The American Prospect articles from September 2006

The American Prospect archives from September 2006

A rendezvous with failure.(failure of conservatives)
September 1, 2006... MANY LIBERALS IN RECENT YEARS HAVE BEEN smitten with political envy. The conservative movement and Republican Party have seemed so much shrewder in their use of language, tougher in their tactics, and better organized than their progressive and...

Who's counting?(CORRESPONDENCE)(Letter to the editor)
September 1, 2006... IN HIS REVIEW OF LAPDOGS: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush, [July/August 2006] Todd Gitlin writes that the phony accusation that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet appeared in the media more than 4,800 times during the 2000...

Who's stressed?(CORRESPONDENCE)(Letter to the editor)
September 1, 2006... ROBERT KUTTNER ["WHAT'S the Matter with Class," July/August] criticizes my argument that most Americans don't have a fundamental economic interest in voting Democratic by arguing that two-thirds of Americans are "economically stressed."...

Correction.(CORRESPONDENCE)(Correction notice)
September 1, 2006... In Matthew Yglesias's article, "The Price Is Wrong" [July/August], Lawrence Lindsay's prediction of the cost of the war in Iraq was mistakenly cited as $100 million to $200 billion. It was $100 billion to $200 billion.

Condi's reading list.(Condoleezza Rice)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... CONDOLEEZZA RICE'S BOLD JUNE 21 PROCLAMATION that violence in Lebanon merely represented the "birth pangs of a new Middle East" was a minor diplomatic fiasco, prompting denunciations and outrage from around the Muslim world. But where did...

Loud and proud, I.(republicans rebranding)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... Facing a strong electoral headwind and approval ratings dipping near the levels enjoyed by Mikhail Gorbachev in his final days, congressional Republicans have, to put it mildly, a bit of a branding problem heading into the November elections....

Loud and proud, II.(Michael Steele)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... Speaking of GOPERS standing tall, in July, a Republican running for Senate anonymously blasted President Bush at a lunch with journalists, criticizing the administration's handling of Iraq, Katrina, the budget, the country--everything. When...

Still useful idiots.(Bob Casey)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... Pennsylvania progressives turned off by Bob Casey's relatively moderate posture just may get a real choice this fall, thanks to the Green Party. Candidate Carl Romanelli, whose platform includes universal health care, immediate withdrawal from...

The question: back-to-school time: what's the one class bush should audit?(Up Front)
September 1, 2006... "Remedial high school English. As Bush himself said of high school, 'The illiteracy level of our children are appalling.'" --Congressman Chris Van Hollen of Maryland "U.S. Constitution: Theory and Practice. Emphasis on the limits of...

War count.(World War III or IV)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... In a July Meet the Press appearance, Newt Gingrich characterized the current outbreak of fighting in the Middle East as but a single battle in "World War III" which pits the United States and Israel against the nefarious forces of Islam. The...

Rosy Rummy.(Donald Rumsfeld )(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... Donald Rumsfeld on Iraq, August, 2006: "I have never painted a rosy picture. I have been very measured in my words, and you'd have a dickens of a time trying to find instances where I have been excessively optimistic." Rumsfeld, December...

Steve King's wild-n-crazy summer.(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... Iowa Congressman Steve King, one of the most conservative members of the House, has worked hard to build a reputation as an outre right-wing quotemeister. (He's the statesman who said the Abu Ghraib abuse "amount[ed] to hazing" and called Joe...

Funny business.(workers registered to vote for their employers' interest)
September 1, 2006... WHAT WOULD THE LEGENDARY LABOR LEADER Walter Reuther have said if 40 years ago he was told that American business was going to spend millions to register workers and encourage them to vote? He would probably have been ecstatic: "They're...

Complete sentence.(military tribunals illegal)
September 1, 2006... A WEEK AFTER THE SUPREME COURT DELIVERED A stinging rebuke to the Bush administration in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, holding that the military tribunals it had fashioned to try Guantanamo detainees were illegal, I went to the base to visit my...

Field notes: the best word to describe Democrats' get-out-the-vote plans: emerging.(CAMPAIGN '06)
September 1, 2006... IF YOU LOOK AT THE POLLS AND nothing else, it seems almost self-evident that Nancy Pelosi will be wielding the speaker's gavel come January. Nationally, voters give Democrats a 10-point edge over Republicans in their congressional preferences....

Beyond hope: summer 2006 may go down as the time when Iraq was lost for good.(IRAQ)
September 1, 2006... LESLIE GELB, FORMER PRESIDENT of the Council on Foreign Relations and veteran of policy circles dating back to the Johnson administration, was an unlikely candidate to surprise the routine world of Washington national-security roundtable...

