D.R. Tucker

I’m sure George Will is cooking up a Verizon-bashing column right now in response to the company’s new commercial about science and sexism: The commercial–part of the company’s “Inspire Her Mind” campaign–effectively makes the point that there is, for want of a better phrase, a Cold War on Women going on at home and in […]

As if there wasn’t enough evidence of the intellectual exhaustion of the GOP, now we have the bizarre spectacle of Republicans pushing for a third Mitt Romney presidential campaign in 2016: Seriously, what is the question to which Romney is the answer–besides, of course, “Who spent four years as governor of Massachusetts bashing gay married […]

Last night on Beat the Press, the weekly media-review program on Boston’s PBS affiliate, WGBH, host Emily Rooney discussed George Will’s recent deranged suggestion that being a rape victim accords one a privileged status in American colleges and universities. The conversation about the piece was better than anything Will has written in the past two […]

You can already hear the denialists screaming. And scheming. The Environmental Protection Agency will unveil a draft proposal on Monday to cut carbon pollution from the nation’s power plants 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, according to people briefed on the plan. The proposed rule amounts to the strongest action ever taken by the […]

“I’m afraid that’s all we have time for,” declared ABC This Week host George Stephanopoulos at the end of today’s pitifully short segment on President Obama’s efforts to cut carbon pollution from existing power plants: You’d figure that public and planetary health would merit more than five minutes—I mean, did we really need to hear […]

We’ll never know why the New York Times didn’t bother to credit Bill McKibben and 350.org for pioneering the strategy that led to a new era of climate progress in today’s piece about the “face of a new activism that the nation’s largest environmental groups are encouraging to revive a climate-change movement that seemed stalled […]

A fascinating discussion on MSNBC’s Up with Steve Kornacki today about the role age discrimination plays in American politics: Kornacki accurately notes the repugnant nature of Karl Rove’s acidic attack on Hillary Clinton’s age (although it’s hard to imagine what Rove has done that is not of a repugnant nature). He also notes the political […]

This morning, President Obama focused on his efforts to combat carbon-pollution in his weekly radio address, noting the importance of protecting the health and the climate of future generations: Of course, emphasizing the need to think about the health of our children and grandchildren won’t diminish the derangement of climate-change deniers, who hate Al Gore […]

David Koch’s ill-fated 1980 bid for the vice presidency has been covered by Jane Mayer and Rachel Maddow, among others, but Nicholas Confessore’s analysis of Koch’s run in today’s New York Times is perhaps the creepiest and most fascinating look at the man who bought the right. Back then, Koch was a member of the […]

The Boston Globe‘s report on the tenth anniversary of the commencement of marriage equality in Massachusetts doesn’t bring a smile to my face. In fact, my memories of May 17, 2004 are wracked with different sorts of pain. I was in Massachusetts General Hospital that morning, recovering from gallbladder surgery just days earlier, watching the […]