The American Prospect articles from October 2003

The American Prospect archives from October 2003

Elections as an exit strategy.
October 1, 2003... In central Iraq the United States now has its own West Bank, its own encounter with terrorism as a routine occurrence rather than a rare event. As George W. Bush likes to say, we have carried the fight to the enemy--and now are conveniently at...

Campaign reform boomerang.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2003... IN "CAMPAIGN REFORM Boomerang" [September 2003], Thomas Byrne Edsall doubts that "the adoption of a much broader system of public financing of campaigns would produce a major ideological shift to the left." There are, however, reasons to be...

Unite or die.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2003... I WAS DISHEARTENED TO see Harold Meyerson's piece on the SEIU, HERE and UNITE ["Organize or Die," September], in which he simply equated more members with more strength. Meyerson touts--multiple times--the SEIU's 535,000 new members, but...

The Demo Derby.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2003... I AM VERY MUCH IN AGREEment with the editorials by Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich ["The Demo Derby" and "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize," respectively] in the July/August issue. However, I think their appeal should go, above all, to all those who...

How NAFTA Failed Mexico.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2003... JEFF FAUX'S RECENT ARTIcle ["How NAFTA Failed Mexico," July/August] on the devastating consequences of free trade in Mexico neglected to mention the fact that the economic havoc wrought by NAFTA on our southern neighbor, particularly on its...

Lost in the translation.(Devil in the Details)
October 1, 2003... DRIVEN TO DESPERATION by the possibility that the millions the Republicans have invested in the California recall will result in the replacement of Democrat Gray Davis by Democrat Cruz Bustamante, the rightwing spin machine has kicked into...

Tax, tax, tax; yadda, yadda, yadda.(Devil in the Details)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2003... WITH THE RECALL ALMOST upon us, it's hard to recognize the Golden State these days. As the usual rightwing spinmeisters and fabulists tell the tale, record high taxes have made the California economy look like Minsk under Brezhnev, and...

Ueberroth bows out.(Devil in the Details)
October 1, 2003... ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER is ducking print journalists and their pesky questions, and no wonder: They want to know how he can funnel more money to schools and reduce college tuition, as he's promised, without raising taxes, something he's vowed not...

While you were sleeping.(Devils in the Details)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2003... While U.S. forces ferret out terrorist factions in Iraq, it looks like officials at Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are settling in for a long stay. In late August, the military announced plans for the construction of an additional unit to...

Brave new words.(Devils in the Details)
October 1, 2003... BUSH RECOVERY A curious phenomenon by which the stock market goes up, the unemployment rate goes down--and 700,000 people still lose their jobs. CHANGE Something others do. According to Paul Wolfowitz, deciding to seek a new UN Security...

How do you "support our troops"?(Devils in the Details)
October 1, 2003... I BUY LOTS OF GAS [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] WE DISPLAY THE FLAG [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I KEEP AN EYE OUT FOR WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Neosolidarity.(Devil in the Details)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2003... IS THERE HONOR AMONG neocons? You'd think that when the Joint Chiefs, working with Colin Powell, convinced the president that they needed more troops in Iraq and that he'd have to go to the United Nations to get them, neocons might...

Heroes & zeroes.(Devils in the Details)
October 1, 2003... COLIN POWELL Waited out Rummy and Wolfie; reversed Bush's go-it-alone Iraq policy at the UN; survived to be proven right REP. DAVE OBEY Recommends that Bush "allow" Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "to return to the private sector" ...

Vast right-wing conspiracy.(Devils in the Details)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2003... Over the summer, the ongoing conflict in Iraq brought mostly bad news. The executives at Halliburton and Bechtel, however, must be all smiles: The Washington Post reported in late August that Halliburton received even more money on a no-bid...

Which side are yuan?(Devil in the Details)
October 1, 2003... IN ONE AMERICAN CITY after another, local governments are starting to block the construction of Wal-Marts within their jurisdictions. Underselling its competition by paying poverty-level wages here in the United States and dictating sub...

