The American Prospect articles from January 2007

The American Prospect archives from January 2007

The way out.(PROSPECTS)(Iraqi War)
January 1, 2007... WOULD LEAVING IRAQ MEAN "SURRENDERING" to the enemy and "losing" the war? That is how the war's supporters have cast the alternative of a phased American withdrawal. But at a time when the Taliban are gaining strength in Afghanistan and have...

An ACLU coup?(CORRESPONDENCE)(American Civil Liberties Union)(Viewpoint essay)
January 1, 2007... I WISH TARA McKELVEY'S article on the controversies in the ACLU, "Uncivil Libertarians" [December 2006] had been informed by the concerns of some of us who are involved in the issues but do not personally know the more famous participants. That...

Shredding protocols.(CORRESPONDENCE)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2007... TARA McKELVEY'S RECENT article on the ACLU [December] misrepresents both the timing and the facts of the issues regarding document shredding. As the former ACLU archivist and records manager who developed and ran a witnessed, documented,...

More such failures.(CORRESPONDENCE)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2007... IN HIS REVIEW "RESTRAINING the Judges" [December], Gordon Silverstein repeats a widely held misconception. Franklin Roosevelt didn't "fail miserably when he attempted to curb the Court." [H]e failed in his attempt to enlarge the Court, but [he...

Correction.(CORRESPONDENCE)(Correction notice)
January 1, 2007... The table of contents entry for "In But Not of Israel" [December] by Jo-Ann Mort referred to Umm El-Fahm as "Israel's largest Arab town." It's actually Israel's largest Muslim town.

Shock and aaaugh!(Up Front)(political conditions of United States)(Viewpoint essay)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... "I'VE NEVER BEEN A SWING VOTER BEFORE," MUSED David Brooks a few weeks after the election. He was far from the only dejected partisan who'd grown confused trying to process the GOP's thumping. On November 30, the conservative Hudson Institute...

United we fall.(Up Front)(Iraq Study Group)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... David Broder reached new heights (depths?) of self-parody in a December 6 column gushingly touting the Iraq Study Group's work as an "exhilarating experience, a demonstration of genuine bipartisanship," regardless of what the substance of the...

Message: prevail.(Up Front)(George W. Bush on Iraq Study Report)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... Meanwhile, President Bush held a joint press conference with Tony Blair following the release of the Iraq Study Report. He hewed to an impressively consistent theme when answering questions; see if you can spot it: "I also believe we're going...

Blaming the victims.(Up Front)(Iraq)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... The January 2005 Iraqi elections offered conservatives their last real occasion for maximal gloating and denunciations of war opponents' indifference to Iraqi freedom. Bill O'Reilly noted in the run-up to the elections that "you would think...

To putt is glorious.(Up Front)(Xiamen University makes golf a must for admissions)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... One more scene from the marriage of capitalism and Chinese communism: Bloomberg News reports that at Xiamen University, on China's southern coast, golf is now a mandatory requirement for law, economics, management, and software engineering...

American dreams.(Up Front)(James K. Glassman publishes The American)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... James K. Glassman, free-market fanatic and author of the eerily prescient tech-boom-era tome Dow 36,000, has started a new venture--a print magazine called The American, covering business and economics. The debut issue included a feature story...

DeLay vs. readers.(Up Front)(Tom DeLay starts his blog www.tomdelay.com)(Website list)
January 1, 2007... Set your bookmarks: Tom DeLay has started a blog, at www.tomdelay.com. Adjusting to the rough-and-tumble world of blog comment threads proved difficult at first. As the Hammer told The Hill on December 11, "Yesterday, we were up on the blog for...

The question: how many u.s. troops will be in Iraq on January 1, 2008?(Up Front)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... "Unfortunately, close to the current 140,000. The bungling of the war means the Iraqis are not yet up to the job." --Nancy Soderberg, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations "80,000, as politicians from both parties will demand we...

From the secret files of Donald Rumsfeld.(PARODY)(on Iraqi War)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... "Two days before he resigned as defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld submitted a classified memo to the White House that acknowledged that the Bush administration's strategy in Iraq was not working and called for a major course correction.......

The overrated swing voter.(THE OUT YEARS)(Democratic Party (United States) wins)
January 1, 2007... ONE LESSON OF THE 2006 VOTE WAS SO OBVIOUS that Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times was able to write about it two days before the election: the return of the swing voter. Karl Rove's strategy of mobilizing a conservative Republican base...

The real judicial activists.(COMMENT)(supreme court justices)(Column)
January 1, 2007... IN DISCUSSIONS OF "JUDICIAL ACTIVISM," ALMOST everyone focuses on how often Supreme Court justices vote to strike down acts of Congress. These discussions neglect a question that is, in terms of the Court's actual workload, much more important:...

Doctoring health care, I: democrats, business, and labor look to 2008.(CAPITOL HILL)
January 1, 2007... FOR ALL THE HYPE OVER THE Democrats retaking Congress, you'd think the reemergence of that body's liberal lions would, in short order, bring about universal health care and a host of other panaceas. Winning universal health care, alas, remains...

Doctoring health care, II: yo, democrats/Medicare is privatizing!(CAPITOL HILL)(Democratic Party (United States))
January 1, 2007... IF YOU'RE A SENIOR CITIZEN OR JUST happen to know one, you're probably familiar with the flaws in the Medicare Modernization Act (MMA)--the legislative monstrosity that Congress enacted, after one very long night in 2003 when Tom DeLay held the...

Arms dealers to the world: the defense industry wants fewer controls on its exports of armaments.(EXPORTS)
January 1, 2007... NO ONE CAN ACCUSE THE DEFENSE industry of lacking audacity. Despite receiving vast sums of money from the Pentagon each year, and having much of Congress in their back pocket, arms manufacturers have been holding conference after conference of...

