July August Issue
To download the July / August 2006 issue in PDF format, click here.
Hard Labor
It’s a cool, smogless noontime at the Los Angeles-long Beach harbor, and the guys who could be the future of American labor have lined up for lunch. Three weeks earlier, on May 1, the day that immigrants had stayed away from work, these truck drivers had shut down the port — America’s busiest, through which…
All Eyes on Kennedy
After more than a decade of stability, the Supreme Court was overdue for a makeover. Impatient conservatives, long plotting a high-court coup to match their lower-court triumphs, had their eyes on poor old liberal Justice John Paul Stevens. Then, last July, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced she was stepping down. He does have His ways.…
In Defense of Roe
From the archives: It is difficult to know when a contrarian idea has been repeated so much as to become the new conventional wisdom. However, it’s not just “contrarian” for center-left pundits to claim Roe v. Wade doesn’t matter. It’s stupid.
Is the Common Good Good?
“Party in Search of a Notion,” the essay by Prospect editor Michael Tomasky, provoked a tremendous response from readers, other writers, and political leaders. Press attention included a front-page article in The New York Times on May 9. To keep the conversation going, we invited five people to write responses. The ideologically diverse…
Chicken Wing
By the time you read this, The West Wing will have ended weeks ago. Matt Santos will have picked out his Oval Office rug, and Josiah Bartlett will be boring building contractors with rapid-fire trivia as they haggle over the final details of his library. The Sunday nights of liberals, once occupied, will now be…
Cash-And-Parry
What would happen if the United Nations ran out of money? Will unpaid translators show up to work at the Security Council? Will Con Edison simply turn the lights off at First Avenue and 42nd Street? More importantly: Will peacekeeping troops across the globe have to pack up and go home? We may soon find…
The Tchotchkes of War
To spend Christmas in Baghdad is not a dream of many travelers, but it was what The New York Times assigned me to do in 1998. American bombs were raining down on the Iraqi capital that season, as they did periodically during the 1990s. Each morning I visited the places that had been bombed the…
Oversexed
Kristin Luker’s useful history of sex education hits the right notes, until she tries too hard to please all sides.
What’s the Matter With Class?
On June 6, California voters decisively rejected a ballot initiative to provide tax-supported public pre-kindergarten. A special surtax would have touched only residents making at least $400,000 or $800,000 for a couple. It’s hard to think of a better use of social outlay for the middle class and the poor, or a better-targeted tax. Yet…
They’ve Got a Secret
Larry Berman didn’t really believe that a journal article he was writing in 2004 would break much new ground in telling the story of Lyndon B. Johnson and his conduct of the Vietnam War. Berman, a political science professor at the University of California at Davis, already had published two books on presidential decision making…
Solidarity Man
On April 3, at an unpublicized strategy meeting, Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack assembled AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, AFSCME president Gerry McEntee, and several other senior labor leaders with officials of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), including Clinton administration veteran and DLC president Bruce Reed. Vilsack, the current DLC chairman, encouraged the two factions to stop…
All the President’s Pets
Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush by Eric Boehlert (Free Press, 352 pages, $25.00) It will come as no surprise to readers of these pages that the galloping pack of Washington journalists has spent much of the last five and a half years rolling over for an alternately (and sometimes simultaneously)…
Watching the Detectives
When Nick Schwellenbach went down to the House of Representatives’ legislative resource center in May to look into the widening Duke Cunningham corruption probe, he noticed a couple of other visitors at a neighboring table — a man and a woman, both crisply dressed, who were getting attentive service from the office staff. As the…
Is It Good for the Jews?
On May 23, the House of Representatives passed Resolution 4681, the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act, by a vote of 361 to 37. Nothing remarkable about that. But the passage of H.R. 4681 had all the ingredients of the worrying way in which the Israel-Palestine conflict has played out in American politics and policy for the past…
Fairy-Tale Failure
Even in an administration famous for its contempt for science, the President’s tortured case for abstinence stands out. He committed $1 billion to abstinence-only programs abroad without a shred of scientific evidence that they prevent disease. Casting about for justification, he and the virginity advocates who surround him latched on to one of the developing…
The Price Is Wrong
On September 11, 2001, the United States was hit by devastating terrorist attacks perpetrated by a transnational terrorist network. Less than a year later, it was apparent that the Bush administration wanted to invade Iraq, allegedly as part of the response. Famously, selling this agenda involved a highly deceptive effort to link the two issues.…
It Takes a Movement
If the current revival of progressive politics were the civil-rights movement, the role of Rosa Parks would be played by Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer. Every child in America learns each February the story of how Parks one day decided that she just wasn’t going to take it any more and refused to move to the…
Men Overboard
It’s not just “contrarian” for center-left pundits to claim Roe doesn’t matter. It’s stupid.