Off the Wall Street Journal.(Devils in the Details)
October 1, 2003... Every so often, the journal publishes a piece so preposterous that it seems parody. The Journal for Sept. 3 carried a column by one Peter J. Wallison, identified as a fellow at the American "Enterprise Institute and former counsel to President...

W. wakes up screaming.(Devil in the Details)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2003... WHAT NIGHTMARES HAVE Republicans thrashing in their beds, only to awaken in a cold sweat? What fearsome specters haunt their sleep and stalk their waking hours? According to an e-mail that Bush re-election campaign chairman Marc Racicot...

Sifting through the rubble.(Below The Beltway)
October 1, 2003... Last February I had lunch with a friend who was teaching at one of the military war colleges. He told me that the officers he knew were uniformly skeptical about a war with Iraq. "I don't think they are worried about fighting Iraq but about...

Bush's Saudi connections: and why this is a crucial issue in 2004.(Dispatches)
October 1, 2003... SAUDI ARABIA IS THE WELLSPRING OF radical Islam, its primary source of sustenance and inspiration. Yet, since September 11, the Bush administration has consistently ducked the truth about Riyadh's role in nurturing terrorism--and concealed the...

Unilateralism disgraced: the price we all have to pay for Bush's botched tack.(Dispatches)
October 1, 2003... GEORGE W. BUSH'S DECISION TO GO to war against Iraq was based on three fundamental assumptions: Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction posed an imminent threat to the United States; turning Iraq into a stable and viable...

Bullies in the pulpit: will a political Catholic Church help or hinder the GOP?(Dispatches)
October 1, 2003... IN LATE JANUARY 2001, THE NEW ADMINISTRATION had barely unpacked when George W. and Laura Bush paid a friendly visit to Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the recently inaugurated leader of the Washington Archdiocese. On the heels of that supper,...

New generation, new politics: as Generation Y steps into the polling booths, how will political life change?(Youth And Politics)
October 1, 2003... A new generation is coming of age in America and politicians ignore it at their peril. Generation Y, as it's been called, is expected to be as large as the Baby Boom Generation, and when the full group is of voting age, it could have as much...

Virtual politics: how the Internet is transforming democracy.(Youth And Politics)
October 1, 2003... Retired four-star Gen. Wesley Clark seemed a very appealing fellow to retiree Eric Carbone. "I came out of retirement to work for this guy," he says, looking up from his computer in an office just around the corner from the White House....

Schools of thought: the liberal-conservative divide on college campuses.(Youth And Politics)
October 1, 2003... During her first two years at the University of Pennsylvania, Stephanie Steward became convinced that she was being treated unfairly because of her political views. In her class on diversity and the law, a professor seemed obsessed with the...

A contract with America's youth.(Youth And Politics)
October 1, 2003... NEITHER MAJOR POLITICAL PARTY IN THE UNITED STATES PAYS ENOUGH ATTENTION TO THE YOUNG. THIS HAS to change. In the course of writing and editing this special report, we at the Prospect thought it worthwhile to put down on one page the essential...

Daughters of the revolution: today's young women have profited from feminism, but will they defend it?(Youth And Politics)
October 1, 2003... "I would not call myself a feminist," says Natalie, a University of Michigan junior. "I'm experiencing a lot of the advantages that feminists worked to achieve, and I'm thankful.... But I don't know that women are still that much uneven from...

The young and the jobless: why those new to the workforce stand to lose the most.(Youth And Politics)
October 1, 2003... It's not easy being young today. While America moves through an economic recovery, young workers are being left behind. And that's largely because, since the recovery officially began in November 2001, employment is down by more than a million....

Doing disservice: the benefits and limits of volunteerism.(Youth And Politics)
October 1, 2003... NO MATTER WHAT WE DO, THOSE OF US IN OUR 20S can't seem to measure up to the Greatest Generation. That bygone nation of joiners, providers and world-beaters, in the standard story, puts to shame today's sad assemblage of narcissists and...

