The American Enterprise articles from June 2005

The American Enterprise archives from June 2005

Political fashion can hurt, even kill.(Bird's eye)
June 1, 2005... Just as we were assembling this special issue of The American Enterprise on political correctness, the Associated Press transmitted a story across the nation about the latest fashion in marking tests and homework at public schools. For...

Sidelights.
June 1, 2005... IRS regulations and the federal tax code combined have more than 11 million words. * According to a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a press watchdog group affiliated with Columbia University, U.S. media coverage of the 2004...

Filming "Cops" in Baghdad.(Scan)(Gunner Palace)(Movie Review)
June 1, 2005... On February 28, 2004, two days before the climax of the Shiite religious festival of Ashura, I stood near Baghdad's Kadhimain mosque and watched children play atop an M-1 tank. Beside the Abrams, other kids were tugging an U.S. infantryman's...

Defending history.(Scan)
June 1, 2005... On March 2, the Supreme Court heard a landmark case involving the display of a Ten Commandments monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds. The case, Van Orden v. Perry, illuminates a problem that has plagued state officials around the...

"American decline"--again.(Scan)
June 1, 2005... On the other side of the Atlantic, a debate is brewing about whether American power is beginning to ebb, crest, or surge ahead. One of the more lively expressions of this debate can be found on the pages of the Times of London, where Gerard...

Blind justice.(Scan)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... If U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson's recent ruling is upheld, you should give a wide berth to UPS delivery trucks in the future. Demonstrating that formal education and common sense don't always go hand in hand, Henderson ruled that UPS's...

Medication is the answer.(Scan)
June 1, 2005... A new day is rising in America thanks to Strattera, the first drug designed to treat Adult Attention Deficit Disorder. No longer will parents be forced to trudge responsibly through life policing their own personal behavior while their...

Fishy complaints?(Scan)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals recently stuck a hook of criticism into Vice President Dick Cheney for daring to go fishing. Cheney, a well-known Jackson Hole, Wyoming fisherman, like hundreds of thousands of other anglers, casts...

Myths about school choice.(Scan)
June 1, 2005... Public-school teacher unions and other opponents of school choice have repeated certain falsehoods over and over to discourage the adoption of a competitive educational system. One claim is that allowing parents to choose their children's...

Berkeley republicans.(Scan)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... Think conservatives are an endangered species at UC-Berkeley? Think again. In 1999, the Berkeley College Republicans, or "BCR" as they call themselves, consisted of about a dozen members. Today, the organization numbers more than 580 and...

Precaution or protectionism?(Scan)
June 1, 2005... On March 7, the United States was due to reopen its borders to Canadian cattle and beef imports. The border had been closed since May 2003, when the first case of the incurable "mad cow disease," more properly termed BSE (bovine spongiform...

Funny bunny.(Scan)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... Liberals couldn't wait until next Christmas (excuse me, next Holiday Season) to resume their fight for all things politically correct, so they have begun a new battle, this time against the Easter Bunny. This Easter, many Florida shopping malls...

Do charter schools work?(Indicators)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... Teachers' unions have recently been circulating studies showing only very modest achievement gains at charter schools. These studies have two unacknowledged problems, however. They are built on very incomplete selections of charter school...

Death penalty divide.(Indicators)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... Claiming that a "national consensus" had emerged against the death penalty for juveniles, five justices of the Supreme Court outlawed the practice nationally in March. The facts, however, show something far short of a consensus. States...

Marry well.(Indicators)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... A very large new study from the National Center for Health Statistics shows that married people are in better health than those who are not married. The differences persist across all ages, ethnic groups, education levels, and income levels....

Edith Jones and Theodore Olson: as Washington convulses over Senate approval of judicial nominations, we talk law and judges with two of America's top legal figures: former solicitor general Theodore Olson, and federal judge Edith Jones.("Live" with TAE)(Interview)
June 1, 2005... Ted Olson is one Of America's pre-eminent lawyers, having argued more than 40 cases before the Supreme Court. As U.S. solicitor general from 2001 to 2004, he represented the nation in arguments deciding affirmative action policies, U.S....

How racial P.C. corrupted the LAPD (and possibly your local force as well).
June 1, 2005... The LAPD was once known as "the world's greatest police department"--due largely to its stringent character screening. Back in the era of Sergeant Joe Friday, LAPD candidates were checked out as thoroughly as homicide suspects. Even a casual...

