Blog: TAPPED

As I’ve been arguing for years (buy this 2003 book, and I’ll get 50 cents in royalties!), in presidential campaigns, candidates tend to get defined by their one or two most glaring character flaws. You can be a grumpy old man (John McCain, Bob Dole), a patrician flip-flopper (John Kerry), a congenital liar (Al Gore), […]

At The Daily Beast, Howard Kurtz castigates local and national media for overhyping Hurricane Irene: Someone has to say it: cable news was utterly swept away by the notion that Irene would turn out to be Armageddon. […] Every producer knew that to abandon the coverage even briefly—say, to cover the continued fighting in Libya—was […]

As grim as the economic news is, as former skeptic Kevin Drum notes it would be even worse had the Obama administration not saved the domestic auto industry. Automobile sales and parts are one of the few robust areas of the American economy, and Drum estimates that the bailout saved roughly a million jobs. While […]

Will Wilkinson asks an interesting question: Why doesn’t Steve Jobs get the same kind of criticism other billionaires get? After all, Wilkinson says, a lot of his fortune is built on patent trolling and exploitation of poorly paid Chinese workers, and he contributes nothing to charity. His explanation is that Jobs has brought beauty into […]

It’s Friday! Which means another round of bad news for the economy. In this case, the Commerce Department has revised its assessment of economic growth for the second quarter. At the time, economists had estimated 1.3 percent growth for the quarter – sluggish, but an improvement over the first quarter, when the economy grew by […]

I’ve long predicted, perhaps more out of hope than foresight, that once the 2012 Republican presidential nominating contest got underway, the Tea Party would fade away. I expected that all those newly energized activists would channel their energy into their preferred primary candidate, and after that, into helping the nominee defeat Barack Obama. If the […]

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, asked to comment on Rick Perry disbelief in evolution, went to town on Perry: Any other organization — a big corporation, say, or a university, or a learned society – -when seeking a new leader, will go to immense trouble over the choice. The CVs of candidates and their portfolios of […]

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a noted opponent of federal spending, has come out against deficit-funded federal aid for his district in Virginia, despite Republican Governor Bob McDonald’s request for said aid. “All of us know that the federal government is busy spending money it doesn’t have,” remarked Cantor while surveying damage in Culpepper, Virginia. […]

Yesterday, both Gallup and Public Policy Polling released new national polls of Republican primary voters. In a sharp change from several months ago, both found Texas Governor Rick Perry with a large lead over his competitors, including former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. In the Gallup poll, which includes each of the presidential candidates, Perry leads […]

At a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor this morning, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, one of the most powerful union officials in the country, talked with reporters on the state of the labor movement, the recent elections in Wisconsin, President Barack Obama’s rhetoric on jobs and the economy, and the labor movement’s plan for […]