The American Prospect articles from May 2003

The American Prospect archives from May 2003

Were we wrong?
May 1, 2003... The Bush administration settled the argument about whether inspections could ever contain Saddam Hussein by making the issue moot. But the next phase of a broader debate continues. The Iraq War is the first step in a new and alarming policy,...

Why Iraq? (Correspondence).(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2003... JOHN B. JUDIS DOES AN expert job of unscrambling the process that led the Bush administration to its Iraq policy ["Why Iraq?" March 2003]. But he omits one important factor. Whether consciously or subconsciously, George W. Bush knows he looks...

A National-Security Gender Gap. (Correspondence).(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2003... I WAS ANGERED TO DIScover that among Sen. John Kerry's qualifications for the Democratic presidential nomination cited in "The Tough Dove's Moment" [March] is his vote for welfare reform. No nambypamby liberal here, Harold Meyerson tells...

The Right and the Law. (Correspondence).(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2003... YOUR SPECIAL REPORT "The Right and the Law" [March] deserves the thanks of a grateful nation for exposing the long-held strategy of the radical right in our country. I hope you are sending it to the major networks and media outlets in the hope...

Class Warfare, Bush-Style. (Correspondence).(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2003... ROBERT L. BOROSAGE ["Class Warfare, Bush-Style," March] really gets it. The Bush-Rove war on organized workers is as aggressive as it is consistent. And it began almost immediately. As Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao was being sworn in, George...

Corrections.(January 13, 2003 story, "Gored by the Media Bull" regarding misinformation by Katharine Seelye)("The Pro-War Post," commenting on Washington Post editorials influenced by west wing of White House, not television program)(Brief Article)(Correction Notice)
May 1, 2003... DUE TO AN EDITING ERROR, a sentence in Paul Waldman's story on Al Gore's media coverage in 2000 ["Gored by the Media Bull," Jan. 13] stated that he had seen Katharine Seelye of The New York Times questioned "in a number of public forums" about...

Know your allies! (Devil in the Details).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2003... WARNING TO HEADS OF government everywhere: Read the small print on all current U.S. government documents! You may have been enrolled in the Coalition of the Willing without even knowing about it! How so? Consider the experience of Prime...

Praying for you, sir! (Devil in the Details).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2003... THE PRESIDENT HAS SAID that our soldiers in Iraq are in his prayers, and there's an effort under way to ensure that this is a two-way street. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has reported that thousands of U.S. Marines have been given a...

Three economic amigos. (Devil in the Details).
May 1, 2003... TIME WAS WHEN ECOnomic advisers to the president actually advised the president on economics, but in an administration that plans to substitute Paul Wolfowitz for the United Nations, much is up for grabs. Indeed, the administration took...

While you were sleeping. (Devil in the Details).
May 1, 2003... Worried about loose nukes? A recent report by nuclear nonproliferation experts at Harvard University on the availability of the biggest, baddest weapons of mass destruction will send chills down your spine. Take the case of Russia, where just...

Brave new words. (Devil in the Details).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2003... TERRORIST n According to Richard Perle, someone who offends Richard Perle in print, as in, "Sy Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist." CONSTABULARY DUTIES n pl The responsibilities of empire, such as those the...

The cowed donkeys. (Devil in the Details).
May 1, 2003... THE SILENCE OF THE Democratic lambs continues. Generals not grousing about Don Rumsfeld's high-tech, air-power, special-forces invasion plan, which omitted only infantry and artillery from its order of battle, are being denied entry at...

Vast right-wing conspiracy. (Devil in the Details).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2003... Do you trust John Ashcroft with extensive new powers to spy on you, revoke your citizenship and keep you in jail without releasing your identity? You may say"no" but a fat lot that matters. Consider the Domestic Security Enhancement Act (or...

Heroes & zeroes. (Devil in the Details).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2003... RETIRED GENERALS DONALD RUMSFELD Note dearth of U.S. forces; War plan is his when it works, say so audibly Tommy Franks' when it doesn't SENATE GOP MODERATES JEB BUSH Vote against ANWR drilling ...

Wages are, like, so old. (Devil in the Details).
May 1, 2003... REPUBLICANS, LIKE YOGA instructors, are great proselytizers for flexibility. Whether the issue is health care, welfare reform or airport security, Republicans invariably prefer flexibility (that is, letting business do what it wants) to...

