The American Enterprise articles from April 2003

The American Enterprise archives from April 2003

Unchain our schools! (Bird's Eye).(racial preferences)
April 1, 2003... As this issue of The American Enterprise is flowing through newsstands, the U.S. Supreme Court will old oral arguments on two court challenges to racial preferences at the University of Michigan. The Court's decision will come in June, and...

Sidelights.
April 1, 2003... "God is avenging us" an Iraqi government employee commented after the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia. Afghanistan's new chief justice recently shut down all television channels he considered un-Islamic. In a televised speech, Italian...

Self-reliance time. (Scan).(anti-Americanism among allies)
April 1, 2003... America is the new Rome--the overwhelmingly dominant civilization of her age. Unlike Rome and every other great power in history, however, she is not an imperialist nation. More than anything else, Americans want to be left alone to tend their...

Peaceniks in living color! (Scan).(demonstration in San Francisco, California)
April 1, 2003... Perhaps you assumed they were dead and gone, but communist organizations have been very active in the "peace" marches of the last few weeks. Indeed, the communist group ANSWER (defender of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the North Korean terror...

Propaganda U. (Scan).(left-wing influences on campus)
April 1, 2003... A student burst excitedly into my office. The school newspaper had assigned her to write about the current North Korean melee--a situation she at first knew nothing about. But she had just spent an illuminating 20 minutes with one of the...

Next in education reform? (Scan).(college funding)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... Having asked elementary and secondary schools to become more accountable in return for federal funding, Republicans in Congress could next turn their attention to colleges. For example, "with tuition and fees rising at two to three times the...

Not so simple. (Scan).(residential segregation)
April 1, 2003... A note to liberals who used the Trent Lott episode to sling racial recriminations: While recent census results show that racial segregation has declined in almost every corner of the nation, it is in liberal Northern cities that segregation is...

Truth about taxes. (Scan).(tax policy allegory)
April 1, 2003... We took a little allegory e-mailed to us and updated it with current IRS data: Let's put tax cuts in terms everyone can understand. Suppose that every day, ten men go out for dinner. Each bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their...

Rare lamb vs. overdone laws. (Scan).(German labor law case)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... The outrageous labor laws that Germany's unions have imposed on the country have struck again. The town of Recklinghausen (near Cologne) operates a zoo. When the zookeeper was caught barbecuing and eating seven of his animals (five Tibetan...

Go ahead, cut away. (Scan).(tax cuts in the United States)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... Critics are saying that President Bush's tax cut proposal is misguided. It will lead, they say, to bigger deficits--which in turn will raise interest rates. But the economic record is clear: Larger budget deficits do not, by themselves,...

Contrary to popular impression ... (Scan).(white and black soldiers in the US Army)
April 1, 2003... The American troops likeliest to fight and die in a war against Iraq are disproportionately white, not black, military statistics show. While blacks make up 20 percent of the military--compared with 12 percent of the U.S. population--they...

Who's extreme? (Scan).(Senator Tom Daschle)
April 1, 2003... When he was running the Senate last year as majority leader, Tom Daschle actually pulled the energy bill from the Senate Energy Committee because a majority of the members were anxious to approve new oil drilling in Alaska. Better to thwart...

Life isn't dead. (Scan).(cloning and abortion as Congress issues)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... Just after the election of 2002, Utah Republican senator Orrin Hatch told me he was confident abortion and cloning would not be on top of the 108th Congress's agenda. Oh, how times change. The Bush White House, from the State of the Union...

Their berets are very nice too. (Scan).
April 1, 2003... Q: How can you identify French military rifles among the listings on e-Bay? A: They've never been fired. Were, however, dropped once.

Can government be cut? (Indicators).(government tax revenue)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... Amidst debate over President Bush's tax cuts and his proposal to keep the increase in federal spending to 4 percent this year, elements in Congress are howling that the government is headed for a starvation diet. Actual data, however, show...

Out-taxing the Europeans. (Indicators).(corporate taxation)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... While levies on corporations have crept up in the U.S. over the last two decades, the Europeans have actually been trimming corporate income taxes. The result: Income taxes on businesses are now actually more onerous here than in much of the...

Genetically modified food saves lives. (The Data Bit).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... Genetically modified (G.M.) foods promise many benefits to humanity: greater nutrition, reduced need for pesticides during production, lower consumer costs, and so forth. A fascinating example is salmon which has been genetically modified...

Show stockholders the money! (Forward Observer).(cash flow better indicator of value)
April 1, 2003... In the wake of last year's corporate scandals, politicians tried to boost the confidence of investors by improving the so-called Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) that public companies use to report their earnings to the...

