Blog: TAPPED

(Photo: Flickr/Gage Skidmore) By most accounts, Rick Perry has become the Republican front-runner less than a month after he entered the race. He not only leads by wide margins in national polls, besting former leader Mitt Romney by 15 percent in a survey released yesterday; he appears to hold the edge in many of the […]

Before we get into this post about polling in the presidential race, please understand that I’m not saying that anything we’re seeing today predicts what will happen next November. With that out of the way, let me point out something interesting. Yesterday, two new polls came out on President Obama and the 2012 race. The […]

A.G. Sulzberger has a good article about about recent federal court decisions preventing various radical anti-abortion and anti-immigration measures passed by Tea Party-dominated legislatures from going into effect. Particularly interesting are the injunctions against measures like South Dakota’s three-day waiting period for women seeking abortions and the onerous Kansas regulations designed to cause two of […]

This morning, Mitt Romney published an op-ed in USA Today laying out his economic plan, which will no doubt be read eagerly by people staying in hotels all across America. It’s full of all the expected claptrap and flim-flammery, but there’s one part I wanted to point out: Where President Obama left America’s trade interests […]

Imagine it’s the 2008 primary season. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Bill Richardson, and the other candidates troop up to Vermont for a candidate forum. The questioners, who ask a series of questions demanding fealty to a variety of liberal principles, are Bernie Sanders, Maxine Waters, and Noam Chomsky. OK, you couldn’t imagine that. […]

Even in the age of the Internet, local television news remains the top source of information for Americans. And it’s almost undoubtedly the worst, a festering stew of fearmongering and triviality, with the occasional waterskiing squirrel thrown in. So for your Friday amusement, via The Hairpin, here is a local news crew in Indianapolis, but […]

Could immigration be Rick Perry‘s Achilles’ heel? Folks are beginning to ask. Republican primary voters, The Washington Post tells us, are pestering Republican presidential candidates about it. Ed Kilgore suggests it could be a problem for Perry in South Carolina. So we might be headed for a repeat of the 2008 primaries, where the contest […]

Hapless presidential candidate Rick Santorum is not a happy man. Watch how he talks about same-sex marriage, even before being challenged, in this video taken at an event at Penn State (via Andrew Sullivan): “Does anybody go out there and make the argument as to why this a good thing, because it will happen? Make […]

If there’s anything impressive about Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign, it’s the extent to which he’s convinced the world of his moderation. For example, here’s the first sentence of The New York Times’ write-up on his recently released economic plan: “Jon M. Huntsman Jr. again showed himself on Wednesday to be an ideological outlier in the […]

Between his defense of the scientific consensus and his willingness to denounce the GOP’s brinksmanship on the debt ceiling, it seemed safe to describe former Utah governor and ambassador to China Jon Huntsman as a conservative representative of the reality-based community. If Huntsman’s jobs plan is any indication, that assessment was off-base. Here are the […]