The American Prospect articles from January 2005

The American Prospect archives from January 2005

Security flaws.(PROSPECTS)
January 1, 2005... REPUBLICAN PLANS TO PRIVATIZE SOCIAL SECURITY raise two different security questions. One is the impact on the retirement security of workers if they become dependent on the stock market for their basic livelihood in old age. The other concerns...

I'm Jacques-d!(CORRESPONDENCE)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2005... IT IS REFRESHING WHEN A major pundit says straight out, "I regret my error." So said Todd Gitlin to George Stephanopoulos, as you admirably published in December, about Gitlin's first claim that Stephanopoulos did not counter the Swift Boat...

Progress noted.(CORRESPONDENCE)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2005... THE ARTICLE BY SARAH Blustain ["Choice Language," December] is a breakthrough. Her willingness to label abortion a "sad" event from a pro-choice perspective allows me, an anti-abortion Democrat, to open up to the rest of her message. (I used...

Hit job.(CORRESPONDENCE)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2005... I'VE READ YOUR NOVEMBER article about the Trafficking Victims Protection Act [Tara McKelvey, "Of Human Bondage"] and the movement behind it. Having long been a part of that movement, I and others in it both need and solicit serious criticism of...

Weird science.(CORRESPONDENCE)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2005... WITH ALL DUE RESPECT, I find it astonishing that the Prospect's immediate postmortem on the election centers on "the problem posed by gay fights for liberals." August Bebel once said that anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools. Might it be...

Correction.(CORRESPONDENCE)(Correction Notice)
January 1, 2005... Correction: In our December 2004 issue on page 52, we mistakenly published a photo of Public Safety Commissioner Joseph Cannon, instead of House Speaker Joseph Cannon of the 58th-61st Congresses. Our apologies for any confusion.

To our readers.(CORRESPONDENCE)(Editorial)
January 1, 2005... To Our Readers: You should already have noticed that this issue of The American Prospect looks different. From the "flag" (the name of the magazine on the cover) to the body text to the "folios" (the small type at the bottom of each page), we...

No sweat, doctor.(Devil in the Details)
January 1, 2005... JUST HOW CRAVEN A panderer is Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist? Consider the following: The office of Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman released a report early in December analyzing 13 curricula for abstinence-only education programs...

Soft on war crimes?(Devil in the Details)
January 1, 2005... IN THE MONTHS FOLLOWING Iraq's January election, Saddam Hussein will stand in the dock for war crimes and crimes against humanity. But as the Butcher of Baghdad awaits trial, a surprising dilemma has surfaced: Do we want him convicted? On one...

Islamabad is good.(Devil in the Details)
January 1, 2005... UP EARLY ON THE MORNING of Saturday, December 4, for a joint press conference with Pakistani President Pervez Musharaff, U.S. President George W. Bush took the opportunity to reiterate his position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "The...

Dossier: red-state values.(Devil in the Details)
January 1, 2005... In red states in 2001, there were 572,000 divorces... Blue states recorded 340,000... In the same year, 11 red states had higher rates of divorce than any blue state... In each of the red states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and New Mexico,...

What? No tang?(Devil in the Details)
January 1, 2005... EARLY IN 2004, GEORGE W. Bush tried unsuccessfully to channel John F. Kennedy, unveiling a new space initiative that included the promise of a manned mission to Mars by 2030. "This agency and the dedicated professionals who serve it have...

Transcript.(Devil in the Details)(Brief Article)(Transcript)
January 1, 2005... From the December 3, 2004, broadcast of the nationally syndicated The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly: Caller: The thing is, is when you have, for example, Christmas carols or gift exchanges being done in school, that kind of sets the kids...

The God squad: what's the difference between a politically conservative Supreme Court and a Court dominated by religious conservatives? Read on.(Dispatches)
January 1, 2005... LEADERS OF THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT are demanding a hard-line conservative Supreme Court as payback for their contribution to the re-election of President George W. Bush. Liberals, meanwhile, are seeking consolation in a roll call of justices, past...

The battle begins: for decades, Social Security was called the "third rail" of American politics. Suddenly, privatization sounds like a done deal. Not so fast.(Dispatches)
January 1, 2005... SOCIAL SECURITY IS THE MOST successful program that tangibly delivers on the core philosophy of the Democratic Party--namely, that ordinary people depend on government for economic security that markets can't provide. Unlike recent token...

A farewell to Armitage: Colin Powell's departure has been much discussed. Less so has been his deputy's. But the latter may prove to be the more important move.
January 1, 2005... WHEN COLIN POWELL ANNOUNCED his resignation as secretary of state on November 15, he didn't just take away the remaining vestiges of foreign-policy centrism from the Bush administration. He also eclipsed the departure of his deputy and best...

New year's resolutions.(THE TAXONOMIST)
January 1, 2005... OVER THE NEXT FEW YEARS, WE'RE GOING TO FACE monumental tax and budget decisions. President Bush wants to privatize part of Social Security, make the tax code far less progressive, borrow many more trillions of dollars, and probably slash...

Mapquest.dem: what's the matter with Massachusetts? The democrats are far too dependent on it. Go Midwest, young man.
January 1, 2005... IS THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY BECOMING THE NEW England party? In 2004, the candidates who dominated the Democratic presidential primaries, beginning with the one in New Hampshire, were Howard Dean of Vermont and John Kerry of Massachusetts. In 2004,...

