The American Prospect articles from September 2004

The American Prospect archives from September 2004

Liberalism in arms.(Prospects)
September 1, 2004... It would have been a catastrophe for democracy itself if liberal leadership during the past century had been unequal to the challenges of national defense. But under Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the United States and its allies...

LB-Yea.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... RICHARD BYRNE'S ARTICLE on the legacy of Lyndon Baines Johnson ["Lyndon Agonistes," August 2004] is correct in its assertion that LBJ deserves his place as one of progressivism's greatest champions. When it comes to domestic policy,...

Unfillable Rx.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... IN HER ARTICLE ON FIGHTING terrorism ["The Talking Cure," August], Laura Secor writes, "[W]hen it comes to swaying larger populations and shifting public attitudes, U.S. policy-makers can and must make real inroads." But she doesn't tell us who...

He's got womb?(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... I LOVE YOUR MAGAZINE and read it every month. I was truly dismayed, however, to read a quote from Thomas Oliphant's article about John Kerry ["The Kerry I Know," August] highlighted as a teaser: "Put yourself in Kerry's shoes... it took...

Back to school.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... I WAS DISMAYED TO READ in Harold Meyerson's article ["Climbing the Hill," August], that a "source close to both [Massachusetts Senator Ted] Kennedy and [John] Kerry" has asserted that, under a Kerry administration, No Child Left Behind (NCLB)...

Montreal expo.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... CONNIE DE LA VEGA ["Going It Alone," July] provides an excellent summary of the international isolation the United States finds itself in as a result of its use of the death penalty. The other side of the coin is the increasing use of...

Go negative.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... I HAVE SOME SECOND thoughts on Tara McKelvey's suggestion that there is a strategic weakness in MoveOn's basically successful approach to political activism ["Onward and Forward," August]. Her viewpoint was adequately conveyed in a section of...

Neo-con-artists.(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... WHY NOT CUT TO THE chase and simply call the neocons neo-con-artists ["Inside the Crack-Up," July]? To add insult to injury, these very same free-trade wizards think it's great to export upper-middle-class jobs to India and China in exchange...

Bush flips and flops.(Devil in the Details)(apparent policy reversals)
September 1, 2004... ON AUGUST 3, 2000, IN Philadelphia, Republican candidate George W. Bush accepted his party's nomination for president and delivered a stirring address. As we await the president's upcoming convention speech four years later, let us reflect on...

Nukes from kooks.(Devil in the Details)(North Korean ballistic missile capability)
September 1, 2004... REMEMBER NORTH KOREA? The charter member of the "axis of evil" that the Bush administration neglected to stop from acquiring nuclear weapons because it was otherwise occupied in Iraq? Yes, that North Korea. Well, according to an August 4 report...

Wage wars.(Devil in the Details)(minimum wage legislation)
September 1, 2004... TAKING THE OLD MAGICIAN'S trick of misdirection to a new extreme, New York Governor George Pataki waited until the day of John Kerry's Democratic convention speech, when every political reporter in the Western world was in Boston, to veto New...

While you were sleeping.(Devil in the Details)(candidate James Hart)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... The good news is that we've found a Republican who understands that tax cuts don't cure all ills. "The politicians who tell you they will cut taxes are playing you like the shareholders of Enron," says the Web site of James Hart, Republican...

Brave new words.(Devil in the Details)
September 1, 2004... SERVED WITH Served somewhere else, as when the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" say they served with John Kerry when, in fact, they either served on the same boat at a different time of on a different boat elsewhere in Vietnam at the same time....

Citizen Thad.(Devil in the Details)(Thad Anderson posts government documents online)
September 1, 2004... THAD ANDERSON WAS minding his own business when he came across a New York Times article reporting that a top assistant to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham had written an email to a natural-gas-industry lobbyist that read, "If you were King, or...

Non-native son: in Massachusetts, John Kerry never had to worry about the (small) black vote. This November, he'll need a huge black turnout. Can he connect?(Dispatches)
September 1, 2004... THE STAKES COULD NOT HAVE BEEN higher for John Kerry as he appeared before the NAACP's 95th annual convention in Philadelphia on July 15. In the few months prior, his campaign had been the subject of sharp criticisms from prominent black...

A more perfect union? Tony Blair was the first British PM to take the European Union seriously. But then came Iraq. Now, the dissension is playing out all over Europe.(Dispatches)
September 1, 2004... THE IRAQ WAR HAS QUIETLY BUT fundamentally changed the course of the European Union. If in recent years Britain, France, and Germany--the EU's three most important states--had created a delicate and unprecedented harmony over Europe's future,...

One to watch: if she wins this fall, Samara Barend will be the youngest congresswoman ever, and something nearly as rare: a Democrat from upstate New York.(Devil in the Details)
September 1, 2004... CORNING, N.Y. -- SAMARA BAREND, A 26-year-old congressional candidate in New York state, is barreling along in a Buick Rendezvous on a recent Friday when "an even bigger SUV," as her campaign spokesman-cum-driver, Don Weigel, put it, nearly...

The facilitators.(The Taxonomist)(American accounting firms in Russia)
September 1, 2004... Do our big accounting firms deserve some of the blame for the demise of a free press, and even democracy itself, in Russia? This thought first occurred to me when I stumbled on the fact that PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is the accounting firm...

The brains thing: three years of watching Bush makes the point: intelligence matters more than "character".
September 1, 2004... REMEMBER THE 2000 ELECTION?WITH THE COUNTRY EN-joying a seemingly endless spell of peace and prosperity, and no apparent daunting challenges facing the next chief executive, the media were finally granted the chance to construct a narrative...

