The American Enterprise articles from July 2004

The American Enterprise archives from July 2004

The stamp of our wild West.(Bird's Eye)
July 1, 2004... It was almost exactly 200 years ago: Three dozen men, tough as mule meat, departed the last outpost of civilization on an American odyssey that would take them more than 8,000 miles by foot, canoe paddle, and hoof. Before they finally returned...

Sidelights.
July 1, 2004... A Rasmussen Reports survey found that 62 percent of American voters believe the world would be a better place if other countries became more like the United States. The number increased to 81 percent among George W. Bush voters, but fell to 48...

It's overspending, stupid.(Scan)(analyzing the Bush tax breaks)
July 1, 2004... John Kerry has blamed George Bush's tax cuts for today's federal deficit, and proposed their repeal as a centerpiece of his economic strategy. Exactly how much of today's federal deficit would be eliminated by reversing the various Bush...

Triumph to tragedy on race.(Scan)
July 1, 2004... We've just marked the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the defining legal decision of the past century, in which the Supreme Court ruled school segregation by race to be un-Constitutional. Ten years later, with the 1964 Civil...

Hysterical preservation.(Scan)
July 1, 2004... Each spring, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the grumpy grand-daddy of America's historical preservation organizations, releases a list of America's "most endangered historical places." While 2004's list includes a few worthy...

Flip. Flop.(Scan)
July 1, 2004... At the University of New Hampshire, John Kerry criticized President Bush for doing too little to support alternative and renewable energy. But when an environmentally state-of-the-art wind farm of 130 electricity-generating turbines was...

Germany's holy recyclers.(Scan)
July 1, 2004... In Germany, recycling has virtually been turned into a state-mandated religion. Green Party officials sprinkled throughout local government have written the hymns. Now all citizens must sing along. And the music is not easy. All glass...

Bounties for tech jocks!(Scan)
July 1, 2004... It's draft time for the NBA, and a select few high school seniors will earn more than a diploma. Projections of the June 24 draft show that as many as seven high school seniors will be selected in the first round. While these select few go off...

Non-left students strike back.(Scan)
July 1, 2004... Politically and culturally, America's college campuses are some of the least diverse places in the nation. In faculty suites and classrooms, liberal orthodoxy is the only approved view. (See concrete documentation of this phenomenon in TAE's...

Costly beetles and moths.(Scan)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2004... A recent study by the Political Economy Research Center found that the costs of the Endangered Species Act are many times greater than what the federal government officially reports. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that the...

Drawing fire.(Scan)
July 1, 2004... New York City's contemporary art world has seen everything this season--from a "painting" made of dead flies to footage of JFK's autopsy. But perhaps nothing puzzled Manhattan more than an exhibition last October of 45 drawings and watercolors...

Common Sense, RIP.(Scan)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2004... COMMON SENSE, RIP Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, with us for many years, by the name of Common Sense. He'll be remembered for such things as knowing to come in out of the rain, that...

Entitlement explosion.(Indicators)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2004... National defense consumes vastly less of your federal taxes compared to 40 years ago. But a tsunami of new spending on Medicare, Social Security, and other welfare "entitlements" has left lawmakers with less control over the nation's spending....

Technology uptake.(Indicators)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2004... The pace at which consumers adopt new technologies in entertainment and communications is increasing. Months from introduction to an installed base of 1 million customers Cable TV 144 Internet services 96 VCRs ...

Harder high school.(Indicators)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2004... By at least one measure, the push for back-to-basics academics has paid off. A new study from the U.S. Department of Education shows that high school students across the country are spending more time than they used to in core academic courses....

Bill Owens: a Texan by birth, he is now governor of Colorado, where he epitomizes the libertarian and conservative politics of the West perhaps better than any other elected official in the nation.("Live" with TAE)(Interview)
July 1, 2004... Colorado governor Bill Owens has held the line on state spending, created the most comprehensive school voucher plan in the country, gone to the mat against powerful environmentalist special interests, and pushed ahead on road and transit...

Are we a nation "under God"?
July 1, 2004... As this issue of The American Enterprise goes to press in June, the U.S. Supreme Court is considering whether the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance are a violation of the separation of church and state. In 2002, a three-judge panel...

Go ahead: call us cowboys.
July 1, 2004... Everywhere, Americans are called "cowboys." On foreign tongues, the reference to America's western rural laborers is an insult. Cowboys, we are told, plundered the earth, arrogantly rode roughshod over neighbors, and were addicted to mindless...

A rich boyhood in the plain void.
July 1, 2004... It's October 1965 in Fargo, North Dakota, and I'm wearing a plaid plastic windbreaker with scratchy elastic. I have a red wagon. The handle bites my hand if I hold it tightly; they didn't plane everything smooth back then--who'd sue? I load the...

Culture in inner America.(the American Midwest analyzed)
July 1, 2004... We came to North Dakota for baseball. Fargo was a charter member (1902) of the Northern League, which in four incarnations has organized the American game in the Northern Plains. The 1908 Fargo team included Richard Brookins, the twentieth...

Rediscovering our Middle West.
July 1, 2004... ST. Louts, Missouri -- When President Thomas Jefferson acquired the vast new territory of the Louisiana Purchase, St. Louis, founded in the late 1760s near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, was the natural launching point...

In praise of small lives well lived in small places.
July 1, 2004... Called Home By Blake Hurst "There is no reason for Tarkio to exist." So says Dr. Rex Campbell, rural sociologist and leading expert on small Midwestern towns. I'm sitting in his office in Columbia, Missouri, and it's my hometown upon...