Movement Interruptus: September 11 slowed the Democratic trend that we predicted, but the coalition we foresaw is still taking shape.
January 1, 2005... THERE WERE CERTAINLY REASONS TO DESPAIR after the 2004 election--chiefly, the awful thought that George W. Bush and a Republican Congress could find the means to exceed the egregious irresponsibility, the xenophobia, the sheer partisan...

The Democrats' Da Vinci Code: the election results they didn't tell you about: progressive victories in the heart of red America.
January 1, 2005... AS THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY GOES THROUGH ITS quadrennial self-flagellation process, the same tired old consultants and insiders are once again complaining that Democratic elected officials have no national agenda and no message. Yet encrypted...

North malice forty: what the Republicanization of testosterone means for the Democrats.(SPORTS)
January 1, 2005... JANUARY BRINGS THE ANNUAL RITUALS of the National Football League (NFL) playoffs and the major college bowl games, and if any more evidence were needed about how football-obsessed a nation ours has become, consider the following: Of the top 10...

Action liberalism.(Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism)(The Fall of the House of Roosevelt: Brokers of Ideas and Power from FDR to LBJ)(The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... EUGENE MCCARTHY: THE RISE AND FALL OF POSTWAR AMERICAN LIBERALISM BY DOMINIC SANDBROOK Knopf, 416 pages, $25.95 THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF ROOSEVELT: BROKERS OF IDEAS AND POWER FROM FDR TO LBJ BY MICHAEL JANEWAY Columbia University Press, 284...

EU got that thing.(The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE: THE NEW SUPERPOWER AND THE END OF AMERICAN SUPREMACY BY T.R. REID Penguin Books, 305 pages, $25.95 IT IS EASY TO SCOFF AT THE trappings of the European Union. Its flag of 12 gold stars on blue is bland. Its...

The enemy of comfort.(THE LAST WORD)(Iris Chang)(Obituary)
January 1, 2005... A WEEK AFTER THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS, IRIS Chang, the much-acclaimed author of The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, was found dead in her car on a highway just south of Los Gatos, California. Before shooting herself,...

The good news about pain treatment.(Brief Article)(Advertisement)
January 1, 2005... THE GOOD NEWS ABOUT PAIN TREATMENT: The Drug Enforcement Administration recently posted new guidelines on the DEA website to stop the unjustified harassment and prosecution of pain doctors. THE BAD NEWS ABOUT PAIN TREATMENT: Two months...

America observed: why foreign election observers would rate the United States near the bottom.
January 1, 2005... FEW NOTICED, BUT IN THE YEAR 2000, MEXICO and the United States traded places. After nearly two centuries of election fraud, Mexico's presidential election was praised universally by its political parties and international observers as free,...

2004: a report card: the appearance of a disaster averted obscures an election system that's still badly broken.
January 1, 2005... AMERICANS KNOW THE 2000 ELECTION WAS A fiasco. What they don't know is that the 2004 election, in many ways, might have been even worse. The purported margin of victory in November has led many to believe that the process went relatively...

The democracy we deserve: there's reason to be optimistic about the prospects for reform. Here's why.
January 1, 2005... THE 2004 ELECTION CONFOUNDED THOSE WHO have blamed the flaws in our democracy on apathetic voters, apolitical young people, and a generalized culture of disengagement. More than 120 million citizens cast ballots, a turnout of 60 percent of...

Whither the ward heelers? The democratic "527s" all but supplanted the party, but does ACT have a second act?(AMERICAN DEMOCRACY)(America Coming Together)
January 1, 2005... SHORTLY AFTER THE McCAIN-FEINGOLD BILL passed Congress in 2002, the smart money was all on the big money: Mega-wealthy donors to the new "527s" would dominate the new political era just as they had dominated the last. Sure enough, such...

Color it wrong: the tactics are more subtle than in the old days, but suppression of votes in minority neighborhoods is very much alive and well.
January 1, 2005... IF THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA CAN BE believed, the nation witnessed a hotly contested but generally acceptable election last November 2. George W. Bush won the White House in balloting that pulled our democracy back from the brink of illegitimacy and...

Courting trouble: liberal overdependence on the courts, combined with an obsessive preoccupation with church-state symbolism, has reached its limit.
January 1, 2005... JUDGING FROM THE VIEWS OF MY respected co-authors in this report, American democracy stands indicted for its performance in November's election. Yet in several important respects, the system performed better in 2004 than it has in years. That's...

Vanishing bipartisanship: a conversation with Warren Rudman.(AMERICAN DEMOCRACY)(Interview)
January 1, 2005... WARREN RUDMAN HAS SPENT years perfecting the art of bipartisanship. Called a "consensus-forging leader" by Senator Olympia Snowe, Rudman, who served two terms as a U.S. senator from New Hampshire (1980-92), is well-known for his role in...

Don't count on it: why we need paper trails to back up compromised and fallible voting machines--and why we're not getting them.
January 1, 2005... FOR ELECTION OFFICIALS IN FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida, November 2 had passed with merciful ease. The balloting was deemed an administrative success--until two days later, that is, when election workers noticed a mathematical oddity: As they...

A few good states: Maine, Minnesota, and now Georgia are showing that well-run elections are more than possible.
January 1, 2005... WHEN IT COMES TO ELECTION SYSTEMS the United States isn't all Floridas and Ohios. There are, in fact, a number of states that tend to run their elections well, through trusted systems and voter-friendly procedures. They don't grab the attention...