Bridging the two Americas.(Economic Bridges)(working poor)
September 1, 2004... IN THE PAST FOUR YEARS, THE INCOME OF THE MEDIAN family has fallen while the gap between executive pay and that of ordinary workers has continued to widen. Some of this trend is the result of deliberate Bush administration policies: tax cuts...

Purgatory of the working poor: people seeking help from the job-training and income-support systems face a bureaucratic paper chase and limited resources. There are oases of progress, but much remains to be done.(Economic Bridges)
September 1, 2004... SINCE MAKING THE LEAP FROM WELFARE TO WORK two years ago, Tami Buddi has put a lot of miles on her aging family sedan. To collect child-support payments from her former boyfriend, she drove to the county courthouse in a nearby suburb of...

How much is enough? To live decently, working families need a lot more than what low-wage jobs currently pay. They need social outlays and income supports as well as career horizons.(Economic Bridges)
September 1, 2004... ADAM SMITH, IN THE WEALTH OF NATION$, POSED THE QUESTION OF HOW TO define an adequate standard of living. "By necessaries," he wrote, "I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for support of life, but what ever...

Can better skills meet better jobs? The economy needs both. Here's how we can attain them.(Economic Bridges)
September 1, 2004... OUR ONGOING NATIONAL DEBATE ABOUT POVERTY, work, and opportunity is in many respects an argument about supply versus demand. Is working poverty ultimately a problem of the skills workers supply or the number and quality of jobs employers...

Welfare reform, phase two: doing less with less.(Economic Bridges)
September 1, 2004... IN 1996, WELFARE REFORM WAS RARELY FAR FROM THE HEADLINES. ACROSS THE country, states were overhauling their cash assistance programs for poor families. That summer, Congress passed and President Clinton signed a deeply controversial revamping...

Business: ally or obstacle? Although they're not the norm, a number of civic-minded companies are helping their low-wage workers juggle job and family challenges. Government also needs to do more.(Economic Bridges)
September 1, 2004... BY NOW, THE STIRRING IMAGES ARE FAMILIAR TO television viewers: teary-eyed father recounting beloved child's battle with life-threatening illness... child enjoying miraculous recovery thanks to world-class healthcare at Mayo Clinic......

Women and children last: the right wants welfare mothers to work but will not pay for the necessary child care.(Economic Bridges)
September 1, 2004... ONE REASON FOR THE RELATIVE SUCCESS OF WELfare reform in the 1990s was expanded child-care subsidies to women making the shift from welfare to work. Since then, experts have been mining the data, seeking to understand the wide-ranging effects...

A payday bonus: the Earned Income Tax Credit helps "make work pay" for millions of hard-pressed families. Despite some blemishes that need fixing, on the whole it's a real success.(Economic Bridges)
September 1, 2004... RUSSELL LONG WAS HARDLY THE DARLING OF LIBERAL TAX REFORMERS WHEN he chaired the Senate Finance Committee in the 1970s. In fact, we usually saw him as a toady for corporate special interests. But as the genial Louisiana Democrat liked to say,...

The politics of one America: how to build a coalition of the poor and the middle class to make work pay.(Economic Bridges)
September 1, 2004... TO THE EXTENT THAT THERE'S A SOCIAL CONTRACT in America, it centers on work. If polls are to be believed, most Americans think that all full-time workers should be paid enough to keep themselves and their families out of poverty, that all...

The big squeeze: Republicans have always defended big business. But they've never done it quite like this.
September 1, 2004... For most Americans, the last four years have represented a low point in our economic history. But for the big-business interests financing the Bush campaign, these have been high times. In previous eras, and even under previous Republican...

Cheap trick: Bush's health-savings accounts are a bargain--provided you never get injured or sick.
September 1, 2004... Back in 1996, Terry Johnson, the human-resources director for Ada County, Idaho, was excited about his new health-care coverage. He had just helped the county become the first in the United States to offer employees a medical savings account...

Cell block: Bush's politicized stem-cell decision puts California on the verge of a "scientific secession.".
September 1, 2004... TWO YEARS AGO, EVAN SNYDER, A DEVELOPMENTAL AND child neurologist, was working at the Harvard Medical School, transplanting neural stem-cells into the damaged brains and spinal cords of mice and other animals and watching them reconstitute...

Costume psychodramas: a new Manchurian Candidate labors under today's partisan imperatives, while a censored Iranian blockbuster mixes art and politics more deftly.(Currents)(Marmoulak)(Movie Review)
September 1, 2004... IS SHE OR ISN'T SHE? THAT IS THE question stalking Meryl Streep's portrayal of a power-mad senator in The Manchurian Candidate. Is the actress pulling a Hillary or what? In June, Matt Drudge fanned the rumors prior to the film's release,...

Rules of engagement.(Arguing about War; The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in Age of Terror)(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... ARGUING ABOUT WAR BY MICHAEL WALZER * YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS * 225 PAGES * $25.00 THE LESSER EVIL: POLITICAL ETHICS IN AN AGE OF TERROR BY MICHAEL IGNATIEFF * PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS * 160 PAGES * $22.95 IT IS NOT EASY TO WEAVE...

Rights stuff.(The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution--and Why We Need it More than Ever )(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... THE SECOND BILL OF RIGHTS: FDR'S UNFINISHED REVOLUTION--AND WHY WE NEED IT MORE THAN EVER BY CASS R. SUNSTEIN * BASIC BOOKS * 294 PAGES * $25.00 MOST OF THE WORLD'S CONSTITUTIONS include three kinds of rights: civil, political, and social....

States of emergency.(The Last Word)
September 1, 2004... Is there constitutional substance to the "war on terror"? The rhetoric of war has paid political dividends for President Bush, but that does not make it a compelling legal concept. The classic war is between sovereign states. The conflicts with...