The American Enterprise articles from March 2003

The American Enterprise archives from March 2003

What do you mean, "a good war"? (Bird's Eye).
March 1, 2003... It is sometimes said, including by me, that Americans don't know as much history as they ought to. But there is one era that many Americans have studied carefully--and that is our own Civil War epoch. Indeed, national interest in the Civil...

Sidelights.
March 1, 2003... In an effort to deglamorize fur, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is providing fur coats to the poor. A group spokeshuman stated that only the destitute should wear furs.... New York City is considering housing the homeless on...

Still battling. (Scan).
March 1, 2003... In late December, the United States Historical Society dropped a bomb on Richmond, Virginia. It announced plans to erect a statue commemorating Abraham Lincoln's April 5, 1865 visit to the defeated city. The statue, of Lincoln seated on a bench...

What is Qatar? (Scan).
March 1, 2003... As America prepares for war in Iraq, we have been hearing more about the tiny Arab emirate of Qatar. Home to several thousand U.S. troops, the largest stash of pre-positioned American military gear in the region, and a new alternate...

Work available. (Scan).
March 1, 2003... In the epilogue to her recent book An Unlikely Conservative, Linda Chavez describes a corner of American politics in deep need of a cleansing reform. Is anyone in the new Republican Congress looking for a project? Something needs to be...

And you thought Perot was odd ... (Scan).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Montana's recent Libertarian Party candidate for Senate has turned blue. Literally. Stan Jones said he started ingesting a colloidal silver solution he believed would protect him from disease back in 1999, when he feared that Y2K disruptions...

Tough (guy) love. (Scan).
March 1, 2003... Not many of us would have the heroic composure to do what Senate majority leader (and physician) Bill Frist did at the scene of a bloody accident in Florida earlier this year. An SUV had rolled over several times after a tire blowout, and there...

Deconstructing NYC. (Scan).
March 1, 2003... The proposals for the World Trade Center site unveiled recently by some of the world's leading architects reveal a curious state of affairs: The architecture profession's avant-garde is hopelessly mired in a failed past. Almost all of the...

Life's too short for TV. (Scan).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Two years ago, back when I worked in television, I got a chance to serve as a judge for TV's Emmy awards. I was an ABC news staffer, and helped judge the news category. I voted for things like a National Geographic story about an elephant that...

Ms. Fortune. (Scan).(Kitchen Table Entrepreneurs)(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... Two liberal feminists have discovered that... capitalism works! In their new book, Kitchen Table Entrepreneurs, Martha Shirk and Anna Wadia tell the stories of 11 women who started their own small businesses and pulled their families out...

Productivity miracle? (Scan).
March 1, 2003... When new machines, new information, or new techniques allow workers to produce more in the same period of time, this is what economists call "productivity growth." Producing more with less is the only lasting way to improve our standard of...

The GOP lock. (Politico).
March 1, 2003... On November 4, 1952, the Republican Party elected a President and captured both the House of Representatives and the Senate. This period of united Republican government lasted only until 1954, when the GOP lost both the House and Senate. ...

Catherine Crier: who better to write an angry new book called The Case Against Lawyers than a former prosecutor, civil litigator, and state judge--who is now an anchor for Court TV? ("Live" with TAE).(Interview)
March 1, 2003... Catherine Crier still ranks as the youngest person in Texas history to win election as a state judge. "I was voted in on my 30th birthday, in 1984," she says. Before that, Crier had worked as a prosecutor in the Dallas County district...

The Civil War returns: the struggle that forged America and launched modern warfare comes to life in a major new film. (Cover Story).(Movie Review)
March 1, 2003... Mr. Lincoln said he liked his speeches short and sweet, so here it is: The new Warner Brothers picture Gods and Generals is not only the finest movie ever made about the Civil War, it is also the best American historical film. Period. ...

Revising Mr. Lincoln: a new debate bursts out--Jay Winik and Dinesh D'Souza assess it.
March 1, 2003... Bending Fate to A Higher Purpose Late March of 1865. So anxious was Abraham Lincoln about ending the Civil War that, when he received word of Robert E. Lee's bold but failed attempt to break through Ulysses S. Grant's lines outside...

A class war: how the Civil War squashed aristocracy in America.
March 1, 2003... General William Tecumseh Sherman--a quirky, difficult, and much misunderstood man--deserves a place on the roll call of great liberators in human history. More than any other person, he destroyed the institution of American slavery and the...

Living history: for millions of Americans, the era of Lee and Lincoln is still open for visiting.
March 1, 2003... Time Travelers Skip Coonts, a tall, gaunt man with a neatly trimmed gray beard, spends the work week installing windows and store-fronts in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. But this occupation is little more than a means to make money and...

Man without a country. (Flashback).
March 1, 2003... To know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain ever a child--Cicero As we walk down a rutted dirt road leading into the historic Batavia Cemetery in New York on its annual Civil War candlelight tour, we halt before a...

Conservatism & liberality: Michael Oakeshott's quirky fusion. (Transcript: words worth repeating).
March 1, 2003... From a Bradley lecture delivered recently at the American Enterprise Institute by writer and former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan: The name Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990) instills dread in many American conservatives. They recognize...

