The American Prospect articles from December 2002

The American Prospect archives from December 2002

The unconvincing case for war. (Comment).(Iraq)(Editorial)
December 16, 2002... RECENTLY, THE PROSPECT sponsored a debate on Iraq. Interestingly, both teams were ostensibly liberal Democrats. Arguing for a U.S. invasion were Jonathan Chait, a Prospect alumnus and author of a recent New Republic cover piece on the liberal...

Whose tax cuts? (Comment).(Editorial)
December 16, 2002... I'M WELCOMING MYSELF BACK TO the Prospect by declaring a holiday on the payroll tax. Starting as soon as possible, you'll be relieved of payroll taxes on the first $20,000 of your annual income. The tax holiday will last two years. Ballpark...

Union seeks Republicans. (Correspondence).(Letter to the Editor)
December 16, 2002... FOR AN EDITOR OF A LEFT-LIBERAL publication, Harold Meyerson is surprisingly uncritical of one of the most appalling labor trends in recent years ["Union Seeks Republicans," Oct. 21, 2002]. When former 1960s leftists, who went into...

Good company. (Correspondence).(Letter to the Editor)
December 16, 2002... CHRIS MOONEY ASSERTS IN "Good Company" [Nov. 18] that the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence failed "with respect... to predicting the Soviet collapse." In fact, the U.S. intelligence community produced a series of analyses and estimates in the...

The Left Coast Goes Lefter. (Correspondence).(Letter to the Editor)
December 16, 2002... WILLIAM BRADLEY'S "THE Left Coast Goes Lefter" [Nov. 4] celebrates progressive resurgence in California, but the point should not be overstated. In a number of ways, conditions for Californians remain regressive compared with other states....

Talent for deception. (Correspondence).(Letter to the Editor)
December 16, 2002... I APPRECIATE SAFIR AHMED'S well-documented, critical appraisal of James Talent's political position, "Talent for Deception" [Nov. 4]. But I take exception to the implication that Talent's "deception" is in some way intimately connected with...

What, more Bushes? (Devil In The Details).(George W. Bush, Jeb Bush, 2008 presidential elections)
December 16, 2002... BY ANNOUNCING HIS INTENT to keep Dick Cheney as his running mate in the election two years hence, President Bush didn't just settle the veep question in 2004. In all probability, he also meant to settle the pres question in 2008. Had W....

ICC PSA. (Devil In The Details).(International Criminal Court )
December 16, 2002... THE 30-SECOND SPOT NOW showing in French movie theaters looks, at first blush, like a car ad. Jump-cut shots show a well-heeled white man being sped through a winding landscape in a sleek American-built sedan. His shoes are spit-shined and his...

Thompson's promotion. (Devil In The Details).(Fred Thompson)(Brief Article)
December 16, 2002... WHAT WAS SEN. FRED Thompson (R-Tenn.), the first sitting U.S. senator to have a recurring role on a TV show, doing mouthing off about how "Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided" on the Nov. 6 episode of NBC's Law & Order? Pro-choice viewers of the...

Tax tips for Republicans. (Devil In The Details).(Brief Article)
December 16, 2002... Presidential economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey is nervous. The economy is shaky; a double-dip recession is a distinct possibility. Lindsey's long been a champion of tax cuts to stimulate the economy, and, of course, the administration prevailed...

King coal: guess who's Bushwhacking the environment for votes? (Below The Beltway).(George W. Bush)
December 16, 2002... SINCE TAKING OFFICE, GEORGE W. Bush has aggressively rolled back environmental regulations and initiatives. What he hasn't achieved by changing the rules he has done by reducing the staff devoted to enforcing them. According to a study by AIR...

The other war: we are scarcely safer today than we were before 9-11. (Gazette).(Iraq)
December 16, 2002... PRESIDENT BUSH AND HIS ADMINISTRATION, especially Secretary of State Colin Powell, deserve credit for skillfully and patiently involving the international community in the project to disarm Iraq. So, of course, do Bush's critics, whose efforts...

Woman on top: Nancy Pelosi is the Democrats' mid-course correction. (Gazette).
December 16, 2002... WHEN IT BECAME CLEAR that U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) would be the next House Democratic leader, an unusual thing happened: Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle cheered. Democrats, who felt the party had never found its message in the...

How to undermine a law: Pitt, Webster and the SEC mess. (Gazette).(Harvey Pitt, William Webster, Securities and Exchange Commission)
December 16, 2002... THE EVENTS LEADING UP TO the high-profile resignations of Harvey Pitt and William Webster are symptomatic of a broad effort by President Bush, Republicans on Capitol Hill and the business community to undermine a six-month old law designed to...

Reclaiming the party: three suggestions to jump-start the Democrats. (Gazette).
December 16, 2002... THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY--like Enron, the FBI and the Catholic Church--is a dysfunctional institution that cannot reform itself from the inside. If the party were a well-run corporation whose products weren't selling, its board of directors or its...

Where the Democrats lost: and where they can come back. (Gazette).
December 16, 2002... WHERE DID THE DEMOCRATS lose in 2002? A lot rides on this question; wrong answers will produce poor targeting and ineffective politics, and the Democrats can afford precious little of either. But right answers can set the stage for future gains...

