Blog: TAPPED

Rick Perry has already been declared the front-runner to gain the GOP nomination less than a month after launching his campaign. He’s posted a significant lead in recent polls over previous front-runner Mitt Romney. The only problem is that national polls mean nothing at this point in the election cycle — it’s all about how […]

A good article by Manny Fernandez and Emily Ramshaw details some ways in which Rick Perry‘s federalist views have yielded to other priorities: In one of his more well-publicized shifts, Mr. Perry proclaimed that gay marriage was an issue for individual states to decide, but backtracked in recent weeks and now says he supports a […]

The GOP presents itself as the party that understands the importance of locality, detail, specificity and, in general, the contingency of any situation. Its favorite buzz-words, often imported from the business community, are flexibility, accountability, local-control and, most directly, “understands business.” But it’s been amazing in the last few years to watch the party become […]

Two years ago, I wrote a column talking about some of the things that still bring value to newspapers, even in the Internet age, particularly its size: It isn’t that there’s anything inherent in the process of ones and zeros passing through the ether that precludes an experience that duplicates what we get with newspapers. […]

War has offered the opportunity for profiteering pretty much since the most sophisticated weapons technology at man’s disposal was a spear. But the level of that profiteering these days is truly spectacular. This new report from the Center for Public Integrity explains just how your tax dollars are shoveled into the coffers of KBR, the […]

The L.A. Times reports today that Democrats in the California Legislature are pushing a bill to have ballot initiatives appear only in general elections. Their argument is that having important laws passed via initiative in primaries — when turnout is low, and so a tiny portion of the electorate can determine the state’s fate — […]

The latest Kaiser Family Foundation health reform tracking poll is out, and it’s pretty seriously depressing. Essentially, as time passes, people understand less and less about the Affordable Care Act. This is the opposite of what the Obama administration and congressional Democrats want, of course, but it springs directly from the way the bill was […]

As a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, Texas Governor Rick Perry’s claim to fame is his devotion to states’ rights. Under Perry, Texas has pushed the federal government for greater autonomy in the operation of programs like Medicaid, where states are responsible for delivering services and hewing to federal mandates. Perry has also […]