The Real Supply Side
It’s no secret that the nation’s public schools are confronting their worst budget crisis in decades. Blame it on the combination of a lousy economy, state and local budget cuts, and unfunded federal mandates. The result is that many of America’s 50 million public-school kids are going back to overcrowded classrooms, older and rattier textbooks,…
The American Game
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game By Michael Lewis, W.W. Norton & Company, 288 pages, $24.95 Back in 1922, the U.S. Supreme Court, in its infinite wisdom, declared that Major League Baseball was not involved in interstate commerce and, hence, was exempt from federal antitrust laws. In 1952 and 1972 the Court reaffirmed…
Mission Unlimited
The Mission: Waging War and Keeping the Peace with America’s Military By Dana Priest, W. W. Norton & Company, 384 pages, $26.95 A principal deficiency of the argument against the Iraq War was that the war’s opponents, like the first Bush administration, would have left a brutal tyranny in power. Who wanted to side with…
The Nixon Enigma
No matter what we do, those of us in our 20s can’t seem to measure up to the Greatest Generation. That bygone nation of joiners, providers and world-beaters, in the standard story, puts to shame today’s sad assemblage of narcissists and whiners. Gone are the days when the United States, stung by a Japanese sneak…
Exporting Censorship to Iraq
From the start, problems small and large plagued the Pentagon’s media project in Iraq. The Iraqi Media Network (IMN), as it is known, is an American-run outfit contracted by the Pentagon to put out news after Saddam Hussein’s fall. Its mission was twofold: to be both a PBS-style broadcaster and a means for the occupying…
Bioterror Brain Drain
Dr. Marcus Horwitz, professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, has devoted most of his career to finding a vaccine for tuberculosis. Though the age-old killer is well controlled in the industrialized world, TB kills more than 2 million people each year among the global poor. It’s not a sexy field: Compared…
Preserving Choice
Each year the anti-abortion movement becomes more aggressive and insidious in its campaign to undermine reproductive rights. But somehow the abortion-rights majority — convinced that a broad base of support protects the freedoms we cherish — dismisses the threat. This complacency is the anti-choice movement’s strongest asset. William Saletan looks at this conundrum in his…
Elections as an Exit Strategy
In central Iraq the United States now has its own West Bank, its own encounter with terrorism as a routine occurrence rather than a rare event. As George W. Bush likes to say, we have carried the fight to the enemy — and now are conveniently at hand to be shot at and blown up…
The Students’ Rep
The Capitol Hill office of Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) looks like nothing so much as a college bookstore without the books. Her University of Wisconsin-Madison pennant is proudly displayed, along with the matching stuffed bear, football and autographed basketball and football. A poster behind the reception desk proclaims that the Madison Area Technical College makes…
Doing Disservice
No matter what we do, those of us in our 20s can’t seem to measure up to the Greatest Generation. That bygone nation of joiners, providers and world-beaters, in the standard story, puts to shame today’s sad assemblage of narcissists and whiners. Gone are the days when the United States, stung by a Japanese sneak…
The Young and the Jobless
It’s not easy being young today. While America moves through an economic recovery, young workers are being left behind. And that’s largely because, since the recovery officially began in November 2001, employment is down by more than a million. Of the 10 economic expansions since World War II, this is the first in which jobs…
Daughters of the Revolution
“I would not call myself a feminist,” says Natalie, a University of Michigan junior. “I’m experiencing a lot of the advantages that feminists worked to achieve, and I’m thankful. … But I don’t know that women are still that much uneven from men, especially in the workplace.” Told that on average a woman today makes…
Schools of Thought
During her first two years at the University of Pennsylvania, Stephanie Steward became convinced that she was being treated unfairly because of her political views. In her class on diversity and the law, a professor seemed obsessed with the evils of slavery. Another professor’s defense of the estate tax struck her as excessively one-sided. The…
Virtual Politics
Retired four-star Gen. Wesley Clark seemed a very appealing fellow to retiree Eric Carbone. “I came out of retirement to work for this guy,” he says, looking up from his computer in an office just around the corner from the White House. Carbone, a member of DraftWesleyClark.com, spent the past two months encouraging Clark to…
New Generation, New Politics
A new generation is coming of age in America and politicians ignore it at their peril. Generation Y, as it’s been called, is expected to be as large as the Baby Boom Generation, and when the full group is of voting age, it could have as much political significance. It is a generation that has…
Scandalous Schools
“The Condition of California School Facilities and Policies Related to Those Conditions,” a 2002 report by nationally recognized facilities expert Robert Corley, is written in stilted bureaucratese, but the conditions it describes are the stuff of exposés. Corley describes peeling lead paint on classroom walls; leaky roofs; deathly hot classrooms, their windows blacked out against…
Bullies in the Pulpit
In late January 2001, the new administration had barely unpacked when George W. and Laura Bush paid a friendly visit to Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the recently inaugurated leader of the Washington Archdiocese. On the heels of that supper, Karl Rove, together with Deal Hudson, editor of the Catholic magazine Crisis, organized a White House meeting…
Unilateralism Disgraced
George W. Bush’s decision to go to war against Iraq was based on three fundamental assumptions: Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction posed an imminent threat to the United States; turning Iraq into a stable and viable self-governing state would be far easier than previous nation-building efforts; and, once weapons were found and…
Bush’s Saudi Connections
Saudi Arabia is the wellspring of radical Islam, its primary source of sustenance and inspiration. Yet, since September 11, the Bush administration has consistently ducked the truth about Riyadh’s role in nurturing terrorism — and concealed the truth as well. Given the many business and personal ties binding the president, his family and his associates…
Brooks No Argument
David Brooks is having an excellent decade. As he might have put it in his breezy, best-selling Bobos in Paradise, he’s the Restoration Hardware of conservative punditry, the Starbucks of insouciant moderation. Indeed, with his frequent appearances in Newsweek, The Atlantic Monthly and other magazines, not to mention his regular TV gig, Brooks might seem…
Recalling the Future
I. Hiram Johnson’s Mess The land may have been ours before we were the land’s, as Robert Frost wrote, but not in California. The Progressives saw to that. When people arrived in my home state, there were no political institutions to reach out to them or provide an orientation; there was nothing they could join.…
