The American Prospect articles from December 2005

The American Prospect archives from December 2005

The right fight.(PROSPECTS)
December 1, 2005... MANY DEMOCRATIC STRATEGISTS CONTEND THAT a battle to block Samuel Alito's elevation to the Supreme Court is the wrong fight at the wrong time. The Bush presidency is in trouble on so many other fronts: the deceptions that misled the nation into...

Animal matters.(CORRESPONDENCE)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2005... AS CARL POPE APTLY points out, a commitment to environmental protection may be the common thread that ultimately unifies our divided population ["A New Environmentalism," October 2005]. The question that begs an answer, however, is how much...

Tone it down!(CORRESPONDENCE)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2005... "THE INCOMPETENCE Dodge" [November] is truly an excellent argument. Much like the writers, Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias, I am a proponent of humanitarian interventions that never saw Iraq as one but nonetheless find myself surrounded by...

We're trying.(CORRESPONDENCE)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2005... I FIND THE AMERICAN Prospect the most informative source that I read regarding political issues, but I must point out that Garance Franke-Ruta's "All Together Now" [November 2005] is in error in describing our GOP incumbent Heather Wilson as...

Uh, Bob?(CORRESPONDENCE)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2005... I AM A NEW SUBSCRIBER TO The American Prospect and I find it to be a breath of fresh air. It wasn't until the last page of the November 2005 issue that I found a view expressed that runs contrary to my liberal democratic views and perhaps...

Clarification.(CORRESPONDENCE)(Correction Notice)
December 1, 2005... Clarification: A table accompanying the article "The Defectors" [October] identified 15 Democrats in Congress who voted with big business and the White House on several key "pocketbook issues." While the article clearly defined one of those...

Chalabi-palooza.(Ahmed Chalabi)
December 1, 2005... THE CONQUERING fabricator has returned. On November 9, Ahmad Chalabi, the notorious Iraqi exile who fed a hungry Pentagon and hungrier press corps fantastic tales of Saddam Hussein's bristling arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and joint...

Naval gazing.(Devil in the Details)
December 1, 2005... EVERY NEIGHBORHOOD has its own target demographic. By the exit of the Metro station near my house in a predominantly African American area of D.C., we've got posters for 50 Cent's new movie, Get Rich or Die Tryin', and BET's show Ultimate...

Dana Rohrabacher, auteur.(Devil in the Details)
December 1, 2005... ON NOVEMBER 4, THE Los Angeles Times reported that Orange County Representative Dana Rohrabacher had opened Capitol Hill doors to a movie producer, Joseph Medawar, interested in ginning up political support for a proposed TV series about the...

Dossier: the new New Orleans.
December 1, 2005... New Orleans' population before Hurricane Katrina was 462,269... Today, 138,026 households, or two-thirds of the 2000 census population, are still forwarding their mail to new addresses... The city's budget for 2004 was roughly $16.8 billion...

Drug beneficiary.(American Association of Retired Persons )
December 1, 2005... WITH THE NEW medicare prescription-drug benefit proving an ever more byzantine boondoggle, one would understand if AARP, the bill's most important supporter when it was enacted, wanted to guide its members through this thicket. But AARP seems...

George W. Bush, Veterans Day Speech, November 11.(Brief Article)(Transcript)
December 1, 2005... George W. Bush, Veterans Day Speech, November 11: While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began. Some Democrats and anti-war critics...

Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, NBC's Meet the Press, November 14.(Brief Article)(Transcript)
December 1, 2005... Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, NBC's Meet the Press, November 14: It's fine to dissent, it's fine to object. But to make politics your bottom line in this critical war on terror, in the central front in the war on terror,...

National Security Council Chairman Stephen Hadley, CNN's Late Edition, November 13.(Brief Article)(Transcript)
December 1, 2005... National Security Council Chairman Stephen Hadley, CNN's Late Edition, November 13: And it is unworthy and unfair and ill-advised, when our men and women in combat are putting their lives on the line, to relitigate an issue which was looked at...

Washingtoon[R].(Cartoon)
December 1, 2005... WHEN GEORGE SR. WAS THE VEEP, HE WAS SEEN BY SOME AS A LAPDOG AND CALLED A WIMP. I WISH HE WAS MY DADDY! WE HAVE DEFEATED GRENADA AND CURED THE VIETNAM SYNDROME. WOW! NOW WE'RE FREE TO HAVE MORE VIETNAMS! THIS IN THE AFTERMATH...

Net effects: netroots activists are liberal firebrands? Tell that to Sherrod Brown.(Dispatches)
December 1, 2005... IT'S NOT EXACTLY RARE TO SEE THE blogosphere in an uproar. But the recent row between supporters of Paul Hackett and backers of Representative Sherrod Brown, who are vying for the Democratic nomination for senator from Ohio, was a bit odder...

Picture this: can the ACLU pry more Abu Ghraib photos from the government?(American Civil Liberties Union)
December 1, 2005... IT'S POURING RAIN OUTSIDE AMERICAN Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) staff attorney Jameel Jaffer's office on an October afternoon, making the room dark and chilly, and Jaffer holds up a legal document so a visitor can get a better look. In the...