Survival of the slickest: how anti-evolutionists are mutating their message. (Gazette).
December 16, 2002... IT MUST TAKE GUTS TO BE A "young-Earth" creationist. After all, imagine rejecting virtually all of modern science based on a literal interpretation of Genesis. Imagine opening yourself up to ridicule by insisting that Adam and Eve lived...

President George W. McKinley? Bush waxes nostalgic for robber baron-era tax policies. (The Taxonomist).(George W. Bush)
December 16, 2002... IS GEORGE W. BUSH HOPING TO TAKE US BACK TO THE 19th century on tax policy? Prior to the 20th century, except under Abraham Lincoln, the federal government relied almost entirely on regressive consumption taxes to pay its bills. This...

Dems in the dumps: demystifying their defeat; charting their comeback.(Democratic Party 2002 elections)
December 16, 2002... WE HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE. IN THE WAKE of yet another of their periodic election debacles, the Democrats are deflated and dispirited, bothered and bewildered. Bewildered, I think, more than anything else. After all, this is not 1980, the year of...

The Pentagon muzzles the CIA: devising bad intelligence to promote bad policy.
December 16, 2002... EVEN AS IT PREPARES FOR WAR AGAINST IRAQ, THE Pentagon is already engaged on a second front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency. The Pentagon is bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to produce intelligence reports...

Rhyme and reason: the Eminem vehicle 8 Mile offers a surprisingly gritty ride. (The Critics Film).
December 16, 2002... PART OF THE rUN OF 8 MILE is guessing at who's in the lead role: Is it the real-life Marshall Mathers III, the sullen Eminem or the explosively perverse Slim Shady? Starring Mathers, aka Eminem, aka the most controversial white boy in music...

True heroine, false worshipper.(Book Review)
December 16, 2002... Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy By dean Bethke Elshtain. Basic Books, 336 pages, $20.00 THE APPELLATION "ST. JANE" came early to Jane Addams. Florence Kelley, one of her closest comrades during the early years of settlement...

Tough target.(Book Review)
December 16, 2002... Can Gun Control Work? By James Jacobs. Oxford University Press, 287 pages, $27.50 THE TERROR RECENTLY INFLICTED by the Washington-area sniper may have been frightening enough to rouse the public once again to demand measures that would...

The court justifier.(Book Review)
December 16, 2002... First Among Equals: The Supreme Court in American Life By Kenneth Starr. Warner Books, 320 pages, $26.95 BILL CLINTON DID NOT DESTROY his opponents; he drove them insane, and they destroyed themselves. Of all the careers Clinton ended in...

Sins of commission. (Comment).
December 30, 2002... THE APPOINTMENT OF HENRY Kissinger to chair a commission on the September 11 attacks has provoked widespread clucking. As Maureen Dowd aptly put it, Henry Kissinger isn't whom you hire to get to the bottom of something. "If you want to keep...

The cult of Karl. (Comment).(Karl Rove)
December 30, 2002... SO WHO YOU GONNA BELIEVE, Bob Woodward or Ron Suskind? In Bush at War, Woodward's new behind-the-scenes account of the White House in wartime, mighty battles are waged between the Powellites and the Cheneyistas over the fundamentals of foreign...

Good Company. (Correspondence).(Letter to the Editor)
December 30, 2002... I WAS TROUBLED BY THE thrust of Chris Mooney's article, "Good Company" [Nov. 18, 2002], which advocated a renewal of collaboration between the CIA and scholars. In these days of new CIA and military intelligence surveillance projects, such as...

The taxonomist. (Correspondence).(Letter to the Editor)
December 30, 2002... THOSE WHO DEPLORE RISING tax evasion both here and abroad should applaud Robert McIntyre's [Nov. 18] exposure of the outrageous unwillingness of the Bush administration to call for reporting of interest paid to foreign depositors by U.S. banks....

It's Full Employment, Stupid. (Correspondence).(Letter to the Editor)
December 30, 2002... I COULD NOT AGREE MORE with Jared Bernstein's "It's Full Employment, Stupid" [Nov. 4]. Could it be that we will now turn our attention to domestic woes? Certainly there is no denying his assertion that incomes are rising in the upper classes...

Whose Tax Cuts? (Correspondence).(Letter to the Editor)
December 30, 2002... I WHOLEHEARTEDLY APPLAUD Robert Reich's column "Whose Tax Cuts?" [Dec. 16]. If Democrats espouse this proposal, they should prepare for ripostes from the right. Of most concern will be: "Why should we expect one group (those who pay estate...

Keeper of the secrets. (Devil In The Details).(Brief Article)
December 30, 2002... HERE AT THE PROSPECT, WE take a rather nuanced view of Henry Kissinger's appointment to head the commission that will investigate the government's failure to predict and prevent the attacks of September 11. Kissinger is far from being the least...

Secrets, part II. (Devil In The Details).
December 30, 2002... SPEAKING OF THE DARK recesses of government, just where did that Eli Lilly profit-protection clause in the homeland-security bill come from? In the aftermath of the midterm elections, when the Democrats gave up their fight to protect the...

