Blog: TAPPED

WORST. PROGRAM. EVER. Via Tyler Cowen, Human Events lists the “ten most harmful government programs,” two of which — income tax withholding and earmarking — aren’t programs at all. The super-popular pillars of the social insurance state — Social Security (#1), Medicare (#2), and Medicaid (#7) — all make the list, along with genuinely harmful […]

JUST POSTED ON TAP: THE OPTIONS FOR DARFUR. Mark �Fast Leon� Goldberg asks liberal hawks to not make the same mistakes with Darfur as they did with Iraq. –The Editors

THE SUNLIGHT FOUNDATION AND CONGRESSPEDIA. Today Jeff Birnbaum reports on the activities of the interesting new Sunlight Foundation, financed by securities bigwig Michael Klein and headed up by goo-goo veteran Ellen Miller. I was briefed on some of Sunlight’s activities a few weeks ago; certainly one of their most compelling visions, looking forward, would be […]

DO-NOTHIN’. The collapse of the Republicans’ once-formidable legislative machine in Congress is fairly bracing to behold. While immigration reform remains bogged down, intra-GOP squabbling over earmarking and appropriations are hampering the prospects for passing a budget resolution, an emergency supplemental bill, and lobbying reform. The fight over the emergency Iraq supplemental is amusing: the President’s […]

CHIMP RIGHTS. Andrew Stuttaford notes that Spain’s Socialist Party is pushing a bill to give great apes legal rights in part on the grounds that “humans share 98.4% of our genes with chimpanzees, 97.7% with gorillas, and 96.4% with orangutans.” Jonah Goldberg objects to the whole DNA-sharing methodology, and I think there are some good […]

BRAVE, NEW ECONOMY. This post of Andrew Sullivan‘s reminds me of a point I’ve been meaning to make for awhile now. Memory jogged by a book on world opinions towards America, he rhapsodizes, “twenty-one years ago, six weeks after arriving here, I wrote to tell my parents: no offense, but I’ve found a home. Two […]

THE GOOD SPIN. Notwithstanding earlier positive remarks about the Post opinion page, they’ve chosen to run another David Ignatius column in which he simply repeats, utterly uncritically, whatever Zalmay Khalilzad told him yesterday afternoon. Spencer Ackerman gets at some of the issues, but I don’t even understand why it’s a good thing that new boss […]

WHO IS THE BLOGOSPHERE? Chris Bowers‘s analysis of the demographics of the progressive blogosphere is well worth a read. In sum, “Active readers of Democratic political blogs are very highly educated, highly politically active, quite well-to-do, voracious consumers of media, not very young, and skew male.” Bowers thinks this runs contrary to stereotype, but to […]

CROOKS AND LEAKERS. The Post editorial page often disappoints, but yesterday’s missive on Porter Goss‘s zealous pursuit of CIA employees who blow the whistle on illegal torture and detentions is a good one. The only thing I would say is that it’s past the time to drop the pretense that the administration’s problem is, say, […]

THE TROUBLE WITH JAY. Regarding Greg‘s apt calling-out of Jay Rockefeller for once again indulging Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts‘ partisan shell games, it’s worth revisiting Laura Rozen‘s reported piece on the Rockefeller-Roberts dynamic from our November issue. Rozen paints a complicated picture of both the real constraints Rockefeller faces and the ways in which […]