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Prospect Conference on C-SPAN2

The EditorsOct 31, 2003
Beginning at 5:53 tonight, the TAP emergency summit conference on the foreign policy crisis, held last Tuesday and Wesndesay and featuring Wesley Clark, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Theodore Sorensen, and many more, will be rebroadcast . The speeches by Clark and Brzezinski are two of the most effective challenges to America's current foreign policy that we've heard. Here is the original schedule .

Head Rush

The EditorsOct 27, 2003
The news that Rush Limbaugh will be spending the month trying to kick his OxyContin habit provides a tempting opportunity to kick a thug while he's down. Rush, after all, told his audience just eight years ago that "we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. And the laws are good because we know what happens to people in societies and neighborhoods which become consumed by them. And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up." So, is it time to give the king of talk radio a taste of his own medicine and let him see what's become of America's penal system after 30 years of "tough on crime" hysterics? After all, in the same broadcast he specifically called for the imprisonment of more white drug offenders as a solution to the well-known racial disparities in the justice system. To quote the man himself, "What this says to me is that too many whites are...

Book 'Em

The EditorsOct 27, 2003
Let's just agree up front that there's no augury or metaphor in it, but the fact remains that South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle spoke at length for the first time about his new book, which is due out in November, at something called the Deadwood Pavilion. Addressing an audience at his state's first-ever book fair, Daschle said he wrote the tome, titled Like No Other Time, because he had "a compelling story to tell," adding, somewhat cosmically, that "history is not written at a constant pace. It is sometimes accelerated." "Accelerate," meanwhile, is undoubtedly what many Democratic senators -- perhaps Daschle included -- wish they could do with the number of days remaining in the term of their colleague from Georgia, Zell Miller. That's because Miller, too, has turned authorial; but where advance word on Daschle's book suggests that it will be a polite paean to his colleagues and their will to soldier on after 9-11, Miller's product (published in October) is of a different character. A...

FOXic Waste

The EditorsOct 27, 2003
Say what you will about its bias and inaccuracies, FOX News is succeeding at its mission. Of course, that mission is to spread bias and inaccuracies that bolster the position of the Bush White House. A new survey from the Program on International Policy Attitudes (a joint project of the Center on Policy Attitudes and the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland) asked more than 3,000 Americans a range of questions on foreign-policy matters. Conclusion? If you're a viewer of FOX News, the odds are high that everything you know is wrong. In particular, respondents were asked if it was true that clear links had been found between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq and that world public opinion was favorable to Bush policy in Iraq. Fully 45 percent of the FOX News audience believes at least one of these three whoppers is true -- compared with 36 percent of CBS viewers, 31 percent of CNN's, 30 percent of...

Ashcroft on the Case

The EditorsOct 27, 2003
It's not every investigation that lays its cards on the table at the outset, but the modus operandi of John Ashcroft, public eye, became apparent at the very moment the Justice Department got on the Joseph Wilson retaliatory leak case. As all signs pointed to a White House leaker, Justice announced that it would widen its net to look for suspects at the Defense and State departments. Now, in theory, it's conceivable that some neocon at Defense decided to out Wilson's wife. But State? Why stop there? Why not Agriculture? How about the Bureau of Labor Statistics? Not that Ashcroft's approach to the case is without precedent. We think, particularly, of the climactic moment in Casablanca, when Humphrey Bogart's Rick, the smoking weapon still in his hand, stands over the fresh corpse of Conrad Veidt's Maj. Strasser, while Claude Rains' Louis, the prefect of police, utters the immortal words, "Round up the usual suspects." A few moments later, in the film's final shot, Bogart and Rains walk...

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