The American Enterprise articles from April 2004

The American Enterprise archives from April 2004

The cold realities of our fight in Iraq.(Bird's Eye)
April 1, 2004... At the one-year anniversary of the war that removed Saddam Hussein and set Iraq and the rest of the Middle East on a dramatically new path, about 400 American men and women have been killed in action. Each of those lost sons or husbands or...

Sidelights.
April 1, 2004... Instead of using "Jr.", Jon Blake Cusack of Holland, Michigan opted to give the name Jon Blake Cusack 2.0 to his son. * "I consider the act absolutely brutal, threatening human rights, violating human dignity, xenophobic, and worthy of the...

Outlaws on the bench.(Scan)
April 1, 2004... Regardless of how you feel about the recent ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Court endorsing same-sex marriage, the key question is this: Who decides? "I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people...

John Kerry's judgment.(Scan)(Column)
April 1, 2004... Upon arriving home from service in Vietnam, John F. Kerry sniffed the political wind in Massachusetts--the only state carried by George McGovern--and decided there was hay to be made opposing the war. The hero enlisted in Vietnam Veterans...

What the Monday morning quarterbacks were saying on Sunday morning.(Scan)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... John Kerry speech at Georgetown University, January 23, 2003 Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime. We all know the litany of his offenses. He presents a...

Building a bad memorial.(Scan)
April 1, 2004... The wrangling over what kind of memorial to construct at the site of the World Trade Center is over. The jury has chosen architect Michael Arad and landscape architect Peter Walker's "Reflecting Absence"--two pools of water in the footprints of...

Mad cow sanity.(Scan)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... Consumers seem to be taking the mad cow news in stride. To date, no sales declines are reported from the fast food chains, and some of the premium steak-houses have even increased demand. Perhaps yellow journalism no longer has much effect. ...

School daze.(Scan)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... At UCLA, students of an upper-level class on literacy theory must complete 30 hours of community service at an underperforming school. Sounds great, right? Until you find out that the after-school program, called the "Fifth Dimension," invites...

Missing Walt.(Scan)
April 1, 2004... "We are managing this company for one thing, and only for one thing.... You can count on us to exploit every opportunity to grow revenues."--January 8, 2001, Sumner Redstone, CEO of Viacom, which broadcast Super Bowl 2004. I miss Walt...

Getting the picture.(Scan)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... Actor John Travolta isn't exactly a poster boy for wholesome entertainment. His own work includes roles in notably violent films like Pulp Fiction. But in a sign of the times, even Travolta has become disgusted by the shortage of family movies...

Whose recession?(Indicators)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... New data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis show that the American economy edged into recession months before President Bush even began his term in office, and that within seven months of his inauguration the economy was again growing....

The work ethic.(Indicators)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... It's desirable that some working-age people stay out of the labor force--to care for their children, to go to school, and so forth. But there are many reasons for not working that are socially undesirable: receiving welfare benefits, serving...

Manufacturing hurdles.(Indicators)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... A recent study by the National Association of Manufacturers points to two factors that reduce the ability of U.S. factories to remain competitive and keep manufacturing jobs alive: the cost of benefits (primarily health insurance and Social...

Bill James: Barry Bonds may be as good as Babe Ruth, but Ruth had more impact.("Live" with TAE)
April 1, 2004... He is the guru who invented a whole new way for Americans to partake of the national pastime from their reading chairs. More recently he has gone to work in the major leagues to see if he can translate his baseball theories into wins on the...

The guerilla war: a return to Iraq finds American soldiers prevailing in a tough and momentous fight.(Cover Story)
April 1, 2004... In January of 2004 I returned to Iraq to be re-embedded with American troops. This was my third month in the country out of the past 11, and I came to closely observe combat operations and reconstruction work during the guerilla phase of the...

Global warming is all guesses.(Transcript: words worth repeating)
April 1, 2004... From the Caltech Michelin Lecture delivered by science novelist Michael Crichton at the California Institute of Technology. To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global warming controversy is the overt reliance that is...

Writer-in-hesitance.(In real life: first-person America)
April 1, 2004... ALLENTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA -- Midway through last semester, word began filtering back to the pooh-bahs at Allentown's Muhlenberg College, where I served as an adjunct professor of writing, that despite my lack of a terminal degree, perhaps I...

Millard Fillmore--seriously.(Flashback: to know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain ever a child--Cicero)
April 1, 2004... Blessed are the peacemakers? Well, perhaps in the Gospel of Matthew, but not in the Gospel of the Schlesingers. Those surveys in which historians are asked to rank the U.S. Presidents--most notably the polls organized by Arthur Schlesinger, Sr....