The students' rep: Wisconsin congresswoman Tammy Baldwin knows how to represent--and turn out--young people.(Youth And Politics)
October 1, 2003... THE CAPITOL HILL OFFICE OF REP. TAMMY BALDWIN (D-Wis.) looks like nothing so much as a college bookstore without the books. Her University of Wisconsin-Madison pennant is proudly displayed, along with the matching stuffed bear, football and...

Preserving choice.(Comment)
October 1, 2003... Each year the anti-abortion movement becomes more aggressive and insidious in its campaign to undermine reproductive rights. But somehow the abortion-rights majority--convinced that a broad base of support protects the freedoms we...

Bush's borrowing binge.(The Taxonomist)
October 1, 2003... This August, while everyone in Washington was away, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) quietly published its latest update on our nation's fiscal situation. It's one of the CSO's more enlightening--and frightening--efforts. If you read the...

Recalling the future: can a bizarre political process reverse California's transformation into a Democratic state?
October 1, 2003... I. HIRAM JOHNSON'S MESS The land may have been ours before we were the land's, as Robert Frost wrote, but not in California. The Progressives saw to that. When people arrived in my home state, there were no political institutions to reach out...

Scandalous schools: after a quarter-century of tax revolt, California's schools rank with Mississippi's.
October 1, 2003... "THE CONDITION OF CALIFORNIA SCHOOL FACILITIES AND Policies Related to Those Conditions," a 2002 report by nationally recognized facilities expert Robert Corley, is written in stilted bureaucratese, but the conditions it describes are the stuff...

Bioterror brain drain: infectious-disease specialists are following the big bucks to Washington's new multibillion-dollar program on bioterrorism research--but at what human cost?
October 1, 2003... DR. MARCUS HORWITZ, PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE AT THE University of California, Los Angeles, has devoted most of his career to finding a vaccine for tuberculosis. Though the age-old killer is well controlled in the industrialized world, TB kills...

Brooks no argument: a closer look at the Times' newest columnist.(Currents)
October 1, 2003... DAVID BROOKS IS HAVING AN EXCELLENT decade. As he might have put it in his breezy, best-selling Bobos in Paradise, he's the Restoration Hardware of conservative punditry, the Starbucks of insouciant moderation. Indeed, with his frequent...

Exporting censorship to Iraq: the press system we allow the Iraqis is far from free.(Media)
October 1, 2003... FROM THE START, PROBLEMS SMALL and large plagued the Pentagon's media project in Iraq. The Iraqi Media Network (IMN). as it is known, is an American-run outfit contracted by the Pentagon to put out news after Saddam Hussein's fall. Its mission...

The Nixon enigma.(Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image )(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... NIXON'S SHADOW: THE HISTORY OF AN IMAGE BY DAVID GREENBERG * W. W. NORTON & COMPANY * 384 PAGES * $26.95 IN THE OPENING PAGES OF NIXON Agonistes, his peripatetic meditation on the 1968 presidential campaign, Garry Wills recalls watching...

Mission unlimited.(The Mission: Waging War and Keeping the Peace with America's Military)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... THE MISSION: WAGING WAR AND KEEPING THE PEACE WITH AMERICA'S MILITARY BY DANA PRIEST * W. W. NORTON & COMPANY * 384 PAGES * $26.95 A PRINCIPAL DEFICIENCY OF THE ARGUMENT against the Iraq War was that the war's opponents, like the first...

The American game.(Moneyball: The Art of Winning An Unfair Game)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... MONEYBALL: THE ART OF WINNING AN UNFAIR GAME BY MICHAEL LEWIS * W.W. NORTON & COMPANY * 288 PAGES * $24.95 BACK IN 1922, THE U.S. SUPREME Court, in its infinite wisdom, declared that Major League Baseball was not involved in interstate...

The real supply side.(The Last Word)
October 1, 2003... It's no secret that the nation's public schools are confronting their worst budget crisis in decades. Blame it on the combination of a lousy economy, state and local budget cuts, and unfunded federal mandates. The result is that many of...