Blog: TAPPED

ARCANE INTERNATIONAL LAW BLEG. Here�s a question that perhaps some of our readers with legal knowledge or relevant experience can weigh in on: citing security concerns, the prosecutor of the special court for Sierra Leone has asked to use the premises of the International Criminal Court in The Hague to try Charles Taylor. Should the […]

LE SIGH. As Brad DeLong notes, Richard Cohen‘s admission that he didn’t realize that Bush had lied until sometime last week is a bit absurd. If you don’t think Bush is a liar, you simply haven’t been paying attention. And if you haven’t been paying attention, maybe you shouldn’t be a Washington Post political columnist. […]

THE VISION THING. Too many people too soon forgot about John Boehner‘s laugh-out-loud hilarious campaign manifesto released back during his House leadership race, in which the Ohio rep. included epigraphs from Winston Churchill and Walt Disney and implored his fellow Republicans to reclaim their souls through a renewed commitment to spewing vacuous platitudes. For a […]

IN DEFENSE OF BLUE STATE ELITISM. I’m going to go a step further than my genteel colleague Sam and defend The Prospect‘s Red State Dossier on substantive grounds as well. Coming mere moments after an election that largely turned on a defense of “traditional marriage” and contempt for blue state values, it actually was the […]

HILLARY RAISES BIG BUCKS IN TEXAS BUSH COUNTRY. Senator Clinton did a great deal of fundraising around the country in March, and her private fundraising schedule — which was passed along by a source — shows that she raked in big bucks in that most impenetrable of red-state strongholds: Texas. The schedule lists a dozen […]

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, YOUR AMERICAN GOVERNMENT! It’s rarely a surprise to hear that the Bush administration lies, but it’s occasionally impressive to read a textured account of how brazen and conscious their deceptions are. And no one is better at offering such retellings than The National Journal‘s Murray Waas: Karl Rove, President Bush’s chief political […]

“RED AMERICA”: BLUE AMERICA’S FAULT? Rob Anderson‘s effort to cast liberal elites as the real bad guys in the Ben Domenech scandal does indeed seem more than a bit strained. Anderson speculates that Jim Brady hired Domenech precisely because he was a crude, unqualified caricature of conservative punditry that Brady, fogged by blue state elitism, […]

PRIORITIES? Via the excellent Coalition for Darfur blog, I see that the State Department is probing into a New York Times advertorial (PDF) paid for by the government of Sudan to see if it violated US sanctions. This is ludicrous. As far as I�m concerned, no newspaper has done more to raise public awareness about […]

THE DEMAND SIDE. As the immigration debate lurches forward, lots of folks have asked why there’s so little focus on the demand side. Wouldn’t it be easier to dry up the jobs than patrol the desert? My read is that you couldn’t totally staunch the flow by patrolling employers, but you could sure put a […]

FREE AT LAST. Reporter Jill Carroll, who was kidnapped in Baghdad on Jan. 7, was freed, apparently unharmed, by her captors today. The A.P. has the details. Her parents and friends are, needless to say, elated. “I don’t know whether to cry or skip down my street,” Jackie Spinner told ABC’s Good Morning America, according […]