Sex science & economics.(Lawrence Summers)
June 1, 2005... Harvard President Lawrence Summers set off a firestorm when he suggested at a recent academic conference that discrimination was not the key explanation for lagging numbers of women in science and engineering, or other professions. Much more...

Professors who preach: faculty are importing politics into their teaching in a way that affects a student's ability to learn. This should trouble us all.
June 1, 2005... We hear a lot these days about the importance of diversity in ensuring that ideas are heard fairly. But the individuals who are most insistent about this are interested only in racial and sex diversity. Intellectual and ideological diversity is...

Cruel compassion: how politically correct psychology weakens Americans.(Dr Christina Hoff Sommers; Sally Satel)(Interview)
June 1, 2005... TAE contributing editor Karlyn Bowman recently sat down with Dr: Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel, M.D., resident scholars at the American Enterprise Institute, to discuss their new book One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture...

Feel-good is bad.(Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless)(Brief Article)(Excerpt)
June 1, 2005... The "self-help" and "self-actualization" movement is seldom recognized for what it is: a contributing factor to many of the problems now plaguing our society. It is almost impossible to assess the full magnitude of what self-help has done to...

The war against gun owners.
June 1, 2005... Since the 1970s, the American print media has pursued an all-out war against gun owners. Mainline media often present "gun nuts" as either sick or laughable. A columnist for a major West Coast newspaper recently described a women's organization...

Zimbabwe in a bad way: why does an African tyrant get a pass?
June 1, 2005... Bob Ballantyne was a Caucasian tobacco farmer in Zimbabwe. Now there's a politically incorrect trifecta. A white male in postcolonial Africa growing a crop responsible for causing cancer is not the easiest character to generate sympathy for on...

Confessions of an old-fashioned liberal.(Mario Vargas Llosa)(Transcript)
June 1, 2005... Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa flirted briefly with communism before becoming an outspoken defender of human freedom. Today he is a leading proponent of "classical liberalism"--which Americans are more likely to call "libertarianism," but...

Take the fiction out of science policy.(Transcript: Words worth repeating)
June 1, 2005... I have spent the last several years exploring environmental issues, particularly global warming. I've been deeply disturbed by what I found, largely because the evidence for so many environmental issues is shockingly flawed and unsubstantiated....

Lights! Camera! Al-Jazeera!(In Real Life: First-person America)
June 1, 2005... WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Most Americans have now heard of the al-Jazeera television network. And many have thought seriously impolite thoughts about the channel that regularly incites vicious anti-Americanism throughout the Middle East. Yes, the...

Anti anti-Americanism.(Geopolitics)
June 1, 2005... An entire industry has arisen to account for the recent anti-Americanism. In the case of the Europeans, the end of the Cold War lessened the need for subsidized American protection, emboldening them to caricature Americans as fat and...

Internet killed the video star?(Beat the Press)
June 1, 2005... Only two weeks after the Eason Jordan saga came to an end with the resignation of the longtime top CNN executive, Daily Variety reported an important postscript: In February, 2005, the Network That Ted Turner Built saw a 21 percent drop in its...

Our looming science crisis.(Forward Observer)
June 1, 2005... A scientist from the Bronx named David Bauer has developed a low-cost sensor which can quickly detect the presence of nerve agents after a biochemical attack. The patch has the potential to save thousands of lives if terrorists strike. But...

A company shutdown can be a good thing.(Enterprising: Business as an act of creation)
June 1, 2005... Mitsubishi, Japan's fourth largest automaker, sits in the midst of a scandal that makes the corporate malfeasance at Enron, Worldcom, and Parmalat look trivial. The conglomerate, one of Japan's 20 largest companies, appears to have...

Messy, honest reality on race.(Crash)(Movie Review)
June 1, 2005... What comes to mind when you think of movie dramas about race relations? Painful earnestness. High political correctness. In 1967, we got Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, essentially a grand pronouncement carried down from the Hollywood Hills...

Star Trek warps to an end.(the Tube)(Television Program Review)
June 1, 2005... Forty-one years after they filmed the pilot, "Star Trek" went off the air for good this spring. Five series. Hundreds of episodes. Ten movies. Pulpy novels, video games, fan fiction that had Spock falling madly in love with Kirk. Model kits,...

