The American Prospect articles from July 2004

The American Prospect archives from July 2004

Earth to Kerry ...(Prospects)
July 1, 2004... George W. Bush had a pretty good month. Iraq is still a mess, but the Bush administration, with the improbable help of the United Nations, managed to confound the critics and install a new government in Baghdad. The UN Security Council blessed...

Bury the hatchet ...(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2004... I WAS DELIGHTED TO READ "Come Together" [June 2004] by Robert Kuttner and Will Marshall. It's about time we buried our minor differences and confronted the common enemy. E.J. Dionne Jr.'s piece in the same issue, "Democratic Detente," gives...

... Or carry one?(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2004... "DEMOCRATIC DETENTE" is another tepid call for Democrats to forget about fundamental issues and focus only on how Democrats are a better choice considering how bad the Republicans have become. Dionne states that the first thing we must abandon...

Kerry good advice.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2004... I AM VERY IMPRESSED with the quality and scope of articles in The American Prospect. At the urging of my mother in Florida, I picked up the May 2004 magazine. I have a comment on Matthew Yglesias' excellent article "Freedom Fraud" [May]....

AARP elbows.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2004... BARBARA T. DREYFUSS' article regarding AARP ["The Seduction," June] was a perfect example of the "special interest" problems outlined in Theda Skocpol's piece on "The Narrowing of Civic Life" [June]. Advocacy groups get in the door at the...

Nader's new raiders.(Devil in the Details)
July 1, 2004... WHEN OPPOSITES ATTRACT, it's not always a case of innocent bliss. During the month of April, donations to Ralph Nader's presidential campaign from contributors who have historically given to Republican candidates or the Republican Party spiked...

The social life of Kerryites.(Devil in the Details)
July 1, 2004... ABOUT A YEAR AGO I GOT roped into the Friendster social-software system by an English friend. Originally designed to help people find dates through friends, it's mainly used by my circle of college chums to stay in touch despite living in...

Rising Starrs.(Devil in the Details)
July 1, 2004... BILL HAS SURVIVED. Almost five years to the day after the Independent Counsel Act expired, former President Clinton released his memoir, My Life, which, properly enough, is none too kind to the zealous team of prosecutors assembled by...

Vast right-wing conspiracy.(Devil in the Details)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2004... Karl Rove is so desperate for votes from conservative Christians that he just might don a black preacher's robe and hit the pulpit. In early June, Luke Bernstein, coalitions coordinator for the Bush campaign in Pennsylvania, wrote a letter...

Brave new words.(Devil in the Details)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2004... TORTURE Not, according to a Pentagon memo, "the infliction of pain or suffering per se." It's got to be severe. What's more, your"good faith belief" that you are inflicting non-severe pain "need not be a reasonable one" to get you off the...

Ground Zero West.(Devil in the Details)
July 1, 2004... WHILE NEW YORK'S SEPTEMBER 11 memorial as yet exists only in architectural renderings, another 9-11 monument, open for more than a year, has already drawn millions of visitors. To get there from Ground Zero, take the Holland Tunnel to New...

Ballot insecurity: in theory, the June 30 handover in Iraq is supposed to clear the path to free and fair elections. In practice, it's a little more complicated than that.(Dispatches)
July 1, 2004... SIX MONTHS AGO, THE QUESTION ON the lips of most critics of the occupation of Iraq was one that the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani had posed: Why not hold elections by June 30? At the time, the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA)...

Man in the iron Mosque: radical Sunni cleric Sheikh Mahdi al-Sumeidayih was held in Abu Ghraib prison--and he and his Salafi followers are hardly in a forgiving mood.(Dispatches)
July 1, 2004... IF THE AMERICAN JAILERS OF SHEIKH Mahdi al-Sumeidayih hoped to take the fire out of one of Iraq's most radical Sunni clerics, they might have been glad to hear the hesitant, almost beseeching tone in his voice less than a week after his...

Eastern bloc party: on the eve of the Iraq War, the Bush administration boasted of a great European divide. But today, Europe's united--and economically strong.(Dispatches)
July 1, 2004... IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND THIS year's expansion of the European Union and NATO, go to Berlin. Fifteen years ago, the Berlin Wall, approximately 96 miles of concrete and soldiers, was the symbol of the Cold War. When I visited this spring,...

Oinkonomics?(The Taxonomist)
July 1, 2004... Congress seems on the verge of enacting a major new corporate-tax giveaway bill this summer. Ostensibly designed to protect American manufacturing jobs, it will almost certainly have the opposite effect. But hardly any of our lawmakers seem to...

Building a better UN: yes, we need it. But we need it to be more effective than it has been. Can the UN fix itself?(United Nations)
July 1, 2004... IF ONE HAD ASKED THE LEADERS OF THE UNITED NATIONS to choose a test case through which they could demonstrate the organization's efficacy before the world, they would hardly have chosen Iraq. With a volatile security situation, too few...

Life after death.(Capital Punishment)
July 1, 2004... WHY A WHOLE SPECIAL REPORT ON THE death penalty? For one thing, the growing movement to reform and eventually abolish capital punishment in America suggests that heterodox currents are alive and thriving in these seemingly conservative times....

Death's dwindling dominion: public opinion is shifting against the death penalty. What will it take to abolish it?(Execution)
July 1, 2004... AS WE ENTER THE 21ST CENTURY, AMERICANS have never been more divided over the proper role of the death penalty. Some of us (still a minority) would like to see it entirely abolished--and we have achieved this goal in a dozen states, beginning...