Democrats miss an economic shift. (Politico).(tax policy)
April 1, 2003... Economists believe that President Bush's proposed elimination of taxes on dividends will increase stock prices somewhere between 8 and 20 percent. In short, it's good economics. But the proposal is also a political tsunami that will change the...

Ward Connerly: he is America's most ardent proponent of colorblindness, a successful grassroots political leader, and a bold thinker on questions of race, education, and government policy. (Live with TAE).(Interview)
April 1, 2003... Californian Ward Connerly vaulted to national prominence in the 1990s as the most visible and articulate leader of the Proposition 209 campaign, which in 1997 outlawed racial discrimination or preferences in all decisions by the state of...

Don't do me any favors: a black case against race preferences: with the U.S. Supreme Court about to decide whether racial preferences are Constitutional, TAE presents some intellectual background on this critical case--with contributions from John McWhorter, Jim Sleeper, Deroy Murdock, Ken Lee, and Lino Graglia.
April 1, 2003... I am an African-American linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and students often come by my office for mentoring. One such student, a Chinese American, had heard that I'd been on the radio discussing affirmative...

Black America's real albatross: the schooling gap: ... a cautionary yet encouraging tale.(student behavior and academic performance)
April 1, 2003... One of last year's true academic heroes is Scott Phelps, a science teacher at John Muir High School in Pasadena, California. He wrote what is now referred to as "The Letter." In it, he stated frankly that the students with the poorest academic...

The key to closing the minority schooling gap: school choice.
April 1, 2003... In a nation supposedly committed to free enterprise, consumer choice, and equal educational opportunities, school choice should be routine. That it is not demonstrates the clout of those dedicated to preserving the government's monopoly over...

Sweeten the pot for middle America: to make school vouchers truly popular, make sure there's something in them for suburbanites.
April 1, 2003... The Republican gains of November have prompted renewed calls for action on school vouchers and choice in education. In the past, supporters fretted that the Bush administration had abandoned school vouchers too readily in the face of fierce...

Last holdout against educational freedom: every modern nation except the U.S. allows school choice. Here's how our allies make it work.(government funding for non-government schools)
April 1, 2003... Over the last decade, we conducted a major study of how school systems operate in leading industrialized nations. We found that in every one of the two dozen countries we surveyed (which ranged from Canada, Britain, and Germany to Greece,...

Another result of racial politics on campus: unfree speech.(speech codes )
April 1, 2003... Free speech no longer exists on American college campuses. A comprehensive survey conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) makes it clear: America's great universities are now officially committed to punishing...

The benevolent universe of filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan.(spiritual themes )
April 1, 2003... What is M. Night Shyamalan trying to tell us? Clearly, the writer/director of mega-hits The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs has something on his mind. More than any other popular director in America, Shyamalan deals with big ideas. Almost...

Hating America.(related article: How Weakness Turns Anti-Americanism into Terrorism)
April 1, 2003... I can remember the last time I was an anti-American. It was 18 years ago, wincing at the vulgarity of the Los Angeles Olympic Games. I threw in the towel when Lionel Ritchie was a key feature of the opening ceremonies. Or was it the...

School choice--really. (Flashback).(compulsory education)
April 1, 2003... Back when our great-grandparents were children, trudging barefooted through blizzards to one-room schoolhouses warmed by the patriotic heat of Parson Weems and McGuffey Eclectic Readers, school "choice" meant just that: Parents had the choice...

Constitutional conservative. (Inside Expert).(legal expert Michael Greve)(Interview)
April 1, 2003... If the Supreme Court uses two current cases against the University of Michigan to over-turn the use of racial preferences in college admissions, Americans will have Michael Greve to thank. As a founder of the Center for Individual Rights, Greve...

A recipe for school chaos. (In Real Life).(classroom interruptions)
April 1, 2003... THE BRONX, NEW YORK -- As a fresh Teach For America recruit in the South Bronx four years ago, I learned that the way a school was run could be the most important factor determining the success in my classroom. Here's why. For the first...

Inner drives on the hard drive. (In Real Life).(online Scrabble)
April 1, 2003... NEW YORK CITY -- I started playing Scrabble over the Internet last year. It's allowed me to make some interesting discoveries--about games, about people who play them, and about the influence of the World Wide Web. Players on the games.com...

Green dreams and nightmares.(Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death)(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death Edited by Ronald Bailey Prima Publishing, 320 pages, $24.95 Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths, a new book edited by Reason...

Obviously great.(Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World)(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World By Margaret Thatcher Harper Collins, 512 pages, $34.95 In her latest book Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World, former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher offers an approach to...

