Blog: TAPPED

For years, liberals have entertained the possibility that Mitt Romney is secretly a moderate whom they could actually agree with. After all, he was for abortion before he was against it, and Romneycare is no conservative achievement. Jonathan Chait admitted as much in 2008, a position he reiterated last week: “He is not, at heart, […]

Last night, Ron Paul was on The Daily Show, and under the gentlest of questioning from Jon Stewart, he said some truly insane things. After alleging that people who don’t support him “don’t understand what freedom is all about,” Paul made his usual case that government is bad because it makes decisions for everyone, whereas […]

Via Kevin Drum, this poll from Winthrop University shows, among other things, that a full 74.7 percent of South Carolina Republicans think the term “socialist” describes Barack Obama well or very well (in addition, almost 30 percent believe he’s a Muslim, and 36 percent think he was probably or definitely born in another country). So […]

Over at Transom, a site showcasing interesting things going on in public radio, Ira Glass explains what makes Radiolab such a terrific program, which is kind of like having Ted Williams explain to you what makes Joe DiMaggio a great hitter. Here he is talking about a one-minute introduction to a segment on the program, […]

Over at Alyssa Rosenberg’s blog, a post about the class differences between heroes and villains has become a thread over Batman and his methods. In particular, the commenters are working through one particular question: Is Batman crazy? As the argument goes, it’s not that Batman is insane, per say, but that he has a monomaniacal […]

As has been shown time and time again, African American families have been the biggest losers in the current economy. Black unemployment, for example, has been in the 16 percent range for more than two years, with dim prospects for improvement. The poor economic position of African Americans is most evidence with regards to overall […]

I strongly recommend Garrett Epps’s new article in the Prospect. But like Amanda Marcotte, I don’t think this is right: We can, of course, study cases where the Court tried to substitute for a genuine popular movement. Brown was not one; black Americans had carried the idea of integration forward for nearly a century by […]

At this point, political observers are almost unanimous in their assessment of last night’s Republican presidential debate: Mitt Romney won, and Rick Perry is not ready for prime time. It’s not just that he seemed tired and lethargic — his answers to substantive questions on foreign and domestic policy were either weak or incoherent, and […]