The American Enterprise articles from July 2005

The American Enterprise archives from July 2005

A depraved society we can't ignore.(Bird's Eye)
July 1, 2005... The authors in this issue of The American Enterprise paint a sometimes terrifying picture of North Korea. Kim Jong Il's mad regime has never formally renounced its pledge to swallow up the southern half of the Korean peninsula, even if it takes...

Sidelights.(France Senate raises marriage age for women)(Washington D.C.'s anti-terror funds spending)(violent anti-Semitic acts in France)
July 1, 2005... Washington, D.C. city officials have failed to spend $120 million of the $145 million in federal anti-terror funds allocated to the city after 9/11. * Over 20 percent of the world's oil is controlled by states that sponsor terrorism or are...

The war is over, and we won.(postware reconstruction in Iraq)
July 1, 2005... Your editor returned to Iraq in April and May of 2005 for another period of embedded reporting. Compared to my earlier tours during 2003 and 2004, I could immediately see improvements. The Iraqi security forces, for example, are vastly more...

Iraqi bulls.(economic conditions)
July 1, 2005... The brochure is slick, even by American standards, featuring colorful logos and a photograph of a river flowing toward a gorgeous sunset. Other than the mosque on a bluff overlooking the water, the advertisement is indistinguishable from any...

Stupid Hollywood.(trends in movie ratings)
July 1, 2005... Two recent studies illustrate again that the favorite Hollywood response to complaints of offensive content--"we just give people what they want'--is completely hollow. The first bit of research came from the National Association of...

Europe's fairy tales.(Germany and United States help for Afghanistan postware reconstruction)
July 1, 2005... Europeans insisted that the problem with the recent liberation of Iraq was that it was not "multilateral" enough. A "big tent" operation like Afghanistan, they say, is how wars should be conducted. In reality, they need to find a new story. ...

Blair dodges bullets.(Scan)(re-election of Tony Blair)
July 1, 2005... The May re-election of Tony Blair with a comfortable majority in the U.K. parliament solves one foreign policy problem for him, but opens up another. Although Blair's Labour Party tried to avoid discussion of the Iraq war, the issue was...

Resource Math.(Congress to decide on petroleum drilling project in Alaska)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2005... The oil reserves that sit at one edge of the ANWR lands in Alaska--which Congress set aside as a national energy reserve a generation ago and which environmentalists have kept locked up since--could finally become available for intelligent...

Civil disobedience in Concord.(Henry David Thoreau's protest against same-sex marriage class room discussions)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2005... Some 159 years ago Henry David Thoreau made a name for himself by spending a night in the Concord, Massachusetts jail as part of a tax protest--an event glorified in Thoreau's famous essay "Civil Disobedience" Recently another Massachusetts...

Numbed by Nintendo.(video game addiction in American youth)
July 1, 2005... My two sons recently entered puberty. There's no better way to gain a firsthand look at the degenerate aspects of modern American culture. Today's music is mostly lacking in melody, and, at worst, is vile and offensive. The fashion is for...

The two Koreas.(Indicators)(Brief Article)(Illustration)
July 1, 2005... From the time they were divided in 1950 into communist North (which was originally richer) and capitalist South, the two Koreas have diverged sharply. Free markets, and the cultural modernization and democracy they eventually spawned, have...

You think you've got gas pains.(Indicators)(Brief Article)(Illustration)
July 1, 2005... High gasoline prices in the U.S. pale beside the costs in other large countries. Gas price per gallon (March 2005) U.S. $2.24 France $5.60 Germany $5.83 Italy $6.00 U.K. $5.92 Source: U.S. Energy...

Real vs. imagined problems.(Indicators)(Brief Article)(Illustration)
July 1, 2005... The most serious problem in American health care today is runaway costs. Thanks to the unfortunate fact that employers, governments, or other third parties now pay for most health care, consumers have few choices, and no incentive whatever to...

Pain for airlines, profit for fliers.(Indicators)(Brief Article)(Illustration)
July 1, 2005... Major airlines have been losing money amidst fierce competition. But while the companies have struggled, customers have profited. The prices Americans pay for tickets have gone down, while the number of flights has increased. U.S. air...

Richard Norton Smith: one of America's most distinguished historians discusses our nation and our Presidents--in particular, Abraham Lincoln, whose Presidential library and museum he has just opened.("Live" with TAE)(Interview)
July 1, 2005... Historian Richard Norton Smith has worked for Republican politicians (Senators Edward Brooke and Robert Dole), written biographies of Republican leaders (Herbert Hoover, Thomas Dewey, and, forthcoming, Nelson Rockefeller), and directed the...

