saddam Hussein‘s regime which serves as the basis for this long article in Foreign Affairs on which Andrew Sullivan based this blog post concluding that “Those who sincerely marched against war […]

MORE DELAYING TACTICS ON IRAQ INTEL PROBE FROM PAT ROBERTS. Senator Pat Roberts is so determined to delay a real probe into the Bush administration’s prewar deceptions that he’s breaking the promises he makes in his own press releases. On March 14, Roberts, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, put out a press release that […]