The American Prospect articles from February 2004

The American Prospect archives from February 2004

The Republican lock.(Prospects)
February 1, 2004... The 2004 election is really only about one question: whether the Republican Party will enjoy thorough and unchecked power in all branches of the federal government. Despite the virtually even split in the American electorate, conservatives have...

Get onboard.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2004... I'D LIKE TO THANK MICHAEL Tomasky for the great piece "Is It Time to Believe?" [January 2004]. He really crystallized some thoughts I have been having lately about my inability to understand the Democratic Party. I am so sick of Washington...

Using fear.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2004... GERSHOM GORENBERG'S otherwise excellent piece ["The Terror Trap," January] stops short of an obvious and crucial point when the author suggests that Ariel Sharon is pursuing an overly aggressive policy against terrorism because he somehow...

Activists, eh?(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2004... IN "PHOENIX RISING" [January], Robert Dreyfuss reports on the Bush administration's secret plan to create a "revenge-minded" Iraqi paramilitary unity and compares the plan to "Israel's official policy of targeted murders of Palestinian...

He's W., not Webster.(Corespondence)(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2004... PAUL STARR'S OTHERWISE perceptive critique of the president's speech on freedom and democracy in the Middle East ["The President's New Crusade," December 2003] makes the error of assuming that George W. Bush uses those words the way that most...

Blind faith.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2004... IN JOHN PATRICK DIGGINS' superb assessment of the neoconservatives' self-congratulation for the fall of communism ["The Neocons' Dark History," December], the author notes their inflexible determination that totalitarianism must always be...

Of God and Democrats.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2004... ALTHOUGH I SELDOM DISagree with Robert Reich, whom I consistently look forward to reading, his article in the December issue ["The Religious Wars'], though basically correct, is off the mark politically. What the Democratic Party has been...

Old wine, GOP bottle.(Devil in the Details)
February 1, 2004... IT'S COMMON THAT election-year State of the Union addresses meet two basic criteria. First, they must have wrapped inside them a goody bag or two (or three), which quietly toss a few billion dollars toward some segment of the economy that has...

Who's nit pickler-ing?(Devil in the Details)
February 1, 2004... AN ASSOCIATED PRESS reporter took a look at a recent Democratic debate in a Dec. 10 story and concluded that Democrats "sometimes leave out the facts" in their critiques of the gush administration. For example, "[S]everal of the nine candidates...

While you were sleeping.(Devil in the Details)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... There are approximately 300,000 child soldiers involved in civil conflicts around the world. They tote AK-47s, spy on the enemy and fight in the trenches. If they manage to leave the military, they face scant opportunities in civilian life....

Brave new words.
February 1, 2004... ALMANAC Terrorism handbook. SAFE The United State--now that Saddam Hussein is in custody. Ignore the fact that the terrorism alert has risen to "orange" and that flights have been canceled left and right. Also, American beef,...

Soft bigotry.(Devil in the Details)
February 1, 2004... SUSAN B. NEUMAN, FORmer assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, quietly resigned her post last year after less than 18 months. She won't say exactly why she left--at least not to us, anyway. But she is speaking out about the...

Perle's wisdom.(Devil in the Details)(Book Review)
February 1, 2004... THE NEXT WAR OF WORDS has begun. In their new book, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, David Frum and Richard Perle ramp up the rhetoric against radical Islam far more than their colleagues still in power ever could. Frum, you may...

Bad Max: it's a tempting story line that Sen. Max Baucus has to cast all those pro-Bush votes because of pressure back home in Montana. It's just not true.(Dispatches)
February 1, 2004... OBSERVERS MARVELING AT PRESIDENT George W. Bush's ability to push a radical agenda through a closely divided Congress have tended to attribute the administration's success to the impressive party discipline within the Republican congressional...

Second act: as the North Korea merry-go-round keeps turning, Congress weighs a bill to encourage mass emigration. Good idea. Here's why it won't work.(Dispatches)
February 1, 2004... THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION HAS BEEN at times dangerously ambiguous in its policy toward North Korea. With a second round of six party talks likely for early 2004 and North Korea's nuclear program chugging along, the upcoming debate on Capitol Hill...

That was then: deficit reduction worked for Clinton, but circumstances were different in 1993. Today's Democrats mustn't think they can merely mimic him.(Dispatches)
February 1, 2004... WE LIVE IN AN UPSIDE-DOWN WORLD where Republicans defend deficits and Democrats attack them. These are seemingly opposite views. But both have led, mistakenly, to cuts in social investment as well as to needlessly slow economic growth and high...

Tax cheaters and their enablers.(The Taxonomist)
February 1, 2004... David Cay Johnston of The New York Times came to the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank, in January to talk about his intriguing new book, Perfectly Legal. In it, he argues that some of America's richest people--with the active...

America as a one-party state: today's hard right seeks total dominion. It's packing the courts and rigging the rules. The target is not the Democrats but democracy itself.(Cover Story)
February 1, 2004... AMERICA HAS HAD PERIODS OF SINGLE-PARTY DOMinance before. It happened under FDK's New Deal, in the Republican 1920s and in the early 19th-century "Era of Good Feeling." But if President Bush is re-elected, we will be close to a tipping point of...