Nursery lessons. (In real life: first-person America).
March 1, 2003... PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA--I'm a man who worked in high-quality professional child care for four years. I can't really recommend it to anyone. Especially not children. I had been working freelance and part time when my wife got pregnant,...

Bull Schmidt. (Now Playing).(About Schmidt)(Movie Review)
March 1, 2003... The new movie About Schmidt isn't really about the title character played by Jack Nicholson (an actuary for an Omaha insurance company who reevaluates his life in the wake of his retirement). This movie is about the Midwest--and Hollywood's...

Praise the boom, don't bury it. (Forward Observer).
March 1, 2003... Revisionists, acting with what author Michael Lewis calls a "mob mentality," have turned on the 1990s. They're lynching a decade. Its crime? Mindless greed. These journalists, pundits, and politicians enjoy attacking Alan Greenspan as the...

Time to woo India? (Terror Watch).
March 1, 2003... The cheek-to-cheek relationship between America and her principal Cold War partners has famously soured, with perhaps a permanent breakup in the offing. Even if U.S.-European affairs can be patched up, it is time for the Bush administration to...

Free market pharmaceutical coverage. (Working Lunch).(Interview)
March 1, 2003... Wisdom... is social. She seeks her fellows--Thomas Jefferson Five expensive plans to buy prescription drugs for Medicare recipients are currently floating around Washington. All promise to create huge and permanent entitlements except one:...

Why I'll vote for the dividend tax cut. (the Tax Economist).
March 1, 2003... I'n the year 2000, for the first time ever, a majority of Americans owned stocks. Unfortunately, many savers joined this growing investor class just in time to be mauled by the most vicious bear market in years. Even profitable firms found...

Women 9, men 0.(Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex, and Title IX)(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex, and Title IX By Jessica Gavora Encounter Books, 181 pages, $24.95 A cross the country, programs such as men's wrestling and track have been disappearing at the rate of a half-dozen every...

Junk culture jive.(Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make Believe Violence )(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make Believe Violence By Gerard Jones Basic Books, 272 pages, $25 The biggest cultural conflict in America during the past two decades has been between those who believe that...

Economics as religion.(A Perilous Progress: Economists and Public Purpose in Twentieth-Century America)(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... A Perilous Progress: Economists and Public Purpose in Twentieth-Century America By Michael Bernstein Princeton University Press, 376 pages, $39.50 Marx famously remarked that the job of a social scientist is not merely to understand the...

Guns make people safe.
March 1, 2003... Joyce Lee Malcolm, Guns and Violence: The English Experience, Harvard University Press, 2002 (hup.harvard.edu) In a new book, British historian Joyce Lee Malcolm finds that wider gun ownership made the U.K. safer. Before the widespread...

All-American foreign policy.
March 1, 2003... Joshua Muravchik, "The Bush Manifesto," in Commentary; December 2002 (commentarymagazine.com) America's official national security strategy, a statement of the country's strategic goals and objectives, has traditionally attracted little...

Medical surprises.
March 1, 2003... "Early Release of Selected Estimates Based on Data From the January-June 2002 National Health Information Survey" U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, December 31, 2002 (cdc.gov/nchs/) For years, policy makers have fretted about the...

Triple threat?(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Steven Hayward, "The New Corporate Balance Sheet: Black, Red--and Green," in AEI Environmental Outlook, October 2002 (aei.org) In recent years many corporations have begun measuring performance on the basis of a"triple bottom line." This...

Martian rights?(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Paul York, "The Ethics of Terraforming," in Philosophy Now: A Magazine of Ideas, October/November 2002 (philosophynow.org) Since space travel first became possible, science fiction writers and scientists have imagined what it would take to...

AIDS in Asia.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Nicholas Eberstadt, "The Future of AIDS," in Foreign Affairs, November/ December 2002 (foreignaffairs.org) Exotic drug regimens now allow AIDS patients in the developed world to survive indefinitely. But the disease continues to kill...

Inbred in Iraq.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Steve Sailer, "Cousin Marriage Conundrum," in American Conservative, January 13, 2003 (amconmag.com) If there is a U.S. attempt to build democracy in a liberated Iraq, the structure of Iraqi families may present a major stumbling block,...

The South: still distinctive. (Opinion pulse).
March 1, 2003... Question: Would you say...? Being a Southerner is very/somewhat important Southerners 52% Residents of the 58% deep South Note: Table made from bar...

Tax reform. (Opinion Pulse).
March 1, 2003... Americans have never been happy about the amount of money they pay in taxes. Four in ten believe their taxes will be higher even with the Republicans in control of Congress, with the same number saying they will stay about the same. When asked...

The mail.(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2003... Michael Medved's diatribe against Libertarian voters (SCAN, January/February) condemns Libertarians because they don't study opinion polls to determine who can win before they vote. For Medved, ideas are beside the point. The Libertarian...

Last gasp.
March 1, 2003... "Why do you always get defensive whenever I attack you?" "You can't begin to imagine how embarrassing it is to be seen with you." "It happens every year. We come here to decompress a bit and my husband completely DEFLATES!" THE...