Confessions of a "rich" businessman.(Enterprising: business as an act of creation)
July 1, 2004... John Kerry wants to repeal tax cuts for upper income Americans. Now there's a surprise: a Democratic Presidential candidate attacks the rich. But who are "the rich"? Well, as Democratic politicians define the "fortunate few at the top of...

The queen of Arizona.(Flashback)
July 1, 2004... Born in 1870 to a Kansas buffalo hunter and his Bohemian pioneer wife, young Sharlot Hall kept buffalo calves for pets and recalled watching her mother "wash the heads of men who had been scalped by the Indians? At age 11, Sharlot rode "a...

Ideological greed at Air America.(Beat the Press)
July 1, 2004... Here are some of the useful facts I learned listening to Air America, the all-liberal talk radio network: * Neil Bush blew up World Trade Center building number seven. * Rush Limbaugh isn't just a big, fat, pill-popper, but an evil...

The press and the public are worlds apart.(Forward Observer)
July 1, 2004... The headline on my copy of a touted new survey by the Pew Research Center read, "Press Going Too Easy on Bush." Now there's a story! It was late May, and the media had spent the past three months celebrating vicious antagonists of the...

Trench warfare 2004.(Politico)
July 1, 2004... On May 10, pollster John Zogby boldly predicted: "John Kerry will win the election." He reported that in his latest poll only 43 percent of voters believed Bush deserves to be re-elected, and 51 percent said it's time for someone new. Bush...

Harry Potter for (all) the ages.(Now Playing)
July 1, 2004... One scourge of contemporary moviegoing is when parents bring young children to wildly inappropriate pictures. If you've been to a theater lately you've probably seen this: babies' screams competing with the howling werewolves of Van Helsing;...

Americanize or bust.(Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means To Be American )(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means To Be American Edited by Tamar Jacoby Basic Books, 335 pages, $27.50 Immigration policy raises three issues: What sorts of people do we let in? How many do we let in? And how...

A conservative home on campus.(Educating for Liberty: The First Half-Century of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute )(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Educating for Liberty: The First Half-Century of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute By Lee Edwards Regnery, 343 pages, $27.95 Liberal observers of the conservative resurgence on American college campuses are beset by the vague feeling...

Praising Roosevelt.(Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom By Conrad Black Public Affairs, 1,360 pages, $39.95 In May 1940, Hitler's armies opened their Blitzkrieg across the western front, a portent of the horrors that were to engulf much of the...

Grading D.C.'s report cards.(Politics)
July 1, 2004... Maurice McTigue et al., Annual Performance Report Scorecard: Which Agencies Best Inform the Public? Mercatus Center, April 2004 (mercatus.org) Since 1993, the federal government has required that all of its major agencies keep the public...

Beware high-tech welfare.(Economics And Regulation)
July 1, 2004... Scott Wallsten, "Why Successful Technology Hubs Are the Exception, Not the Rule," AEI On the Issues, April 2004 (aei.org) Many localities seeking to develop their economies look with envy to California's Silicon Valley, Boston's technology...

Outsource away.(Economics And Regulation)
July 1, 2004... Daniel Dresser, "The Outsourcing Bogeyman," Foreign Affairs, May/June 2004 (foreignaffairs.org) Outsourcing has become a hot political issue. Nearly all Democrats (and a fair number of Republicans) decry companies that send jobs overseas....

Race and activism.(Culture And Society)
July 1, 2004... Karthick Ramakrishnan and Mark Baldassare, The Ties That Bind: Changing Demographics and Civic Engagement in California, Public Policy Institute of California, April 2004 (ppic.org) Census data in 2000 proved what many had long expected:...

Food aid fuels war.(National Security)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2004... Matthew LeRiche, "Unintended Alliance: The Co-option of Humanitarian Aid in Conflicts," Parameters, Spring 2004 (carlisle.army.mil/usawc/parameters) Over the past several decades, well meaning non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have...

Air pollution here and there.(Science And Environment)
July 1, 2004... Steven Hayward and Ryan Stowers, "Air Quality: The U.S. and Europe Compared" Index of Leading Environmental Indicators, Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy and AEI, April 2004 (pacificresearch.org) (aei.org) Many people assume...

Card-carrying Brits.(Other Countries)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2004... David Blunkett et al., "National ID Card Scheme Is Key to the United Kingdom's Future," Home Office, April 26, 2004 (homeoffice.gov.uk) From Singapore to France, national identity cards have become a mainstay of daily life. So far,...

America a half century ago.(Opinion Pulse)
July 1, 2004... Fifty years ago, widely admired Dwight Eisenhower was President. Although more than 70 percent of Americans believed there were Communists in the government in Washington, doubts were growing about Senator Joe McCarthy. People were opposed to...

Brown v. Board of Education: then and now.(Opinion Pulse)
July 1, 2004... Fifty-four percent of Americans approved of the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Only 24 percent in the South approved. Fifty-four percent of white Americans said they would object to sending their children to...

The mail.(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2004... I had just been reading Capital Press, a Northwest newspaper covering agricultural business, before picking up the June issue and finding the article by Douglas Irwin, "Does International Trade Kill Good American Jobs?" 1 had never connected...

Last gasp.(Comic)
July 1, 2004... I'D LIKE TO MARRY MY CLONE. "As the candidate speaks, our pundits will provide simultaneous translation in the lower left-hand corner of your screen." "I've got a beautiful wife, three wonderful children, and a great job, but I'm not...