The little pill that could: can RU-486 also treat cancer? Pro-choice advocates hope so.(WOMENS'S HEALTH)
January 1, 2007... IN THE MID-1990S, THE ABORTION wars were at a fever pitch over the impending approval of RU-486. Time magazine called it "The Pill that Changes Everything," The New York Times Magazine dubbed it a 'little white bombshell," and anti-abortion...

Rejecting the right: on issue after issue, conservatives are increasingly isolated from their fellow Americans.(ANALYSIS)
January 1, 2007... ONE SWALLOW DOES NOT A SUMMER MAKE NOR one election a new era. But some significant new realities that emerged from 2006 merit attention. First, clearly, this was a sweeping victory. Democrats had to overcome the Republican advantages in...

Murder & migration: a U.S. trade deal with Colombia may just have been signed, but foreign investment projects have already cost Afro-Colombians their land and their lives.(PHOTO ESSAY)
January 1, 2007... DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS ANYWHERE IN THE world often have a high human cost. In Colombia, the price is olden measured in human lives and blood. Esperanza (she would risk her life, she says, if her real name appeared in print) saw her neighbors...

In Arabic in English in D.C.: up to a point, Al Jazeera English looks like your cable news. Past that point, it doesn't. Not that you can see it, anyway.(MEDIA)
January 1, 2007... AL JAZEERA HAS BEEN CALLED "THE terrorist network," a "beheadings channel," and "a mouthpiece for Osama bin Laden." Yet there was Dave Marash, 64, Al Jazeera's improbable anchor, sitting at his computer in a seventh-floor corner office in its...

The other war.(The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban )(Book review)
January 1, 2007... THE PUNISHMENT OF VIRTUE: INSIDE AFGHANISTAN AFTER THE TALIBAN BY SARAH CHAYES Penguin Press, 386 pages, $25.95 DEFEAT IN IRAQ WILL BE BAD, but defeat in Afghanistan would be a catastrophe. If U.S. and NATO troops eventually leave and the...

Indictment or challenge?(Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... PALESTINE: PEACE NOT APARTHEID BY JIMMY CARTER Simon & Schuster, 264 pages, $27.00 BEFORE IT WAS EVEN RELEASED on November 14, Jimmy Carter's new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, caused an uproar. The implied analogy in the title...

Back to class.(The Charter School Dust-Up Examining the Evidence on Enrollment and Achievement)(The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial)(The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children)(The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... THE CHILDREN IN ROOM E4: AMERICAN EDUCATION ON TRIAL BY SUSAN EATON Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 357 pages, $24.95 THE SHAME OF THE NATION: THE RESTORATION OF APARTHEID SCHOOLING IN AMERICA BY JONATHAN KOZOL Crown, 404 pages, $25.00 ...

How to create populists.(THE LAST WORD)
January 1, 2007... SEVERAL YEARS AGO I HAD A PHILOSOPHICAL conversation with my good friend and Cabinet colleague Bob Rubin over lunch in the White House mess. Cabinet members rarely talk philosophy. There isn't time. Mostly, they talk about how to put out the...

Green common ground.(SPECIAL REPORT: EMERALD CITIES)( Frances Beinecke, Bart Harvey)(Interview)
January 1, 2007... Prospect Co-Editor Robert Kuttner spoke with Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and Bart Harvey, chairman of the board of Enterprise Community Partners. The NRDC is one of America's leading...

Sustainable cities: smart growth is newly fashionable. But what will it take to turn fashion into national policy?(SPECIAL REPORT: EMERALD CITIES)
January 1, 2007... A "GREEN REVOLUTION" IS BURGEONING IN America's cities and towns. And it's a surprise. Six years ago, as we exited an economically exuberant but perilously polluting 20th century, the idea would have seemed chimerical. True, by the 1990s...

Healthy communities, healthy people.(SPECIAL REPORT: EMERALD CITIES)
January 1, 2007... I WORK JUST BLOCKS FROM ONE OF the poorest areas in Washington, D.C. There are liquor stores, convenience stores, and gas stations, but nothing resembling a grocery store with fresh, affordable produce. The playgrounds are dilapidated, with...

The new environment for housing: with a few crusading advocates to lead the way, the market for green affordable housing shows promise.(SPECIAL REPORT: EMERALD CITIES)(Minnesota)
January 1, 2007... STARTING OUT, RICK GOODEMANN WAS A MINNESOTA construction worker hired to refurbish a dilapidated building that had served as low-income housing for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He remembers feeling a sense of waste in...

Not just for the gentry: can the "new urbanism" of green city neighborhoods, convenient to transportation and jobs, also provide affordable housing?(SPECIAL REPORT: EMERALD CITIES)(Los Angeles)
January 1, 2007... WE NEED TO IMAGINE A FUTURE IN WHICH Los Angeles is the greenest and cleanest big city in America," Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said in his April 2006 state of the city address. That s a tall order when you consider Los Angeles' long-standing...

Help wanted--green: green development could be a big generator of good jobs--if America will seize the opportunity.(SPECIAL REPORT: EMERALD CITIES)(renewable energy sector )
January 1, 2007... THERE ARE GOOD JOBS TO BE HAD IN ENVIRON-mentally friendly development, and construction jobs are just the beginning. Thousands of jobs are in products that go into green buildings. The job potential in renewable energy production is even more...

A gulf of good intentions: can New Orleans rebuild along green, sustainable, affordable lines? That will take serious resources--as well as better cooperation.(SPECIAL SECTION: EMERALD CITIES)
January 1, 2007... BACK IN NOVEMBER 2005, BARELY THREE MONTHS after Hurricane Katrina, the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Land Institute presented its recommendations for rebuilding a post-apocalyptic New Orleans. One recommendation called for shrinking the city...