Candidate's scorecard: health care. (Devil in the Details).
May 1, 2003... AS A SERVICE TO OUR readers, the Prospect herewith inaugurates this page, which will rate the presidential candidates' policy proposals as they begin to release them in detail. So far, President Bush and two of the Democratic contenders...

Off the Wall Street Journal. (Devil in the Details).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2003... The right loves to reduce everything to a cost-benefit analysis. The latest gimmick is to calculate benefits and costs of reduced freedoms in the post-September 11 era as a justification for lost civil liberties. In a similar spirit, our...

Minister without portfolio. (Below The Beltway).
May 1, 2003... During the Iran-Contra scandal, it became clear that private citizens had been playing a critical role in the Reagan administration's foreign policy. Some of them, such as Richard Secord, had previously been government officials; others, such...

Humpty Dumpty in Baghdad: how the Pentagon plans to dominate postwar Iraq. (Dispatches).
May 1, 2003... THE PENTAGON IS RUMBLING INTO Baghdad completely unprepared to fashion a viable new Iraqi government, seemingly obsessed with installing the discredited and corrupt Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), as the country's...

Outsourcing the dirty work: the military and its reliance on hired guns. (Dispatches).
May 1, 2003... THE WAR IN IRAQ COULD NOT HAVE taken place without a network of for-profit contractors upon which the U.S. military has come to depend. Some 20,000 employees of private military companies (PMCs) and of more traditional military contractors...

Jews in play? Republicans go after the Jewish vote (again). (Dispatches).
May 1, 2003... MILTON HIMMELFARB ONCE FAMOUSLY quipped that "Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans." These days Republicans are trying to win the hearts and ballots of both Jewish and Hispanic voters. They may have more luck with the...

A license for power. (Comment).(Editorial)
May 1, 2003... Where's the conservative suspicion of the media now that we really need it? The Federal Communications Commission is preparing to roll back long-established rules limiting media ownership, a move that would make the media behemoths more...

Bring me women. (Comment).(Editorial)
May 1, 2003... At least Pfc. Jessica Lynch got her wounds on the battlefront. Back on the home front, Air Force Academy women have been taking friendly fire. Rape, it seems, is the price of graduation. To many civilians, that news from the Air Force Academy...

Deja voodoo economics. (The Taxonomist).
May 1, 2003... My friend and adversary Bruce Bartlett of the rabidly anti-tax National Center for Policy Analysis was tapped by Philadelphia public radio to defend President Bush's enacted and proposed tax cuts. Bartlett spoke glowingly about the tax cuts'...

Never again. (Comment).(criticism of Congress to relinquish war authorization authority)
May 1, 2003... A healthy constitutional system learns from its mistakes, and we have made a big one. Congress should never again write the president a blank check to make war. The precedent left by the first President Bush has cast a very large shadow on this...

The most dangerous president ever: how and why George W. Bush undermines American security. (Cover Story).
May 1, 2003... I miss Ronald Reagan. I know, I know: Reagan was our first president to proclaim government the problem, to cut taxes massively on the rich, to deliberately create a deficit so immense that the government's improverishment did indeed become a...

All the president's lies: Bush's rhetoric bears no resemblence to his policies. How does he get away with it?(Editorial)
May 1, 2003... Other presidents have had problems with truth-telling. Lyndon Johnson was said, politely, to have suffered a "credibility gap" when it came to Vietnam. Richard Nixon, during Watergate, was reduced to protesting, "I am not a crook." Bill Clinton...

In God's name: past presidents have shown there's a better way to invoke God in wartime.
May 1, 2003... THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION RUSHED INTO WAR TALKING about good and evil. "A calculated, malignant, devastating evil has arisen in our world," proclaimed Attorney General John Ashcroft. "And we know God is not neutral," added President Bush. While...

Trans-Atlantic food fight: the stakes in the U.S.--Europe battle over genetically engineered crops.
May 1, 2003... AT THE SUNDAY MARKET AT THE PLACE DE LA BASTILLE in Paris, the produce proudly announces its origins. There are bananas from Martinique, olives from Spain, artichokes from Brittany and broccoli from Saint-Malo, the place names written just...

No news is good news: how Bush gets a free ride--again and again and again. (Media).
May 1, 2003... IN MID-MARCH, WASHINGTON POST REporter Jonathan Weisman made a startling confession on media columnist Jim Romenesko's Web site. Weisman acknowledged that he changed a quote in a story about R. Glenn Hubbard, President Bush's departing economic...

