Blog: TAPPED

On its face, David Brooks’ most recent column for the The New York Times is a policy-focused critique of Occupy Wall Street and the “We are the 99 Percent” movement. “If there is a core theme to the Occupy Wall Street movement,” he writes, “it is that the virtuous 99 percent of society is being […]

At last night’s Republican debate, Newt Gingrich got asked about the fact that Medicare spends a huge amount of its funds on procedures in the last two years of patients’ lives, much of which are pointless or even harmful. His answer was, essentially, that the government should pay for any medical procedure anyone wants, no […]

Jon Chait has a contrarian take on last night’s debate: The big question of tonight’s Republican presidential debate was whether Rick Perry, cratering in the polls and facing a party Establishment starting to accept the inevitability of Mitt Romney, would survive. I think he did. He is a bad debater, but given the history of […]

Why do liberals love Elizabeth Warren so much? It’s because of her actual record and positions, of course, and also because she is very talented at taking complex issues and presenting them in ways that are easy to understand without dumbing them down. It’s also because she has a kind of nurturing warrior thing going […]

Flickr/Vaguely Artistic My feature from the November issue is up on the homepage today. Republicans, after gaining control of many state legislatures in 2010, have undertaken a coordinated effort to suppress voting rights. Photo-identification laws have been the splashiest measures passed, but a slew of subtler changes pose just as large a threat. My piece […]

Politico reports on this exchange between Herman Cain and conservative radio host Neil Boortz: Boortz, at the tail end of the interview, asks Cain how he’d do in a debate against Obama: “It would almost be no contest.” Ticking off ways he could compete with Obama, Boortz says that Cain would be able to talk […]

When a candidate from the party you dislike has no chance at all of being successful, it’s hard to get too worked up about him or her. Yes, Rick Santorum is repellent, but how mad can you get at him? It’s not as though he’ll have the power to affect millions of lives anytime soon. […]

With a full three months before the first Republican presidential contests, there’s still a lot that can change in the race. For now, however, Mitt Romney is riding strong in New Hampshire, a crucial primary state. According to a new poll released by Harvard University and the Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm University, Romney […]

Here, courtesy of Think Progress, is Herman Cain doing a little preemption for when future interviews reveal him to be not particularly knowledgeable about the kind of stuff a president needs to know: Yes, he said, “Ubeki-beki-beki-stan-stan.” And it’s good to know that before he departs for a state visit to a foreign country, he […]

Despite a long history of ideological heterodoxy, Mitt Romney has managed to move through the Republican nomination process unscathed by conservative attacks. To a large degree, you can say that Romney has been blessed with terrible opponents. Lower-tier candidates like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have never posed a threat to the Romney juggernaut, while […]