Where race rules, liberty flees.(South Africa: The First Man, The Last Nation)(Book Review)
June 1, 2005... South Africa: The First Man, The Last Nation By R. W. Johnson Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 288 pages, $31.80 South Africa holds a far more prominent place in international politics than its economic size would suggest it should. Its influence...

Our enemy's friends.(Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left)(Book Review)
June 1, 2005... Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left By David Horowitz Regnery, 296 pages, $27.95 In cities across the country, Americans protesting George W. Bush's foreign policy carry posters of the President with a Hitler mustache, and...

Farming ... who needs it?(Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization)(Book Review)
June 1, 2005... Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization By Richard Manning North Point Press, 240 pages, $24 Richard Manning is not happy with the way that the human race has evolved. In Against the Grain, he places the fall of man at...

Schooled in statistics.(CULTURE AND SOCIETY)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... Melana Zyla Vickers, "An Empty Room of One's Own: A Critical Look at the Women's Studies Programs of North Carolina's Publicly Funded Universities," Pope Center for Higher Education Policy Inquiry, March 30, 2005 (popecenter.org) Evidence...

Grading the governors.(POLITICS)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... Stephen Moore and Stephen Slivinski, "Fiscal Policy Report Card on America's Governors," Cato institute Policy Analysis, March 1, 2005 (cato.org) Every two years, the Cato institute measures the fiscal performance of the nation's...

Mercury madness.(ECONOMICS AND REGULATION)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... Ted Gayer and Robert Hahn, "Thinking Through Mercury Regulation: Some Lessons for the Design of Environmental Policy," AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, March 2005 (aei-brookings.org) The Environmental Protection Agency...

Regulating the regulators.(ECONOMICS AND REGULATION)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... Marlo Lewis, Jr., "Reviving Regulatory Reform: Options for the President and Congress," CEI Issue Analysis, March 2005 (cei.org) The story of regulatory reform has been one of much talk and little action, as CEI scholar Marlo Lewis...

Battle in the skies.(NATIONAL SECURITY)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... Thomas Donnelly, "Strategy and Air Power," AEI National Security Outlook, March 2005 (ad.org) As recently as September 10, 2001, air power was assumed to be the future for the American military. Commentators and military analysts alike...

More bureaucrats needed?(SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT)(Book Review)
June 1, 2005... Adam Keiper, "Science and Congress," The New Atlantis, Winter 2005 (thenewatlantis.com) Adam Keiper, managing editor of the new conservative magazine of science and culture, The New Atlantis, looks at the history of the Congressional...

End of the affair?(OTHER COUNTRIES)(Book Review)
June 1, 2005... Kieron O'Hara, After Blair: Conservatism Beyond Thatcher, Icon Books, 2005 The trials and tribulations of Britain's Conservative Party have prompted British professor Kieron O'Hara to reassess what conservatism means in Britain and offer...

Profiling the police.(Opinion Pulse)
June 1, 2005... Public confidence in the ability of the police to protect people from violent crime is higher today than it was in the 1980s and early 1990s. In another poll, the police rank behind only the military, the top-ranked institution in American...

Crimes and punishment.(Opinion Pulse)
June 1, 2005... Americans are aware that the national crime rate has dropped. More people feel confident about walking alone in their neighborhoods today than in 1989. Around 15 percent say they or someone in their household has had personal property...

LAPD blues.(Opinion Pulse)
June 1, 2005... Using a question asked since 1977 by Los Angeles Times pollsters, Steven Tuch and Ronald Weitzer * looked at opinions about the LAPD after three incidents of alleged police brutality (1979, 1991, and 1996). The Times has continued to ask the...

The mail.(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2005... I read Greg Moore's "A Soldier Comes Home" (April/May) with a lump in my throat. I am sure he can't possibly imagine the magnitude of what he has done. 1 take his service, indeed, the service of all of our military, very personally. My son...

Last gasp.(Cartoon)
June 1, 2005... "I'VE HAD MY COMPUTER FOR THREE MONTHS AND NO PROBLEMS YET! BUT SOONER OR LATER, I'LL HAVE TO PLUG IT IN." "THE GOOD NEWS IS THESE GRADES WERE ACHIEVED WITHOUT THE USE OF PERFORMANCE ENHANCING DRUGS." Hey... I saw this one on "Law And...