One step forward ... the West has high hopes for Morocco, but democracy is coming slowly.(DISPATCHES)
December 1, 2005... OVER SEVERAL DAYS THIS FALL, an estimated 1,500 sub-Saharan Africans tried to enter Europe by scaling the wire fences that separate the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla from the rest of Morocco. In the midst of this attempt, on September...

Part-ing shots: the Bush administration's curiously one-sided good-government tool.(DISPATCHES)
December 1, 2005... THIS FEBRUARY IN NORTH Carolina, George W. Bush told a giddy crowd, "I'm here to talk about an issue that is going to be an interesting experience in dealing with the Congress [laughter]. And that is Social Security--formerly known as the third...

This is simplification?(THE TAXONOMIST)
December 1, 2005... THERE ARE MANY THINGS TO CRITICIZE ABOUT THE recent report from President Bush's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform. Personally, I'm appalled at the report's call for adding $7 trillion more to the deficit over the next two decades--a...

Homeward bound: "choice feminism" claims that staying home with the kids is just one more feminist option. Funny that most men rarely make the same "choice." Exactly what kind of choice is that?
December 1, 2005... I. THE TRUTH ABOUT ELITE WOMEN THE WEALTHIEST, MOST-PRIVILEGED, best-educated females in the country stay home with their babies rather than work in the market economy. When in September The New York Times featured an article exploring a...

He's done: Bush once brandished September 11 like a weapon against his critics. But in one dramatic recent week, it all caught up with him. The 9-11 era is now over.
December 1, 2005... THINGS CHANGE FAST, WHEN they finally do. For more than two years, the daily reports of American casualties and car bombs in Iraq, questions about how the White House had led the country into the Iraq War, and the torture memos and...

Open doors, closed minds: Jim Bill Lynn believed his Wal-Mart bosses when they said he should report unfair practices. He did--and walked into Kafka's castle.
December 1, 2005... BY ALL ACCOUNTS, JIM BILL LYNN BLED WAL-MART blue. His friend Darrell Altom, who worked with Lynn at Wal-Mart's Searcy, Arkansas, distribution center in the days before Lynn traveled the nation and the world on Wal-Mart's behalf, recalls that...

Death by dilution: when fakes of a GlaxoSmithKline anti-malarial drug turned up in Africa, authorities assumed the drug giant would want to know. Instead, they learned about a huge, evil trade in fake drugs--and about an industry that doesn't want the truth to get out.
December 1, 2005... IN GRAHAM GREENE'S 1949 THRILLER CLASSIC, THE THIRD MAN, HARRY LIME--"the dirtiest racketeer who ever made a dirty living"--peddles diluted penicillin through the sewers of occupied Vienna. During the film's famous scene atop the city's Great...

Shots in the dark: you may have forgotten "missile defense," but Rumsfeld hasn't. He's still pushing a useless, secretive--and very expensive--system.
December 1, 2005... ON A FRIGID DAY IN ALASKA LAST WINTER, A rocket, designed to simulate an incoming missile launched at the United States, blasted out of the ground. Fifteen minutes later, an interceptor rocket was to be deployed from a site in the Marshall...

Sorry, not buying: so Republicans want black people to be grateful for their attention? Forgive me, but we're not quite as bowled over as they'd like us to be.
December 1, 2005... NOT LONG AGO, WILLIAM BENNETT--FORMER education secretary, self-styled moralist, and gambler--philosophized, "If you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your...

Follow the (dear) leader: do art and culture even exist in North Korea? A new book and a new compact disc open the door--just a crack--on the Hermit Kingdom.(CULTURE)
December 1, 2005... IN TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE, the puppet-film satire of the global war on terrorism made by Matt Stone and Trey Parker (of South Park fame), North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il is gleefully depicted as an oddball Bond villain: outsized glasses,...

Back to the future.(Book Review)
December 1, 2005... AMERICA BEYOND CAPITALISM BY GAR ALPEROVITZ John Wiley & Sons, 320 pages, $24.95 THE PRO-GROWTH PROGRESSIVE BY GENE SPERLING Simon & Schuster, 326 pages, $25.00 THESE TWO BOOKS--THICK WITH prescriptions for America's future but...

The truth about the Senate.(Book Review)
December 1, 2005... THE MOST EXCLUSIVE CLUB: A HISTORY OF THE MODERN UNITED STATES SENATE BY LEWIS L. GOULD Basic Books, 416 pages, $27.50 DURING LAST SPRING'S FIGHT over the proposed "nuclear option" banning judicial filibusters, it was slightly troubling to...

The two Darwinisms.(THE LAST WORD)
December 1, 2005... THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT IS NOW MOUNTING a full-throttled attack on Darwinism even as it has thoroughly embraced Darwinism's bastard child, social Darwinism. On the face of it, these positions may appear inconsistent. What unites them is a...