The American Prospect articles from November 2007

The American Prospect archives from November 2007

The Iran wedge.(PROSPECTS)(Essay)
November 1, 2007... NOW IS THE SEASON OF REPUBLICAN LETHARGY AND discontent. A wave of retirements is dimming GOP congressional prospects, while the Republican presidential candidates have generated so little excitement that they are running behind the Democrats...

Health care: go long.(CORRESPONDENCE)(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] PAUL STARR PRESENTED an excellent overview ["The Hillarycare Mythology," October 2007] of the 1993-1994 struggle for national health insurance. He is probably seriously in error, however, in concluding that universal...

Medicare, anyone?(CORRESPONDENCE)(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2007... STARR'S ARTICLE BRINGS up considerations not only of the past--and the perfectly routine stupidity of the press--but of the future. When we read the phrase "universal coverage based on consumer choice among competing private health plans," we...

Tending the hedges.(CORRESPONDENCE)(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2007... THE EXCELLENT SUMMARY of the current financial crisis by Robert Kuttner ["The Bubble Economy," October 2007] is marred by a few misstatements regarding the hedge-fund industry. Kuttner writes that in the collapse of the LTCM hedge fund, the...

From the executive editor.(CORRESPONDENCE)(Editorial)
November 1, 2007... WHEN THE LIBERALS AND THE LITERATI AND HOLLYWOOD all come out against the Bush administration's assaults on liberty and individual fights, that's not news. But when the superheroes of America's comic books hurl their superpowers against the...

Pinless cures.(Up Front)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ON A CAMPAIGN STOP IN CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA, A television news reporter asked Barack Obama why he doesn't wear an American flag pin. Obama replied that such doodads have become a substitute for "true patriotism."...

Third-party possibilities.(Up Front)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... Following special secret side discussions at the special secret conservative Council for National Policy meeting in Salt Lake City in late September, conservative Christian leaders announced that they would consider running a third-party...

Swapping nightmares.(Up Front)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... Did you know that children whose parents "don't fall in line" to take arms against global warming "are sometimes ostracized" by their little peers? We didn't either, until we got the press release for a new kids' book (ages 8 to 12) entitled...

Billboard planet.(Up Front)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... What is it that airline passengers long to see as they peer out their portholes for their first-ever glimpse of London, Paris, or New York? But, of course: giant advertising displays! The London-based Ad-Air ad agency is planning to sell...

Policy made easy.(Up Front)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... The direction of the Chinese Communist Party may seem opaque to us outsiders, but to the party's ideologists, it's simplicity itself. "It is impossible for China to return to the left, because that would mean poverty and backwardness," Huang...

The question: Hillary is to "cackle" as ...(Up Front)(Hillary Clinton)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "Rudy is to 'I do.'" --Larry Sabato, University of Virginia professor of politics, and author of A More Perfect Constitution "Biden is to talking and talking and talking and talking." --Chuck Todd, political...

Parody.(Up Front)
November 1, 2007... STEVE KROFT: Who's the [Anita Hill] you knew? CLARENCE THOMAS: Well, I think she could defend herself... she responded very quickly. NARRATOR: In the book [Clarence Thomas' memoir, My Grandfather's Son], he remembers her as an average...

The moral equivalent of optimism.(THE OUT YEARS)
November 1, 2007... You may have noticed a recurring theme in this column: that there is a set of assumptions about political possibilities that date from the late 1970s and have led to the timidity of more recent liberal politics--and that are overdue for...

Eyes wide open.(COMMENT)
November 1, 2007... SOMEWHERE ON THE ROAD TO A "JOHN EDWARDS FOR President" event at a middle school in an Iowa Mississippi River community, I took a wrong turn. This set me cruising along a battered Main Street before turning into a neighborhood of bedraggled...

Bush's neo-imperialist war: our Iraqi occupation not only rejects American foreign policy since Wilson, it's a throwback to the great power imperialism that led to World War I.(George W. Bush)(Viewpoint essay)
November 1, 2007... IN 1882 THE BRITISH OCCUPIED EGYPT. ALTHOUGH THEY claimed they would withdraw their troops, the British remained, they said, at the request of the khedive, the ruler they had installed. The U.S. Army Area Handbook aptly describes the British...

In Iraq forever.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] FOOLISH LIBERALS. JUST DAYS AFTER President Bysh announced in January that he would deploy an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq as a temporary "surge," liberals came up with a different buzzword. "Democrats oppose...

