The American Prospect articles from July 2007

The American Prospect archives from July 2007

Why immigration reform?(PROSPECTS)
July 1, 2007... WHEN IMMIGRATION LEGISLATION STALLED AND possibly died on the Senate floor on June 7, some progressives were just as pleased as Lou Dobbs. But passing even an imperfect compromise of the kind the Senate had been debating would be far better...

Genetic differences.(CORRESPONDENCE)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2007... Melvin Konner's review of Michael Sandel's "The Case Against Perfection" [May 2007] reads like something written by Ayn Rand on steroids. Konner glibly downplays concerns about sports doping, cosmetic surgery, lifestyle neuropharmaceuticals,...

Strike two.(CORRESPONDENCE)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2007... I took courses with Albert Wohlstetter in the late 1970s. Anthony David's description ["The Apprentice," June 2007] of him as some kind of wild-eyed ideologue is quite bemusing. Nowhere in Wohlstetter's classic, "The Delicate Balance," does he...

Correction.(CORRESPONDENCE)(Correction notice)
July 1, 2007... "The Shia Fellas" by Robert Dreyfuss [June 2007] mistakenly referred to Mohammed Baqr Hakim as "Sadr I." Mohammed Baqr al-Sadr is Sadr I. Sadr but wiser, we regret the error.

From the executive editor.(CORRESPONDENCE)(Editorial)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... THE AIR HAS UP AND LEFT CONSERVATISM'S BALLOON. And not just substantively (as anyone who has listened to the Republican presidential candidates debate can attest), but politically as well. Public support for conservative...

Gore's future revealed.(Up Front)(Al Gore)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... IN CONSULTATION WITH A TEAM OF MATHEMATICIANS and climatologists at MIT and Cal Tech, the Prospect has devised what we consider to be a foolproof formula for determining whether Al Gore will enter the 2008 presidential race. We begin by...

Search and destroy.(Up Front)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... Rejoice! The Hillary Clinton book season is at last upon us. The first high-pedigreed tome to hit bookstands is Her Way by Don Van Natta Jr. and Jeff Gerth--The New York Times' veteran Whitewater hype man. At one point in the book, the two...

"Really straightforward".(Up Front)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... Fun with selective Nexis searching aside, Gerth and Van Natta at least don't appear to be completely confused about basic issues in their narrative. Carl Bernstein, for his part, also has a Hillary book out this summer, A Woman In Charge....

Casualty of what?!(Up Front)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... Assorted bigwig hawks and D.C. establishment types wrote a total of 174 letters to Judge Reggie Walton urging him to show mercy in his sentencing of Scooter Libby. One of the most fulsome letters of praise came from Fouad Ajami, a Johns Hopkins...

The question: Mitt Romney says his favorite book is Battlefield Earth. What's a better book he could read?(Upfront)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... "Double-Gitmo-Mittmo should be, well, strapped to a chair and forced to read a good book on torture, such as Tara McKelvey's Monstering." --Rick Perlstein, author, Nixonland (forthcoming) "Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven. ...

It's a win-win!(Upfront)(abortion rights)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... The Washington Post ran a piece in early June about splits in the anti-abortion movement concerning the Supreme Court's Gonzales v. Carhart decision and the overall effectiveness of the strategy of ginning up arbitrary laws banning specific...

Down the memory hole.(Upfront)(Mitt Romney's stand on Iraq war)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney took some small heat for claiming at the early June New Hampshire primary debate that Saddam Hussein had not "opened up his country to IAEA inspectors" in 2003. Back in the real world, Hussein did, in...

Publishing boom.(PARODY)(Bibliography)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... Are You Missing the Real Estate Boom? Why Home Values and Other Real Estate Investments Will Climb Through The End of The Decade--And How to Profit From Them [c] 2005 2 Years to a Million in Real Estate [c] 2006 250 Questions You...

The thirty-year itch.(THE OUT YEARS)(liberalism and conservatism)
July 1, 2007... I'VE ALWAYS RESISTED THE IDEA THAT THERE IS "AN inherent cyclical rhythm in our national affairs," as the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. put it. Schlesinger suggested that American history moves in 30-year cycles between liberalism and...

Beyond regret.(COMMENT)(pro life movement)
July 1, 2007... FOR SEVERAL MONTHS I'VE HAD A WORRY, ONE OF those that at first seems mad but won't, over time, go away: Sometime in the foreseeable future, anti-abortion forces will make another run at the surgeon general, seeking a warning that abortion is...

Democrats are back--but ... there's a catch: The Republicans have so discredited government that Democrats will encounter trouble backing the programs that they, and a conflicted public, know the nation needs.(AFTER THE FAILURE OF CONSERVATISM)
July 1, 2007... TODAY'S PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES NAVIGATE A partisan landscape strikingly more Democratic than that in 2004 and even 2006. Poll after poll confirms the president's low job approval and the public's contempt for the Republican Party. For the...