All eyes on Dixie: the South isn't all Bob Jones University, and Democrats can make inroads there.
February 1, 2004... HOW TO BALANCE NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN STRATEGIES is as central a challenge for the national Democratic Party in the 2000s as it was for the Republicans in the 1960s and '70s. The irony is that some of the same tactical considerations apply--at...

All eyes on Dixie: Perhaps. But Democrats on the hunt for new electoral votes should look to Ohio.
February 1, 2004... AND NOW, AS CANDIDATES AND JOURNALISTS SHAKE THE New Hampshire snows off their boots and the primary process heads south, we can look forward to a spate of media stories raising the question of whether any Democratic presidential candidate can...

The GOP deploys: campaign events masquerading as "official" visits. A massive army on the ground. And--wouldn't you know it--a secret headquarters. Welcome to Bush-Cheney 2004.
February 1, 2004... AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION, VA.--FROM THE OUTSIDE, THE headquarters of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign is completely unremarkable--so unremarkable that passersby have no way of knowing it's even there. Through the tinted windows of the...

A national task: why high-quality public education is the democratic challenge of our time.(Educating America)
February 1, 2004... AN EDUCATED CITIZENRY IS THE HALLMARK OF AMERICA'S democracy and central to the success of its economy. That was true at the founding of the republic, when Common Sense, Thomas Paine's call for independence, sold 112,000 copies in three...

Bush's education fraud: the No Child Left Behind Act is self-defeating, confusing and underfunded. If it isn't drastically overhauled, millions more kids will be left behind.(Educating America)
February 1, 2004... Well before he became president, George W. Bush had made his education plan, the No Child Left Behind Act, the showcase of"compassionate conservatism"--meaning, in the conventional shorthand, a conservative route to liberal ends. Its objective...

The best investment we can make: better schools won't help unless young children are school-ready. That process begins at birth.(Educating America)
February 1, 2004... SCOTTY AND I SHARED A TABLE IN MRS. KERNER'S KINDERgarten class in 1984. He was the classroom's centripetal force, always drawing the teacher's attention away from the rest of us. He rarely finished even the simplest assignment, instead...

Testing our patience: standardized tests have their uses. But current federal law uses testing to destroy learning.(Educating America)
February 1, 2004... STATE AND FEDERAL LAW ASSUME THAT THE QUALITY of public education can be gauged by the number of students who reach the "proficiency" mark on a standardized test. Indeed, the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law provides serious penalties...

The weakly standards: one teacher's losing fight with high-stakes, low-logic testing.(Educating America)
February 1, 2004... WHEN STANDARDS OF LEARNING (SOLS) FIRST APPEARED in my Northern Virginia public school classroom nearly seven years ago, they were hardly more than a lunch-table punch line--another unfortunate abbreviation coined by board-of-education...

Saving black boys: the elusive promises of public education.(Educating America)
February 1, 2004... IN THE SUPREME COURT'S 1954 BROWN V. BOARD OF Education decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, "Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments... it is a principal instrument in awakening the child...

The verdict on vouchers: funded by the right and lent credence by the Harvard name, a series of studies were aimed at proving the worth of school-voucher programs. The irony? The numbers simply don't add up.(Educating America)
February 1, 2004... SCHOOL VOUCHERS ARE UNCOMFORTABLE FOR MANY liberals. Potential worries abound: Such programs could constitute massive de facto government financing of religion; they could also strip public schools of vital resources, and leave them stuck with...

Aiming high: how new research and model programs are reclaiming the American high school.(Educating America)
February 1, 2004... AFTER LUNCH, STUDENTS AT J.E.B. STUART HIGH SCHOOL in Fairfax County, Va., bound out of a cafeteria where more than half are poor enough to qualify for federally subsidized free or reduced cost lunch, a jumble of English and Spanish and high...

We see that now: a heartfelt no--abject--no--craven apology to the right from the left for our campaign of hate, anger and malice against God's own president.(Nostra Culpa)
February 1, 2004... WE CONFESS. IT'S ALL TRUE. EVERYthing you say. We trafficked in hate. We did it in anger. Just as you said, Mr. Kristol, Mr. Krauthammer, Mr. Brooks: We poisoned the airwaves and befouled the sheets of our nation's most august publications. We...

Robert Rubin's contested legacy.(Books)(Book Review)
February 1, 2004... IN AN UNCERTAIN WORLD: TOUGH CHOICES FROM WALL STREET TO WASHINGTON BY ROBERT RUBIN AND JACOB WEISBERG RANDOM HOUSE * 448 PACES * $35.00 The High Cost of Rubinomics BY JEFF FAUX IF A DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENT GETS TO replace Federal Reserve...

Our mongrel planet.(Books)(Book Review)
February 1, 2004... CREATIVE DESTRUCTION: HOW GLOBALIZATION IS CHANGING THE WORLD'S CULTURES BY TYLER COWEN * PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS * 179 PAGES * $27.95 IN A SHORT STORY BY THE LATE WILLIAM Maxwell, an American named John Reynolds takes his family to Le...

It's jobs, stupid.(The Last Word)
February 1, 2004... It's the most anemic jobs recovery on record. Productivity is soaring, but that's mainly because fewer workers are doing more. At least 150,000 new jobs have to be created each month just to keep up with population growth. We haven't come...