A better mutual fund reform.(Forward Observer)
April 1, 2004... The American mutual fund has been the most successful investment mechanism of all time. In 1970, there were 361 funds with a total of $48 billion in assets; at the end of 2003, there were 8,124 funds with $7.2 trillion in assets. That's as much...

How alternatives to the welfare state evolve.(Politico)
April 1, 2004... On December 8, 2003, the White House and Tom DeLay twisted arms to pass an expansion of Medicare that is now estimated to cost $534 billion over the next decade. Then in his State of the Union Speech on January 20, President Bush called for...

Different renegades, different media portraits.(Beat the press: the hand that rules the press ... rules the country--Judge Learned Hand)
April 1, 2004... Bush has conjured his favorite bogeymen--'activist judges' and renegade bureaucrats--to create a Constitutional crisis." That's how the Los Angeles Times editorialized when the President reacted to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's unilateral...

Gambling with visas.(the Immigration Economist)
April 1, 2004... Uncle Sam is running a lottery--a visa lottery, that is. Because of the overwhelming role family connections play in current immigration law, most U.S. newcomers stem from a handful of countries, primarily Latin American and Asian. In 1986,...

Hero + horse = Hidalgo!(Now Playing)(Movie Review)
April 1, 2004... Paul Bunyan. Johnny Appleseed. Annie Oakley. John Henry. Davy Crockett. America has a rich tradition of folk heroes--one that Walt Disney Pictures, portrayer of many of this country's folk heroes on film, adds to with Hidalgo, a live-action...

Russia's dirty war.
April 1, 2004... A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches From Chechnya By Anna Politkovskaya University of Chicago Press, 208 pages, $25 Anna Politkovskaya, a correspondent for the Moscow biweekly Novaya Gazeta, has produced a stirring account of the horrors in...

Black blame game.(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... Scam: How the Black Leadership Exploits Black America By Jesse Lee Peterson WND Books, 224 pages, $22.99 Growing up a slave on a Virginia tobacco farm, Booker T. Washington "had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study would be...

Very personal Jesus.
April 1, 2004... American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon By Stephen Prothero Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 376 pages, $25 During his frantic scramble for a Presidential nomination, Howard Dean claimed to be a committed believer in Jesus...

National service plan.(Politics)
April 1, 2004... John Kerry, "A Plan to Enlist 1 Million Americans in National Service a Year," February 2004 (johnkerry.com) A national service initiative ranked high among Bill Clinton's priorities, and, to the surprise of many conservatives, George W....

Deficit debate.(Economics And Regulation)
April 1, 2004... Alice Rivlin and Isabel Sawhill, "Growing Deficits and Why They Matter," in Restoring Fiscal Sanity: How to Balance the Budget, Brookings Institution, January 2004 (brookings.org) For most of the twentieth century, America has run budget...

Wealth hurts health?(Culture And Society)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... Nicholas Eberstadt and Sally Satel, Health and the Income Inequality Hypothesis: A Doctrine in Search of Data, AEI Press, January 2004 (aei.org) In recent years, a variety of left-leaning academics have advanced an inequality hypothesis"...

Who are the ideologues?(National Security)
April 1, 2004... David Frum and Richard Perle, "Beware the Soft-Line Ideologues" AEI on the Issues, January 2004 (aei.org) America's foreign policy debates are dominated by tension between hard-liners and soft-liners. Soft-line thinkers, such as Secretary...

Robot science.(Science And Environment)
April 1, 2004... Ross King et al., "Functional Genomic Hypothesis Generation and Experimentation by a Robot Scientist," Nature, January 2004 (nature.org) Robots and smart appliances already help scientists, engineers, and ordinary consumers do everything...

Arabian democracy is possible.(Other Countries)
April 1, 2004... Joshua Muravchik, "Bringing Democracy to the Arab World," Current History, January 2004 (currenthistory.com) While a large and growing percent age of nations on every continent has freely elected governments, not a single one of the 21 Arab...

Iraq: U.S. public opinion holds.(Opinion Pulse)
April 1, 2004... Most polls about the Iraq war show a decline in optimism from the immediate postwar period. This is a familiar reaction. Still, a solid majority in one poll (60 percent) continues to say that the United States did the right thing in taking...

The Mail.(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2004... The Massachusetts Supreme Court's view of equality is hopelessly flawed. Gays and lesbians already enjoy equal marriage rights: All have the right to marry one member of the opposite sex. The complaint of gays and lesbians, of course, is that...

Last gasp.
April 1, 2004... Caption: Is that who I think it is? FLIGHT DELAY... I'M HERE TO GIVE YOU THE BAD NEWS. HE'S HERE TO RUBITIN. "Mom said we should play hide-and-seek. Is that a video or PC game?" We'd like to go someplace fun, but not too much...