Blog: TAPPED

BUSINESS INTERESTS OVER NATIONAL SECURITY, PART 84. The top story in this morning�s CongressDailyAM (subscription only) began: A coalition of industry groups is mounting an aggressive lobbying campaign to persuade House Homeland Security Committee Republicans to oppose an amendment that would require all cargo to be scanned at foreign ports before being shipped to the […]

HOW MASS IS YOU DESTRUCTION? Jonah Goldberg replies apropos our earlier disagreement. There seem to be two points of contention. On the question of chemical and biological weapons, I’d say this: There’s no doubt that you can kill a lot of people through aerial bombardment with toxic chemicals (see the case of Saddam Hussein and […]

IMPORTANT COJONES FOLLOW-UP. I�m going to lower the level of discourse here for a moment, but following up on Ezra�s mention of cojones earlier in the day, I thought it only appropriate to offer up this Reuters piece. –Alec Oveis

PRICE GOUGING FOR FUN AND POLITICAL PROFIT. Let’s get something straight: the President’s proposed investigation into gasoline price gouging is straight theatre. Not just because, as Matt noted, the Bush White House and the Republican Congress are funded by (and composed of) oilmen, but because gouging simply isn’t the issue. At best, an investigation into […]

YET ANOTHER DELAY IN PROBING BUSH’S PREWAR DECEPTIONS. Can this be true? From The Hill: Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said he wants to divide his panel�s inquiry into the Bush administration�s handling of Iraq-related intelligence into two parts, a move that would push off its most politically […]

LESS COMMON, MORE GOODS. Ed Kilgore‘s remarks on the Supreme Leader’s “common good” article inspires some thoughts of my own. I certainly agree that the interest-group model of party and movement organization is ill-serving progressive politics. I’m not 100 percent sure how that insight translates into Kilgore’s contention that “there is tangibly a deep craving […]

HEADING TO THE SOURCE. It’s a rare day when I give George W. Bush credit for political courage, but traveling to my hometown of Irvine, California, and forthrightly saying that “massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic. It’s just not going to work,” takes some cojones. Orange County is second only to San Diego […]

WHO TO BELIEVE? I read with interest today’s Washington Post report on the growing (if still limited) presence of Shiite militias — Moqtada al-Sadr‘s Mahdi Army, SCIRI’s Badr Brigade — in the oil-rich northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk. With Kurdish forces digging in and insisting on solidifying Kurdish control of the city, the potential for […]

MORE ON SABRI. Jonah Goldberg links to this earlier NBC news report on the Naji Sabri issue. Jonah and his readers seem to have two points to make. One is that the NBC account allegedly contradicts the CBS account. The other is to mock CBS for being “a month behind” on the story. Both claims […]

FAKE CONSERVATISM. Can there be anything more silly looking than the oil industry’s bought-and-paid-for GOP servants in Congress and the White House pretending to crack down on alleged price-fixing in the oil industry? No doubt some of this is going on (probably at the level of retail gas stations rather than the big business end […]