Blog: TAPPED

THE IDEOLOGY’S THE THING. I’m not so high on this “Bush wants to bomb Iran to secure his legacy” concept. As we enter into the twighlight years of Bushism, it’s important to avoid ascribing problematic elements of the past five years of American governance to Bush’s personal idiosyncrasies when, in fact, the real source of […]

IS WAL-MART THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS? I think I’ll throw my lot in with Michelle Cottle and Wal-Mart (sigh) on this one. There aren’t very many industries I’d wish the Beast of Bentonville on. I’d have preferred they kept out of the unionized, value-oriented grocery sector, for instance. But insofar as I would like […]

FRED HIATT REFUSES ACCOUNTABILITY; BILL KELLER ACCEPTS IT. The big news organizations need to come to terms with their role in spreading White House misinformation — and their failure to dig out the truth — in the run-up to the Iraq war. Because if they don’t, they risk making the same catastrophic mistakes again in […]

OF LEGACIES AND LEADERS. Mike Crowley notices Sy Hersh‘s ascribing Bush‘s enthusiasm for an attack on Iran to the “legacy thing”: Bush wants to be remembered for saving Iran, not merely wrecking Iraq. Which reminds me, anybody else remember the press’s obsession with Bill Clinton‘s second-term legacy-building? I can’t recall Clinton ever mentioning it, but […]

IRAN REALITY. One thing that makes the Iran issue difficult is that one side is led by a religious fanatic suffering delusions of grandeur with a taste for demagogic posturing and the other country has, well, about the same. Thus, it seems that American and Iranian officials alike are exaggerating the successes of the Iranian […]

BILL KELLER AND THE BLOGS. Bill Keller is answering questions at The New York Times‘s site this week, and at one point he offered a somewhat testy view of the blogosphere in responding to a couple of readers who wrote in asking about the Judith Miller affair. Keller responded: Sigh. I can’t imagine that there […]

SOME RECOVERY. Brad Plumer, wielding a fearsome EPI study, does a nice job debunking the claim that stagnating wages are merely the inevitable effect of rising health costs. As he notes, between 2004 and 2005 the bottom 20 percent saw their wages drop nearly 2%, but only 24% of this quintile receives employer-based health care. […]

NOW THAT’S BRAND LOYALTY. Imagine if Coca-Cola, tired of seeing “New Coke” used as a universal signifier of a remarkably bad idea, blasted out a press release demanding that folks cease smearing the trademark of what was merely a sugared up soft drink concocted in accordance with a national survey of soda taste preferences. Oh […]

HARDBALL. It’s a bit Machiavellian, but what a move. Turns out that a hefty chunk of congressional Republicans wanted to delete James Sensenbrenner‘s provision turning all illegal immigrants into felons. Too explosive, they thought, to unite behind a bill that would render 1.6 million children serious criminals hiding on the lam. The Bush administration asked […]

PROFILES IN COURAGE. This is pretty disappointing stuff. A Senate bill, cosponsored by a variety of leading Democrats, to force call centers to identify their country of origin at the beginning of the call. Exactly why the United States Senate has to force the dude handling your tech support to mention that he’s in New […]