Law school daze.(Brush With the Law)(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... Brush With the Law By Robert Ebert Byrnes & Jaime Marquart Renaissance Books, 336 pages, $24.95 Brush With the Law is actually two books. One by Harvard Law School graduate Jaime Marquart, and one by Stanford Law School alumnus Robert...

Oscar politics. (Now Playing).(best picture nominees)
April 1, 2003... Ah, Academy Awards season. A time for Hollywood cynics to shine like stars. Don't get me wrong: I enjoyed each of the five Best Picture nominees. But I wish I could say they're being honored solely for their artistic accomplishments. The...

Latino Favors Are Fruitless.(attracting Hispanic Americans to Republican Party)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... James Gimpel, Latinos and the 2002 Election: Republicans Do Well When Latinos Stay Home, Center for Immigration Studies, January 2003 (cis.org) As part of an effort to attract more Latino voters to the GOP, the Bush administration has...

A Just War.(religious opposition to war in Iraq)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... Michael Novak, "War to Topple Saddam Is a Moral Obligation," The Times (London), February 12, 2003 (thetimes.co.uk) As America girds for war against Iraq, theologians in major faiths, Roman Catholicism included, have come out in opposition...

Big Little Kids.(the move of mothers into the workplace has a major impact on the growing weight problem among children in the U.S.)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... Mary Eberstadt, "The Child Fat Problem," in Policy Review, February/March 2003 (policyreview.com) America has more overweight people than any other country in the world. Among children, the epidemic of expanding waistlines has become...

Tuition Alarmism.(claims that the affordability of higher education is seriously threatened are ambiguous)
April 1, 2003... William Trombley, College Affordability in Jeopardy, National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, Winter 2003 (highereducation.org) This widely disseminated report from a higher education research center argues that the...

Ranking States by Freedom.(a ranking of American states and Canadian provinces for their relative economic freedom)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... Amela Karabegovic et al., "Economic Freedom of North America," Fraser Institute (fraserinstitute.ca) and National Center for Policy Analysis (ncpa.org) A new report from two think tanks--one Canadian, the other American --evaluates the...

Right-to-Work Works.(a discussion of right-to-work laws which have weakened the power of unions)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... Stan Greer, Real Earnings Higher in Right to Work States: Evidence from The AFL-CIO Empire, National Institute for Labor Relations Research (nilrr. org) Right-to-work laws, which make it illegal to mandate union membership as a...

Air Power Anywhere.(the U.S. Air Force is focusing on innovations that will help it maintain its air superiority)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... Malcolm Davis, "Briefing: Future Air Strikes," Janes' Defense Weekly, January 15, 2003 (jdw.janes.com) Since the early 1990s, the U.S. Air Force has been nearly invulnerable in war, partly thanks to stealth technology that lets planes...

Trouble in Venezuela.(Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez deserves blame for the shrinking economy in his country)(Column)
April 1, 2003... Mark Falcoff, "Is There Hope for Peace in Venezuela?" in Latin America Outlook, American Enterprise Institute (aei.org) Venezuela's economy will shrink significantly in 2003, and the entire country faces an uncertain fate. AEI scholar Mark...

Prime-time air kisses for the U.N. (Beat the Press).(journalists should think about how they portray the United Nations)(Column)
April 1, 2003... Here's my new favorite joke. A guy pulls into a gas station. He sees a sign reading "Talking Dog For Sale: $10." The guy goes up to the clerk and says, "Is that sign for real?" The clerk responds, "Absolutely. He's in the back." The guy...

Affirmative action reconsidered. (Opinion Pulse).(research on the impact of affirmative action)(Illustration)
April 1, 2003... What do Americans agree on in this highly contentious area? First, that it is important to have a racially diverse student body on college campuses. Second, that colleges and universities should not give preference in admission to blacks,...

Earth Day revisited. (Opinion Pulse).(Americans do not put environmental matters high on their current list of priorities)(Illustration)
April 1, 2003... Thirty-three years after the first Earth Day in 1970, Americans remain deeply committed to a clean and healthy environment. But with concerns about war and the economy uppermost in their minds, Americans do not put environmental matters high on...

The mail.(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2003... Your January/February issue on "Homeland Dangers" was cathartic: exhilarating and refreshing beyond description. Karina Rollins ("No Compromises on Terror") provided the common sense that could lead to a return of national sanity. The only...

Last gasp.
April 1, 2003... CLINTON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY YOU MUST BE 21 "What do you think about subletting space in the SUV?" IT'S THE SAME PROBLEM AS ALWAYS: TRYING TO FIND THE RIGHT BALANCE BETWEEN WORK AND MY... UM... MY... GEE, WHAT IS THAT OTHER...