Blog: TAPPED

Veteran TV newsman Dave Marash reports in the Columbia Journalism Review that television news operations, both cable and network, have been turning away from prepared video packages: We asked [the Project for Excellence in Journalism] to break out its data for two periods, four years apart—the first three months of 2007, and the first three […]

Remember Glenn Beck? For a while there he was the most talked-about media figure in the country, his mug shouting from magazine covers as he channeled the particular brand of crazy that had seized the Republican party. His unhinged conspiracy theories and venomous hatred for Barack Obama were perfectly in tune with what a significant […]

Perhaps the most telling moment in last night’s GOP debate was the crowd twice cheering the 234 executions Rick Perry has presided over. This would be grotesque enough if this high rate of executions was the product of a scrupulous criminal justice system. But as the case of *Cameron Todd Willingham* illustrates all too well, […]

As Patrick Caldwell mentioned already, of all eight candidates at last night’s GOP debate, it was Rick Perry who sickened many progressives when he defended his record on the death penalty: “In the state of Texas, if you come into our state and you kill one of our children, you kill a police officer, you’re […]

(Photo: Flickr/simminch) Comparisons between Rick Perry and George W. Bush have become routine since the current governor announced his presidential campaign. It’s a natural assumption given their shared conservative credentials and Texas backgrounds. But at last night’s debate, Perry showed himself to be even more extreme than Bush in at least one area: their description […]

At the moment, many liberals are looking at the abysmal economy and saying to themselves, “It’ll be OK. Rick Perry is an extremist nut, and once people learn that, he’ll never win a majority.” He’ll be the next Barry Goldwater or George McGovern, nominees just too far out of the mainstream for the American electorate […]

Last night’s Republican presidential debate featured an interesting exchange about health care — I haven’t been able to locate a transcript, but the gist was that Rick Perry was asked why Texas has the highest rate of people with no health insurance in the country (over a quarter of Texans have no insurance), and he […]

The Bachmann campaign announced over the weekend that campaign manager Ed Rollins would be vacating that role and assume the more auxiliary position of “senior advisor.” Rollins’ health was cited as the explanation for the move. Though it does seem possible that the daily grind of a campaign could get to a 68-year-old, it looks […]

This, from the front page of the Drudge Report, is just unambiguously racist: Get it? Because black people are lazy, shiftless moochers, they are naturally ecstatic about President Obama’s forthcoming push for renewed payroll tax cuts and unemployment insurance. On a related note, a July survey from the Pew Research Center found a large uptick […]

We’d all agree that our politics would function better if conservatives and progressives could understand each other’s point of view better, instead of simply vilifying one another. In that spirit, I’d like to offer a window into the way we on the left think on one particular issue — and particularly, what we think about […]