Blog: TAPPED

HYPING THE THREAT. Yesterday, David Albright and Corey Hinderstein of the Institute for Science and International Security reported (PDF) that US officials sought to hype the Iranian nuclear threat following a closed International Atomic Energy Agency briefing to Security Council members. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) privately briefed permanent members of the UN Security […]

TIMES AND POST PART WAYS ON BUSH’S PRIVATE SESSIONS. Did anyone else notice something intriguing about The Washington Post‘s article today — flagged below by Garance — about President Bush‘s private off-the-record sessions with reporters? The Post obviously viewed the president’s campaign as newsworthy — after all, they wrote a story about it. At the […]

MCCAIN DRAIN. E.J. Dionne hits the nail on the head today when he says that the positions that John McCain will need to take in order to win the Republican primary may very well lose him the support of the more moderate voters who’ve hailed him as a maverick, to his perhaps permanent electoral or […]

STEPHEN SPRUIELL LAPS UP DEBORAH HOWELL’S LATEST SELF-CONTRADICTION. Incredibly, Stephen Spruiell is still trying — and still failing — to discredit the notion that Washingtonpost.com’s hiring of Ben Domenech was a sop to the right. Now he says he emailed Deborah Howell and asked her to explain the discrepancy between two statements. First, her column […]

AS THE IMMIGRATION BILL TURNS. First, the good news. Arlen Specter‘s Judiciary Committee came through with a bill closely approximating the McCain-Kennedy proposal: With Republicans deeply divided, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted on Monday to legalize the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants and ultimately to grant them citizenship, provided that they hold jobs, pass criminal […]