Zapatero Steps Up
“Aim well, miliciano, for you defend the Republic.” On a barren hill in Asturias, Spain, near the border with León, José Fernández, a Loyalist soldier, etched this phrase into wet cement in September 1936, adding, “The Trench of Captain Lozano.” Written to commemorate a friend who’d been shot weeks before by Nationalist troops for refusing…
One Nation, Under Siege
Eleven years ago, my first year living in New York, I sat on the roof of International House on the edge of Harlem, with hundreds of other students, raucously celebrating as elections in South Africa, half a world away, finished off the apartheid regime and brought Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress to power. Drinking beers…
Two If By Sea
Last October, Osama bin Laden released his ï¬rst videotaped message in nearly three years. It was lengthier than anything he’d sent out for a while because he got wrapped up in business talk. “So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy,” he said, quoting the British Royal Institute of…
The Women’s View
Kimberly was at home with her two sleeping children when her estranged husband, high on methamphetamines and angry about their impending divorce, showed up at her door last September. “He came in and said he wanted to talk about child-support payments. We were fighting about everything. The divorce was not final,” Kimberly said. “He raped…
The Front
For Iranians in exile — and the Americans who become embroiled in their intrigues — Paris has long been the city of shadows. This is where the Ayatollah Khomenei awaited the ominous victory of his Islamic revolution; and where the deposed ministers and brutal spies from the late shah’s government washed up in the 1979…
Street Fights
Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life by Steven Fraser (HarperCollins, 752 pages, $29.95) Can the New Deal be repealed? Is America’s welfare state, incomplete though it is, so out of sync with the nation’s individualistic ideology and the political power of business that George W. Bush can…
Freedom Freely Imagined
Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas by David Hackett Fischer (Oxford University Press, 851 pages, $50.00) George W. Bush used the word “freedom” 24 times during his second inaugural address. After the president’s handlers rushed out and denied that he was looking to start more wars, George Bush Senior…
Liberals, Think Big
Return to Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to Recover It by Alan Wolfe (Princeton University Press, 224 pages, $22.95) In recent years, the sociologist Alan Wolfe has emerged as one of America’s most astute thinkers about religion, politics, and society. Unlike so many generalists who…
A Different Equality
Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety by Judith Warner (Riverhead, 304 pages, $23.95) The Career Mystique: Cracks in the American Dream by Phyllis Moen and Patricia (Roehling Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 304 pages, $22.95) The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America by Dorothy Sue Cobble (Princeton University Press,…
Hello, Henhouse? Fox Calling
“Should we have affirmative action for conservatives?” This question, arresting enough by itself, becomes all the more so when the “we” in that question is The New York Times. It cropped up during a January 17 meeting in a nicely paneled Times conference room, billed as an “informal forum” at which various Times editors and…
The Bolton Fights (Plural)
Within minutes of secretary of state Condoleezza Rice’s March 7 announcement that John Bolton was the administration’s pick as ambassador to the United Nations, liberal Washington sprang into action. Bolton, suddenly, was Topic A, even more so than Social Security. His dismissive quotes about the United Nations were given wide circulation in the stream of…
They Make It Up. You Decide.
Last fall, after my group put out a study detailing widespread tax avoidance by America’s largest and most profitable corporations, the right-wing Heritage Foundation published a screed attacking us. It was one blatant misstatement after another. I e-mailed the author, Norbert Michel, to point out his many factual errors, but he declined to correct them.…
Their Sun Also Rises
Famously, on the last day of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin pointed to an image of the sun painted on the back of George Washington’s chair and said that he finally had “the happiness to know it is a rising and not a setting sun.” Ever since then, Americans have had the same…
Dossier: You Pay, They Play
The top 1 percent of U.S. households received an average income-tax cut of approximately $40,990 in 2004, boosting their after-tax income by 5.3 percent … The middle 20 percent of households received an average tax cut of $980, boosting their after-tax income by 2 percent … Including corporate tax cuts, the top 1 percent of…
Labor Intense
LAS VEGAS — “I think John Sweeney’s administration is rhetorically prepared to embrace any and all proposals for change to stay in power,” one of American labor’s dissident leaders told me in January. “If John Sweeney is re-elected, he’s out of gas. Nothing is going to change over there” at the AFL-CIO, and American labor’s,…
Must Joe Go?
Joe Lieberman has a secret: He’s a pretty orthodox Democrat. In the spring of 2001, when 12 of the party’s senators — almost one-quarter of the caucus — voted for the first round of Bush tax cuts, Lieberman voted against them. The liberal group Americans for Democratic Action gave Lieberman’s 2003 voting record a “liberal…