America's manic entrepreneurs: energy, creativity, and risk-taking propensity have made us the most successful nation in the world. You can partly thank the genes of our most inventive citizens.
July 1, 2005... The 1990s will be remembered as the age of Internet mania, a time when entrepreneurs making grandiose claims for their high-tech companies swept up millions of Americans with their irrational exuberance, inflating the biggest speculative bubble...

The U.S. brain belt: the next centers of our information economy may surprise you.(information technology boom)
July 1, 2005... When A. T. Burgum came to the Dakota Territory in 1880, the way to riches lay in the deep, rich soil of the Red River Valley. A generation later, his son J. A. Burgum founded an elevator company in a small town called Arthur (current population...

Is tax reform coming?
July 1, 2005... Now that President Bush has waded hip-deep into Social Security reform, he is about to take on another hugely ambitious crusade: reforming the tax code. You've got to hand it to the President. He's not running a caretaker administration....

Save the males: a case for making schools friendlier to boys.
July 1, 2005... Thomas was one of the first boys I really got along with when I was teaching. This was in Houston, during a summer-school teacher training session, where three other teachers and I were in charge of a group of fifth and sixth graders. Like the...

The empire strikes back.(National Review White House correspondent Byron York, political campaining in United States )(Interview)
July 1, 2005... In Campaign 2004, liberal activists mobilized to an unprecedented degree, creating brand-new behemoth political action organizations and injecting more money into liberal candidacies and causes than had ever been spent before in any election....

Our dangerous muddle in North Korea.(withdrawal of troops )
July 1, 2005... Time For An Amicable Divorce With South Korea By Daniel Kennelly Last October, the Pentagon announced plans to withdraw about a third of our troops from South Korea, and reposition the rest far away from the border that divides...

The incident at Mountain Charlie's.(personal narrative of naval officer)
July 1, 2005... TUCSON, ARIZONA -- In 1972, I was part of the last military draft. A Teletype machine was set up in the student union at the University of Buffalo, where I was enrolled, and lottery numbers were posted as they were pulled. A room full of...

Prizes for the discredited.(Beat the Press: The hand that rules the press ... rules the country--Judge Learned Hand)(CBS Broadcasting Inc.'s Dan Rather and Mary Mapes win Peabody Award)
July 1, 2005... Network news ratings are in the tank. Almost all the nation's major newspapers have seen their readership plummet over the last few years. Blogs now routinely scoop behemoth news organizations--and steal their audiences. You'd think the smart...

Prosperity vs. Sloth.(American people's tendency towards work and wealth )
July 1, 2005... Imagine you're a hard-working mid-level executive in a stress-packed job, and you suddenly inherit a few million bucks. What do you do? Economists have discovered that recipients of windfalls (bequests or lottery winnings) use their new...

Bedeviling Daniel Webster.(Flashback: To know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain ever a child--Cicero)(John Greenleaf Whittier's Ichabod)
July 1, 2005... Robert Penn Warren called it "one of the most telling poems of personal attack in English." Vernon Parrington, Oklahoma Sooners football coach cum literary historian, judged it "the high-water mark of lyric indignation" whose author was "a...

A dutiful man.(Cinderella Man)(Movie Review)
July 1, 2005... How, exactly, do you go about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps? We get an inspiring demonstration of that old adage in Cinderella Man, an unusually forthright movie biography centering on Depression-era boxer Jim Braddock, whose...

That '70s show.(Mary Tyler Moore's show released on DVD)
July 1, 2005... People still drive around Minneapolis looking for Mary Tyler Moore's house. A few tourists recognize the building in which she worked, the former home of an S&L that hit the skids in the crash. Locals have learned to walk around the statue of...

Earnest money.(Enterprising: Business as an act of creation)
July 1, 2005... Books on how to get rich quick rank at the top of the best-seller lists right alongside relationship and diet guides. Even Americans awash in more wealth than their parents ever dreamed of having find there is no such thing as "enough." ...

Australia booms with economic freedom.(the Overseas Economist)
July 1, 2005... The good times keep rolling Down Under. Australia is now in its fourteenth year of uninterrupted vigorous growth, outperforming other major developed economies. Unemployment has come down to a 28-year low of 5.1 percent today from almost 11...