121 days old: Nick Yarris' new life after he was freed from death row.(Exoneration)
July 1, 2004... IF YOU'D ASKED NICK YARRIS HOW OLD HE WAS, ON May 17, 2004--his 43rd birthday--he'd have told you, "121 days." For the rest of his life, Yarris will have his regular birthday and the day he was born again: January 16, 2004, the day he walked...

Shutting down death row: Illinois' death-penalty reforms may presage a fairer criminal-justice system.(Reform)
July 1, 2004... CHANGE IN THE CRIMINAL-JUSTICE SYSTEM IS A rare thing. Change in death-penalty policy is even more rare. Yet Illinois undertook a comprehensive reassessment of its death-penalty system recently, passing reforms that will have far reaching...

The unique brutality of Texas: why the Lone Star State leads the nation in executions.(Recalcitrance)
July 1, 2004... GATHERING DUST IN TEXAS GOVERNOR RICK Perry's inbox is a clemency petition from Joe Lee Guy, a death-row inmate. The petition declares that "the integrity of Guy's capital trial was severely compromised." Considering how horrendously the wheels...

The uneven scales of capital justice: how race and class affect who ends up on death row.(Race & Class)
July 1, 2004... IN 1972, THE U.S. SUPREME COURT DECLARED THE death penalty unconstitutional. The Court found that because the capital-punishment laws gave sentencers virtually unbridled discretion in deciding whether or not to impose a death sentence, "The...

Taking juveniles off death row: this year the Supreme Court will hear arguments over whether the juvenile death penalty is unconstitutional. If it decides so, the Court will be on the cutting edge of death-penalty reform.(Youth)
July 1, 2004... DESPITE A JUDICIARY INCREASINGLY DOMINATED BY CONSERVATIVE APPOINTEES, the federal courts have shown a heartening willingness to rein in the death penalty. In recent years, they have limited who is eligible and have placed other restrictions on...

Courtroom contortions: how America's application of the death penalty erodes the principle of equal justice under law.(Injustice)
July 1, 2004... ONE COST THIS COUNTRY PAYS FOR THE DEATH penalty is that its courts are constantly compelled to corrupt the law in order to uphold death sentences. That corruption soils the character of the United States as a nation dedicated to equal justice...

Going it alone: the rest of the civilized world has abolished the death penalty. Will the United States follow suit?(Outliers)
July 1, 2004... AS YOU HAVE READ IN THE PRECEDING PAGES, a large majority of countries in the world have abolished the death penalty. In order to join the European Union, for example, countries have to become parties to the European Convention for the...

Look who's feuding: suddenly it's Republicans (for a change!) who are at one another's throats over Iraq. There's even talk of a postelection neocon purge. The sun sets on national greatness conservatism.(Cover Story)
July 1, 2004... ABU GHRAIB. L'AFFAIRE CHALABI. GEORGE TENET'S RESIGnation. More conservative defections from the war enterprise. A circular firing squad of feuds--between John McCain and Denny Hastert, Dick Armey and Tom DeLay. These have been, to state...

Waging the media battle.
July 1, 2004... OUR PRESS SYSTEM IS FALLING IN THE UNITED STATES, and we must be clear about why it is failing. The problem is not with poorly trained or unethical journalists; in fact, I suspect this may well be as talented and ethical as any generation of...

Blog heaven.
July 1, 2004... ROBERT MCCHESNEY WILL GET NO ARGUMENT FROM ME on the vital importance of fighting to change the many ways our government policies have made possible the ongoing consolidation of media outlets into fewer and fewer corporate-controlled hands....

The business motive.
July 1, 2004... I GUESS I OFFICIALLY QUALIFY AS AN OLD FART NOW. I agree with much of Robert McChesney's diagnosis of the media's problems; I just lack faith in the prescription. I think that the "media politics" syndrome he describes has reached its advanced...

Check and balance.
July 1, 2004... FROM THE NATION'S FOUNDING, THE UNITED STATES HAS promoted communications through constitutional guarantees, favorable legislation, and extensive subsidies. There has been nothing sinister about this bias. Although the purposes have varied, the...

It was a very bad year: there's little to celebrate about Bill Keller's first anniversary at the helm of The New York Times. And the Judith Miller fiasco is only part of the problem.(Media)
July 1, 2004... THERE WAS A TIME WHEN READERS of The New York Times never knew what they were missing. You had to run down to Hotaling's, the out-of-town newsstand in Times Square, to check The Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times, or wait a few days for...

God and man in the GOP.(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... THE RIGHT NATION: CONSERVATIVE POWER IN AMERICA BY JOHN MICKLETHWAIT AND ADRIAN WOOLDRIDGE * PENGUIN * 464 PAGES * $25.95 THE RECENT HISTORY OF AMERICAN politics can be told as the story of two alliances--one made and unmade by the...

Right on the low road.(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... THE CHEATING CULTURE: WHY MORE AMERICANS ARE DOING WRONG TO GET AHEAD BY DAVID CALLAHAN * HARCOURT * 353 PAGES * $26.00 FEW DECISIONS CAUSED GEORGE WASHington more agony than whether or not to accept some canal-company shares that the...

The lost continent.(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... A CONTINENT FOR THE TAKING: THE TRAGEDY AND HOPE OF AFRICA BY HOWARD W. FRENCH * KNOPF * 280 PAGES * $25.00 THE APPOINTMENTS OF COLIN POWELL as secretary of state and Condoleezza Rice as the president's national-security adviser raised...

Bush's God.(The Last Word)
July 1, 2004... It was recently reported that the Bush campaign had e-mailed members of the clergy, soliciting help in identifying "friendly" congregations that would do the campaign's bidding in their areas. When the e-mail came to light, legal experts...