Conservatism itself: Bush didn't fail because he betrayed conservatism. He failed because his administration was the most conservative of modern times.(AFTER THE FAILURE OF CONSERVATISM)
July 1, 2007... "WE HAVE TO RECOGNIZE THAT THIS WAS A DEFEAT for Republicans, not for conservatives, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich summarized the 2006 Republican election rout. Republicans, George Will echoed, were punished not for pursuing but for...

My Marty Peretz problem--and ours: he bought The New Republic in 1974 and sold it this February. In between, he transformed America's most influential liberal weekly. Today, it is no longer as influential, or liberal, or even weekly.(Martin H. Peretz)
July 1, 2007... "A MAGAZINE," A FRIEND ONCE OBSERVED TO ME over too many glasses of wine, "is by definition a problem." But like Tolstoy's unhappy families, each magazine is its own peculiar problem. And for the past 34 years, the name of The New Republic's...

What hedge funds risk: increasingly, everyone's money--that's what. nobody rides herd on these unregulated investment funds, which now manage a tidy $1.5 trillion.
July 1, 2007... BRIAN HUNTER THINKS HE KNOWS SOMETHING ABOUT hedge fund investing. The 33-year-old Canadian energy trader is starting his own firm and reportedly has already raised nearly $1 billion for the endeavor. No matter that Hunter was largely...

A globalism for our time: sixty years ago, George Marshall unveiled his plan for rebuilding Europe and redefining America's role in the world. It was on-target then, and his vision for America's role is even more on-target today.
July 1, 2007... LIKE THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS, it was a short speech. It took George Marshall just 12 minutes to read his Harvard commencement address, which on June 5, 1947, introduced the United States and Europe to the Marshall Plan. Firsthand reports of the...

Inner-city futurism: a new kind of high school in Chicago's ghetto will train its students for high-tech, high-pay manufacturing.(GOOD JOBS)(Austin Polytechnical Academy)
July 1, 2007... AUSTIN COMMUNITY ACADEMY IS THE SORT OF HIGH school where the bathrooms don't have doors--the better to prevent violence from erupting beyond view. The posters dotting the walls are all for military careers, and despite a beautiful, stately...

Downtown, not just for yuppies: in Denver, thanks to low-income and environmental justice activists, a new mega-project will include affordable housing and good jobs.(GOOD JOBS)
July 1, 2007... TIM LOPEZ WALKS ALONG THE 800 BLOCK OF SOUTH Lincoln Street in the Baker neighborhood of Denver on a clear May afternoon. Trucks roar along a nearby highway, and the street is littered with broken flagstone, cigarette butts, and a flattened...

Two paths for the planet: will we rewire the world with clean energy--or descend into political chaos, social disruption, and climate hell? And will Washington get with the program?
July 1, 2007... HUMANITY IS STANDING AT A CROSSROADS BETWEEN a more just, peaceful world and an increasingly chaotic, turbulent, and authoritarian future driven by a succession of climate-driven emergencies. We could find ourselves struggling to survive a...

Shuttering the sites: like its Chinese counterpart, the new military government of Thailand promotes more investment--and radically less free speech.
July 1, 2007... AS THAI WEB SURFERS MIGHT TELL YOUR LIVING UNDER a military government is no fun. Since April, Thai Internet users looking to YouTube for their favorite lip-sync performances, stupid-human tricks, or political-protest videos have been getting a...

Beyond fear: the NBC hit Heroes is the anti-24. Its emergency-powers president is the villian--and viewers love it.(MEDIA)(National Broadcasting Company)
July 1, 2007... WHEN PETITE, BLONDE DIXIE Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines told a British audience ten days before the 2003 American invasion of Iraq: "Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we're...

How rights became human.(Investing Human Rights: A History)(Book review)
July 1, 2007... INVENTING HUMAN RIGHTS: A HISTORY BY LYNN HUNT W.W. Norton, 272 pages, $25.95 IN AUGUST 2006, I BECAME THE first--and only, as it turns out-journalist to speak with Lynndie R. England at the Naval Consolidated Brig Miramar in San Diego. I...

Our editors at the bookstore.(READING LIBERALLY)(Bibliography)
July 1, 2007... This year brings a bumper crop of books about liberal politics and ideas, and three of those books come from the co-founders of this magazine. The first of the three to appear was Paul Starr's FREEDOM'S POWER: THE TRUE FORCE OF LIBERALISM,...

Why we are vulnerable.(The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters)(The Edge of Disaster)(Americans at Risk: Why We Are Not Prepared for Megadisasters and What We Can Do Now)(Book review)
July 1, 2007... THE NEXT CATASTROPHE: REDUCING OUR VULNERABILITIES TO NATURAL, INDUSTRIAL, AND TERRORIST DISASTERS BY CHARLES PERROW, Princeton University Press, 377 pages, $29.95 THE EDGE OF DISASTER BY STEPHEN FLYNN, Random House, 240 pages, $25.95 ...

Forget those treaties!(THE CLOSER)
July 1, 2007... HERE'S THE QUESTION OF THE DAY: CAN THE UNITED States ever ratify a treaty, be it Kyoto or the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court (ICC), and take its rightful place in the governance of the world? Not likely--unless we give up...