Karl Rove's model union leaders. (Devil In The Details).
December 30, 2002... "Labor boss" is a term to which we're almost congenitally adverse. But when a labor leader sells out his (and it's still more commonly "his" than "her") members, the term "labor boss" is fitting and proper. By which standard, the two...

Gen. election: Israel chooses between two army men--a hawk passing for a moderate and a dove on horseback. (Beyond The Beltway).(Amram Mitzna, Ariel Sharon)
December 30, 2002... IN THE LOBBY OF THE JERUSALEM Convention Center, glossy campaign leaflets of wannabe Knesset members carpeted the floor. Activists flowed from the hall where the Labor Party's newly chosen leader, Amram Mitzna, had pledged to order Israel's...

Persian Gulf--or Tonkin Gulf? Illegal "no-fly zones" could be war's trip wire. (Gazette).
December 30, 2002... IN A PAIR OF EDITORIALS AFTER THE 1991 Gulf War, one of them titled "Don't Shoot Down Iraqi Aircraft," The New York Times called the plan to create vast "no-fly zones" (NFZs) in Iraq "legally untenable and politically unwise." The editorials,...

Al in the family: Gore plays to the base and beyond. (Gazette).
December 30, 2002... DOES AL GORE KNOW WHAT he's doing? Close readers of his two new books, The Spirit of Family and Joined at the Heart: The Transformation of the American Family, cannot help but wonder. Certainly no other serious politician in America has...

Hair-raising hair triggers: terrorists, nuclear weapons and what the press hasn't said. (Gazette).
December 30, 2002... THOUSANDS OF READY-TO-fire U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons are susceptible to unauthorized launches by terrorists, who might either capture a missile or electronically hack into a missile launch-control system. This reality has gotten nearly...

Flunking statistics: the right's disinformation about faculty bias. (Gazette).
December 30, 2002... WHEN WILLIAM F. Buckley, Jr. launched America's conservative movement half a century ago, the requisite foe came readily to hand. In God & Man at Yale, Buckley identified the university he had just left--and, by implication, the country's...

The real steel deal: tariffs meant to pay off at the polls aren't helping on the job. (Gazette).
December 30, 2002... PAUL VERYSER'S STEEL-PARTS company, Stampings Inc., is in big trouble. Tariffs on steel imports, imposed by President George W. Bush in March, have pushed the cost of steel up by more than half on the American spot market, and this has added a...

Reality check: why the Bush Treasury Department's line on corporate taxes doesn't track. (The Taxonomist).(George W. Bush)(Brief Article)
December 30, 2002... SOMETHING I'VE DRUMMED INTO MY STAFF OVER THE years is that no analysis is complete until it's passed a reality check. By that I mean that everything we do must be recalculated using alternative approaches to ensure that we haven't made some...

Put a face on your fears: the apprehensive citizen's guide to the new Republican committee chairmen of the U.S. Senate--and what they have in store for us. (Gazette).
December 30, 2002... THEY HAD TO WAGE A CAMPAIGN IN EQUAL PARTS deceitful and dynamic to get there, but when Congress convenes in January, Republicans will control the Senate. The Democrats' capacity to impede the Bush agenda has been whittled down to the...

The new poll tax: Republican-sponsored ballot-security measures are being used to keep minorities from voting.
December 30, 2002... ONE OF THE RECURRING SCANDALS IN AMERICAN politics since passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is the discriminatory use of so-called "ballot security" programs. These programs are invariably presented as good government measures necessary...

Children left behind: why we need a national child-care program, now more than ever.
December 30, 2002... IN EARLY OCTOBER, NAKIA BURGESS HAD JUST GOTTEN a job as a transcriber in Atlanta. She had already lost two other jobs because of her inability to secure reliable and affordable child care for her 3-year-old daughter, Asan'te, who had Down...

Hero worship: James Bond, Harry Potter and the big-movie machine. (The Critics Film).
December 30, 2002... AS IF IN ANSWER TO A SPEcial, seasonal wistfulness silently voiced by the movie-going public, the film industry seems to hit us each fall with a couple of hero-centered megafilms. Die Another Day is the latest James Bond flick, and Harry Potter...

Whose town? The relevance of Thornton Wilder's play today. (Theater).(Brief Article)
December 30, 2002... WHEN JOANNE WOODward was picking shows to produce this summer, Our Town was an easy choice. Thornton Wilder's play about life and death in turn-of-the-century Grover's Corners, N.H., is one of the most popular works in American theater. What's...

War and leaks.(Book Review)
December 30, 2002... Bush at War By Bob Woodward. Simon & Schuster, 376 pages, $28.00 IT WAS 3 P.M. WHEN THE PHONE rang. "Ring, ring, ring." It was the same sound it usually made, but this time with a difference. The nation was at war. And Bob Woodward had a...

The Perils of diversity.(Book Review)
December 30, 2002... liberal pluralism: the implications of value pluralism for political theory and practice By William A. Galston. Cambridge University Press, 152 pages, $19.00 NO LIVING AMERICAN POlitical theorist has come closer than Bill Galston to...