Innocents (not) abroad: China's outbound tourism industry is booming--but not to America.(CHINA)
September 1, 2006... THE SIZE OF THE TRADE DEFICIT with China is one of the hottest potatoes in American economic policy these days. It is about to get a little hotter, thanks to Beijing's highly provocative, if hitherto largely overlooked, controls on outbound...

The trouble with diversity: two great liberal preoccupations--our celebration of cultural difference and the fight against inequality--go hand in hand, right? Wrong. Incredibly wrong.
September 1, 2006... "THE RICH ARE DIFFERENT FROM YOU AND ME" IS a famous remark supposedly made by F. Scott Fitzgerald to Ernest Hemingway, although what made it famous--or at least made Hemingway famously repeat it--was not the remark itself but Hemingway's...

The real Rudy: the image of Rudy Giuliani as the hero of September 11 has never been seriously challenged. That changes now.(INVESTIGATION)
September 1, 2006... FIVE YEARS HAVE PASSED SINCE SEPTEMBER 11, BUT FOR RUDY GIULIANI, it's as if the disaster happened yesterday. When we needed a leader, he walked the canyons of Lower Manhattan, covered in soot and rallying a panicked city through a morning...

Illusion and reality: the violence in the Middle East shows the negative consequences of the administration's contempt for engagement. But the tough talk has failed.(ARGUMENT)(Cover story)
September 1, 2006... ON THE EVENING OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, I WAS one of a small group of State Department staffers called in to confer with Secretary of State Colin Powell and work through the night to produce a diplomatic strategy for assembling an international...

Just a gigolo: in the go-go '90s, George Allen sat on the board of a Virginia tech company. Now, the company faces several class-action suits and an SEC insiders probe.(REPORT)
September 1, 2006... THE LATE 1990S WERE HEADY TIMES FOR TECHNOLOGY companies in Virginia. The future looked bright, and arguably nowhere more so than in Northern Virginia s new technology corridor, where boxy, smoked-glass structures filled with well-capitalized...

The rise of the Republicrats: conservatives swore that they'd shrink the government once they got power. Well, they have it--and the government is bigger than ever. Now, some on the right have a surprising response: embrace the welfare state.(APPRAISAL)
September 1, 2006... TAKING ITS NAME FROM A SERIES OF ANTITYRANNY pamphlets published in the early 18th century, the libertarian Cato Institute is the foremost advocate for small-government principles in American life. Its 95 full-time employees, 70 adjunct...

The unaccountables: forget the soldiers: the 25,000 civilian contractors in Iraq are an occupying army unto themselves. Some may have engaged in torture--and, by evident design, they can't be prosecuted for their crimes.
September 1, 2006... ONE DECEMBER NIGHT IN 2003, ADEL L. Nakhla, a chunky, broad-shouldered interpreter with a almost feminine voice, went to Cell 43 in Abu Ghraib's Tier 1A. He was accompanied by Army Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr., a reservist convicted in...

Out-foxed, finally? Good news--FOX News Channel's ratings are down across the board! But what's happening to them now could one day happen to our side.
September 1, 2006... WHEN THE NIELSEN RATINGS for the second quarter of 2006 came in, FOX News Channel got some bad news. The network's entire weekday lineup--every show--had lost viewers from the first quarter of the year. Special Report with Brit Hume, down 19...

Shia power and the West.(Reaching for Power: The Shi'a in the Modern Arab World)(The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future)(Book review)
September 1, 2006... REACHING FOR POWER: THE SHI'A IN THE MODERN ARAB WORLD BY YITZHAK NAKASH Princeton University Press, 226 pages, $19.95 THE SHIA REVIVAL: HOW CONFLICTS WITHIN ISLAM WILL SHAPE THE FUTURE BY VALI NASR W.W. Norton, 287 pages, $25.95 THE...

Be not afraid.(Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism)(Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis)(The Faiths of the Founding Fathers)(American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century)(The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right's Plans for the Rest of Us)(Book review)
September 1, 2006... KINGDOM COMING: THE RISE OF CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM BY MICHELLE GOLDBERG W.W. Norton, 224 pages, $23.95 OUR ENDANGERED VALUES: AMERICA'S MORAL CRISIS BY JIMMY CARTER Simon & Schuster, 224 pages, $25.00 THE FAITHS OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS...

Memo to House Democrats.
September 1, 2006... DEMOCRATS: ODDS ARE, COME NOVEMBER 7, YOU will gain the 15 seats you need to take back the House (the odds are much lower in the Senate). So it's not too early to start thinking about what you should do during the two years leading up to the...