Filmic face-lift: Better Luck Tomorrow makes over Asian American cinema. (Film).
May 1, 2003... fra-cas (`fra-kes) n a noisy, disorderly fight or quarrel; a brawl THE WHITE GUY HAD NO IDEA HE WAS about to do filmmaker Justin Lin a huge favor. After watching Lin's tale of Asian American high-school overachievers gone bad, the...

The war about war.(Book Review)
May 1, 2003... THE WAR OVER IRAQ: SADDAM'S TYRANNY AND AMERICA'S MISSION BY LAWRENCE F. KAPLAN AND WILLIAM KRISTOL * ENCOUNTER BOOKS * 153 PAGES * $25.95 THE CONFRONTATION WITH IRAQ IS A war in service of an idea. The idea is what has come to be known as...

Book brief: what liberal media?(Book Review)
May 1, 2003... WHAT LIBERAL MEDIA? THE TRUTH ABOUT BIAS AND THE NEWS (BASIC BOOKS) In this comprehensive examination of the news-commentary industry, Eric Alterman presents an impressive refutation of the myth that a liberal bias characterizes the media....

The parenting trap.(Book Review)
May 1, 2003... RAISING AMERICA: EXPERTS, PARENTS AND A CENTURY OF ADVICE ABOUT CHILDREN BY ANN HULBERT * ALFRED A. KNOPF * 384 PAGES * $27.50 WE LIVE IN AN AGE OF EXPERTS. OUR newspapers and magazines are filled with advice columns, our best-seller lists...

This fill makes you honest.(Book Review)
May 1, 2003... PROTECTING AMERICA'S HEALTH: THE FDA, BUSINESS, AND ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF REGULATION BY PHILIP J. HILTS * ALFRED A. KNOPF * 352 PAGES * $26.95 IN THE 1990S, ATTORNEY DANIEL TROY made a name for himself defending pharmaceutical manufacturers...

The big lesson. (The Last Word).
May 1, 2003... Memorandum To: The President From: Karl Rove As the Iraq War winds down, I want to bring to your attention several important lessons. Election day is just 19 months away. While I have the highest respect for your dad, I think it fair to say...

Sharing America's wealth: the necessary role of government in broadening the middle class.
May 1, 2003... America's generously egalitarian spirit coexists with a startlingly narrow concentration of wealth that has only worsened in the past two decades. This special report, one in a continuing Prospect series, explores how to think about this...

Tax wealth to broaden wealth: reframing the debate and mobilizing a constituency.
May 1, 2003... I RECENTLY SPOKE AT A VETERANS' CLUB IN SUBURBAN Boston about the dangers of America's growing wealth gap and its possible solutions. I informally polled the assembled group of 150 men, all white and over the age of 60. How many had received a...

How wealth defines power: the politics of the new Gilded Age.
May 1, 2003... Of all the great deceptions that come to surround a gathering stock-market boom--from blather about the obsolescence of the business cycle to editorial claptrap about the United States turning into a republic of shareholders--one of the most...

The myth of the investor class: and why small investors still rely on government.
May 1, 2003... Although the ownership of stocks and bonds is more highly concentrated than ever, we've been hearing a great deal lately about the rise of an "investor class." This concept, used with much abandon by free-market theorists and political...

Savings incentives for the poor: why the scale doesn't match the promise. (America's Wealth).
May 1, 2003... THE PROBLEM OF POVERTY IN AMERICA LOOMS LARGE even in the best of times. The most recent economic boom got the share of those officially deemed poor down to 11.7 percent, or about 33 million persons, but poverty rates are much higher for...

The risky business of retirement: pension protections are shaky and Social Security is under assault. (America's Wealth).
May 1, 2003... It's not your imagination: Americans are facing a lot more risk these days. Gone are the sense of national invulnerability and the notion that we are widely beloved because of our prosperity, our movies, our Bill of Rights, even our McDonald's....

Giving the poor some credit: microloans are in vogue. Are they a sound idea? (America's Wealth).
May 1, 2003... Microcredit for the poor is one of those ideas that attracts both liberals and conservatives. In principle, even the world's poorest people can acquire habits of savings and investment--if they have access to capital. The strategy is both...

The indentured generation: how debt stunts young people's dreams. (America's Wealth).
May 1, 2003... WHEN STEFANIE DAVIS, 27, WAS A STUDENT AT GEORGEtown Law School in 2001, the subject of student-loan debt and future legal salaries was an ever-present topic of conversation. Davis, who is married to a software developer, had the privilege of...