Once, we built for beauty.(The United States Capitol: Its Architecture and Decoration )(Book Review)
July 1, 2005... The United States Capitol: Its Architecture and Decoration By Henry Hope Reed Principal Photography by Anne Day W. W. Norton & Company, 288 pages, $50 I should acknowledge at the outset that I owe my vocation to Henry Hope Reed. Not just...

Sons of Ulster.(BookTalk)(Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America)(Book Review)
July 1, 2005... Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America By James Webb Broadway, 369 pages, $25.95 The subtitle of James Webb's Born Fighting--How the Scott-Irish Shaped America--implies a much narrower scope than the book embodies. Instead of...

Shamrocks against sheets.(Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan)(Book Review)
July 1, 2005... Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan By Todd Tucker Loyola Press, 261 pages, $24.95 Notre Dame university occupies a unique place in the American Catholic mind. It was founded at a time when many...

Cosby was right.(CULTURE AND SOCIETY)
July 1, 2005... Kay Hymowitz, "What's Holding Black Kids Back?" City Journal, Spring 2005 (city-journal.org) Comedian Bill Cosby packed houses and incurred liberal wrath last year when he told black "lower economic" parents, "You got to straighten up your...

Napoleonic Constitution.(POLITICS)(Jeffrey Rosen's constitution-in-exile movement)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2005... Michael Greve, "Liberals in Exile" Legal Times, May 2, 2005 (legaltimes.com) Liberal judicial theorists, led by George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen, have alleged that a secret cabal of radical right-wingers has formed...

Clean air, dirty tricks.(State of the Scare)(Book Review)
July 1, 2005... Joel Schwartz, "State of the Scare," Tech Central Station, May 3, 2005 (techcentralstation.com) Every year, the American Lung Association (ALA) issues a State of the Mr report warning Americans that air quality is harming their health....

The costs of regulation.(ECONOMICS AND REGULATION)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2005... Jerry Ellig, "Costs and Consequences of Federal Telecommunications and Broadband Regulations," Mercatus Center Working Paper, February 2005 (mercatus.org) Americans love their high-tech communications gadgets and have benefited from...

Duty down under.(NATIONAL SECURITY)
July 1, 2005... Dan Blumenthal, "Strengthening the U.S.-Australian Alliance: Progress and Pitfalls," AEI Asian Outlook, April-May 2005 (aei.org) Australia's John Howard is often depicted as the third partner in the informal "Anglosphere" alliance,...

Toppling statues.(SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT)
July 1, 2005... Benny Peiser, "From Genocide to Ecocide: The Rape of Rapa Nui," Energy and Environment, forthcoming (multi-science.co.uk/ee) Jared Diamond's latest bestseller, Collapse, relies strongly on the historical example of Easter Island as a...

Free trade is just trade.(Trade Justice or Free Trade?)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2005... Alex Singleton, "Trade Justice or Free Trade?" The Globalization Institute, April 2005 (globalizationinstitute.org) Trumpeting the idea that poor countries should protect their economies, Britain's Trade Justice Movement is calling for...

Is the United Nations losing its luster?(Opinion Pulse)(Brief Article)(Illustration)
July 1, 2005... Americans' belief that the United Nations is doing a good job on the problems it faces has dropped almost 20 points since Gallup first asked about the institution in 1953. In another question asked this year, 64 percent felt that the...

The war on terror: an update.(Opinion Pulse)(Illustration)
July 1, 2005... When Americans are asked about the war on terror, more people generally say we are winning than losing. When asked in a different formulation whether the United States and our allies, the terrorists, or neither side is winning, only 17 percent...

The North Korean danger.(Opinion Pulse)(Illustration)
July 1, 2005... U.S. opinions of the North Korean regime are very negative and falling. South Koreans feel warmer toward the North, which complicates U.S. policy. There is a widespread belief in the United States that North Korea is developing nuclear weapons...

The mail.(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2005... I was born and raised in Los Angeles, and have been a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney for over 21 years. I write this letter in my individual capacity. Having worked hundreds of prosecutions, many of them murders, with the fine...

Last gasp.(Cartoon)
July 1, 2005... "MY DAD AND I ARGUED UNTIL DAWN ABOUT THE NOSE RING, BUT I FINALLY GAVE IN AND LET HIM GET ONE!" Apparently you can have a long, healthy life, if you just lay off everything. THE KIDS ARE ASLEEP. LETS GO TO EUROPE. [ILLUSTRATIONS...