WHY TAP DOESN’T SUCK NOW: I wonder if they’ll have a quote from me on their site soon — “TAP doesn’t suck anymore” — Glenn Reynolds? Well, probably not. But a reader writes with an explanation for the phenomenon I identified below:

There is one reason, and only one reason, for the success of The American Prospect online: Chris Mooney became the editor. It was the approach that he brought to TAP that ushered in the blog and the new non-sleep inducing articles. If I had Bill Moyers’ e-mail address, I’d tell ask him to put Mooney in charge of the whole thing.

PS: The old TAP didn’t completely suck. The political coverage was… bad and the opinion columns were easily ignored, but the criticism – movie, music, book and otherwise – has always been good.

I almost never even looked at TAP until the past few months, and in fact one of the few articles I’d read before then was one by Chris Mooney. So maybe this is true. Pay him more! Er, or at least don’t lay him off. . . .