Who's to blame for the brave new economy? Are we all complicit in the erosion of economic stability in American life? Or are corporate and financial elites the culprits? Our resident Roberts--Kutner and Reich, each of whom has authored a new book on the political economy--argue the responsibility question while agreeing (mainly) on how to fix what ails us.(Robert Reich)
November 1, 2007... Prosperity Squandered BY ROBERT KUTTNER FOR THREE DECADES THE ECONOMY HAS increasingly become more unequal and more precarious for ordinary people. During the same period, risks that used to be absorbed by large, stable employers or...

The sisyphus from searchlight: Harry Reid has united Senate Democrats on shutting down the war, but the Republican votes just aren't there. He'll keep forcing votes on the war until, he hopes, there are more Democrats and fewer Republicans in 2009.(Biography)
November 1, 2007... HARRY REID LOVES MOVIES. "GO TO THE MOVIES every chance I get," he says, sitting in a lavish conference room just off the Senate floor at the north end of the Capitol. It is noon on a Friday, and a narrow beam of sunlight shines in through...

Prince Wiliam's folly: Northern Virginia's nativists (some racist, some Republican, some both) are hell-bent on driving undocumented immigrants away. With demonstrations and lawsuits, the immigrants are fighting back.
November 1, 2007... IT WAS A MAY AFTERNOON IN WASHINGTON'S MERIDIAN Hill Park. Forty-year-old Ricardo Juarez Nava was at a rally in support of immigrants when he saw a neatly dressed man approaching the group. As it turned out, the man, Tyler J. Froatz Jr., was...

Abolish the Air Force: what it does on its own--strategic bombing--isn't suited to modern warfare. What it does well--its tactical support missions--could be better managed by the Army and Navy. It's time to break up the Air Force.(Essay)
November 1, 2007... IN AUGUST OF THIS YEAR, REPORTS EMERGED THAT BRITISH Army officers in Afghanistan had requested an end to American airstrikes in Helmand Province because the strikes were killing too many civilians there. In Iraq, the Lancet Study of Iraqi...

Tomorrow, the world: flush with cash and ancient hatreds, American evangelicals are incubating a Christian right in secular Europe.
November 1, 2007... IN THE ISOLATED SWEDISH ISLAND VILLAGE OF BORGHOLM, on a summer day in 2003, the Rev. Ake Green stepped to the front of his Pentecostal congregation. On this desolate isle, cut off from the mainland and dotted with ruins of a towering stone...

The revolt of the comic books: America's superheroes take on preemptive war, torture, warrantless spying, and George W. himself.(GRAPHIC NOVELS)(Critical essay)
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A SUPERHERO KILLED THE president this summer. Moments later, a shocked White House press corps watched as John Horus, his gleaming white-and-gold costume still soaked in blood, explained why. Because "the war in Iraq...

Faith in the center?(Godly Republic: A Centrist Blueprint for America's Faith-Based Future)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... GODLY REPUBLIC: A CENTRIST BLUEPRINT FOR AMERICA'S FAITH-BASED FUTURE BY JOHN J. DIIULIO JR., University of California Press, 310 pages, $24.95 DESPITE ALL THE TALK OF America's culture war, this q country has been blessed by an absence of...

Why they win.(The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics, The Right Talk: How Conservatives Transformed the Great Society into the Economic Society)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... THE BIG CON: THE TRUE STORY OF HOW WASHINGTON GOT HOODWINKED AND HIJACKED BY CRACKPOT ECONOMICS BY JONATHAN CHAIT, Houghton Mifflin Company, 294 pages, $25.00 THE RIGHT TALK: HOW CONSERVATIVES TRANSFORMED THE GREAT SOCIETY INTO THE...

Shift happens.(Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis--and the People Who Pay the Price, A Second Opinion: Rescuing America's Health Care)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... OVERTREATED: WHY TOO MUCH MEDICINE IS MAKING US SICKER AND POORER BY SHANNON BROWNLEE, Bloomsbury, 343 pages, $25.95 SICK: THE UNTOLD STORY OF AMERICA'S HEALTH CARE CRISIS BY JONATHAN COHN, HarperCollins, 302 pages, $25.95 A SECOND...

Standard error.(Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... TOUGH LIBERAL: ALBERT SHANKER AND THE BATTLES OVER SCHOOLS, UNIONS, RACER AND DEMOCRACY BY RICHARD D. KAHLENBERG Columbia University Press, 524 pages, $29.95 TESTED: ONE AMERICAN SCHOOL STRUGGLES TO MAKE THE GRADE BY LINDA PERLSTEIN, Henry...

When we get behind the wheel.(THE CLOSER)
November 1, 2007... AS GOP SENATORS DROP OUT, THE WILD HOPE GROWS: Could the Democrats get a filibuster-proof Senate? If so, and if the party took the White House and kept the House, then at last the progressives would have the keys to the car. This would not be...