Zellout
When the Senate voted 51 to 50 to provisionally accept the outline of George W. Bush’s budget, the sole Democrat who crossed the aisle was Zell Miller of Georgia. (He was offset by Republican Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, with Vice President Dick Cheney breaking the tie.) Of all the wavering Democrats in the Senate…
The Pregnant Governor:
The Fitness of Mothers Wendy Kaminer’s piece on Jane Swift (“Mama’s Delicate Condition,” TAP, April 23, 2001) has stirred up quite a fuss, and it is easy to see why. The underlying assumptions of her argument are as calculated to shock as one of those tabloid TV shows on “animals that kill” or alien invasion.…
Lowering the Bar
The American Bar Association (ABA) has had a long run, starting with the Eisenhower administration, as quasi-official consultant to presidents on federal judicial appointments. Now the Bush administration’s has ended the ABA’s special role, reflecting Republican criticism of the elite ABA as too liberal. In fact, critics from the left as well as the right…
Comment: Bush, Whacked
George W. Bush is losing his working majority in Congress. The only surprise isthat it took so long. As recently as a month ago, the new administration imaginedthat its tax package would just sail through on a tide of media torpor,Republican discipline, and bipartisan gesture. No longer. As the details of the president’s not very…
The Democrats’ Next Step
In our last issue, Will Marshall debated Robert Borosage and Stanley Greenberg about what campaign 2000 taught us. The discussion continues here. Lessons of 2000 By Mark J. Penn As George W. Bush’s first 100 days in office come to a close, the election of 2000 suggests several lessons if Democrats expect to recapture Congress…
The Working Caste
Tel Aviv’s city bus number four runs down Allenby Street through the heart of secular Israel’s glittering urban showcase. Just visible in one direction is the crowded Mediterranean coast, dotted with international hotels and frolicking sunbathers. A few blocks in the other direction are the cafés and boutiques of Dizengoff Street. As the bus…
Lethal Weapons
For gun control advocates, last fall’s election results demonstrated theSisyphean nature of battling the National Rifle Association. Senator JohnAshcroft of Missouri was one of five NRA allies in Congress who was voted out, inpart because of organized efforts by activist groups such as Handgun Control. Butwith George W. Bush in the White House, Ashcroft rose…
Kill this Idea
No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination. –Executive Order 11905, signed by President Gerald Ford (February 18, 1976) No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Governmentshall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination. –Executive Order 12333, signed by President…
The Judge as Lynch Mob
As any student of the death penalty in America knows, the chance that a person charged with a capital crime will live or die depends greatly on race, social class, and–perhaps most important–where the alleged crime was committed. First and foremost is the question of whether the defendant comes to court in one of …
A Reform That Doesn’t
Let’s say we decided to build a dam along a river. If we merely agreed to erecta small barrier that the river would run around, flowing easily through newchannels and old ones, no one would celebrate our plan as a great achievement.But that is how editorialists have hailed the Senate’s passage of theMcCain-Feingold bill, despite…
Reform You Can Take to the Bank
At its core, the McCain-Feingold bill was about getting rid of soft money. So far, so good. But as part of the deal, the Senate voted to hike hard-money limits. The Senate has thus exacerbated the money-and-politics problem. Assuming that the bill becomes law, we can expect a future in which campaign costs soar, elite…
Reproductive Emergency
Life is one long emergency for most advocacy groups–whose members are apt tobe united by the belief that they’re besieged. To an outsider who lacks theirpolitical passions, however, they seem less besieged than overwrought. So casualsupporters of abortion rights may be unimpressed when the National Organizationfor Women (NOW) declares an official state of emergency in…
TV’s Last Taboo
When it comes to sexual content on network television, broadcasting is an evermore risqué business. Yet in one small corner of the TV industry, apeculiar standard prevails: Straightforward and frank television advertising forcontraceptives is almost as unheard of as it was in the Father Knows Best era. In a recent moment of absurdity, the Fox…
Diversity on Trial
If this article had appeared before Tuesday, March 27, the sentence you are reading now would have said: “A recent decision by a district court judge about admissions policies at the University of Michigan is heartening news for supporters of affirmative action in higher education.” Instead, that introductory sentence needs to be replaced with this…
News Pollution
Readers of the Sunday New York Times Magazine were treated on April 1 to an extensive advertising supplement on allergies and asthma. The supplement ran from page 30 to page 42, with regular Times Magazine page numbering. The ostensible news copy was prepared by an outside agency; the section carried the disclaimer, in small type,…
University for Rent
Harvard University has a famous tradition known locally as “every tub on its own bottom.” Translated, that means that each faculty or school of the university is responsible for raising most of its own research money, and finders are keepers. The Harvard name, of course, is ample bait to attract all sorts of funders,savory and…
Art and Fellowship
Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress, and the Place of the Visual Arts in America, by Michael Brenson. The New Press, 157 pages, $25.00. In the United States, we like our artists nobly bereft, taking literallyPercy Bysshe Shelley’s description of poets as “the unacknowledged legislators ofthe world.” When artists stoop to seek acknowledgment, the priestly…
Death at an Early Age
Loss within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS, edited by Edmund White. University of Wisconsin Press, 305 pages, $29.95. In the aftermath of the terse 1981 announcement by the Centers for DiseaseControl (CDC) that a strange new disease was killing homosexuals, gay menmastered the art of throwing a funeral. This was not something for…
It’s All in Her Head
PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine, by Sally Satel, M.D. Basic Books, 256 pages, $27.00. Are you concerned about the fact that 44 million Americans lack healthinsurance and that millions of senior citizens are struggling to pay for medicineprescribed by their doctors? Are you troubled by the denial of necessary care byHMOs–or by…
The Capital of Loneliness
The advent of television has long been associated with the beginning of the endof the “good old days.” Historians, sociologists, filmmakers, and yes, even TVshows (think Brooklyn Bridge and The Wonder Years) have explored this relationship. In his 1990 film Avalon, Barry Levinson heartbreakingly rendered the effects of TV on three generations of an immigrant…
Voters and Vouchers
Pick up the newspaper or tune in to a Sunday morning TV gabfest and you’re likely to read or hear about the sizable majority of Americans who approve of voucher plans–school choice, as proponents put it. These assertions are sustained by the holy writ of the public opinion poll, rooted in random sample, buffered by…
