Requiem for a Public Defender
A long, dreary corridor of black-marbled linoleum serves as a makeshift waiting room for defendants scheduled to be tried at the Spalding County Courthouse in Griffin, Georgia, 40 miles south of Atlanta. More than 50 men and women, mostly black, stand along a pale yellow wall or sit on a dark oak bench, waiting to…
Sandy’s Moment
Sandy Levin, a veteran Democratic congressman from a heavily unionized district in suburban Detroit, has a problem. Crowded into his Capitol Hill office are a couple dozen union representatives who have come to talk to him about China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). It’s a testy, uncomfortable moment; the union reps are not…
The WTO Vote: The Wrong Whipping Boy
Critics of the World Trade Organization (WTO) have painted a distorted picture of its role and power. The liberal trade regime the WTO seeks to promote neither encourages nor inhibits the efforts of nations to balance market objectives with social ones. Trade liberalization has not undermined the mixed economy or led to a regulatory race…
The WTO Vote: Whose Rules for Globalism?
As this spring’s congressional debate heats up over ratification of the recent China-U.S. trade agreement, the mainstream media have once again dragged out the hoary morality play on “free trade.” On the dark side are protectionist unions, irresponsible eco-freaks, and the jingoist right. On the side of light and reason are the president, the Republican…
Conversation: Open Science or Junk Science?
On his article on PubMed Central, the NIH’s new electronic archive of biomedical research, Harvey Blume paints critics like me as quixotically trying to hold back the Internet (he refers to the controversy as “a tale of new technology versus old, of innovation and inertia”). In fact, my arguments against PubMed Central have nothing to…
The Real Risk for Gore
Al Gore’s problem is that he’s acting as if he’s desperate to be president, but sounding as if he doesn’t want to do anything new once elected. Talk about a mixed message. Voters could understand why someone would be driven to get into the Oval Office if he were intent on making a lot of…
Rights under the Knife
The Congress that made the impeachment of President Clinton its first item of business is now approaching its end with little to brag about. During the impeachment, I disagreed with liberals who thought the proceedings were an unmitigated disaster. Anything that distracted this Congress from actually passing legislation seemed to me worth public encouragement. Yet…
Inventing Al Gore: A Biography
In 2000 we face a presidential election between two men, Albert Gore, Jr., and George W. Bush, who are both sons of major politicians, who share their fathers’ names, who have witnessed their fathers’ political successes and bitter defeats, and who have striven to replicate–surpass? avenge?–their fathers’ careers. That is to say, we have two…
Tom Delay’s Empty suit
“House Democrats yesterday filed suit against Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) accusing him of extortion and money laundering. The civil suit alleges the whip pressured contributors into donating to the GOP and then directed those funds to nonprofit political groups that do not disclose their donors or how they are spending the money.” The Washington…
Our China Illusions
America is in the midst of a supposedly great debate over China policy. Congress will soon hold a seemingly momentous vote on whether to extend indefinitely China’s trading rights in the United States. The Clinton administration and the business community are pressing hard, indeed desperately, for congressional approval, which they argue is necessary for American…
The Tax Cut Nobody Wants
How important are tax cuts? Judging from the campaigns of the major presidential candidates, you’d think they were pretty important. Republican George W. Bush has made a huge, broad-based tax cut–$483 billion over five years, as much as $1.7 trillion over 10 years–a centerpiece, if not the centerpiece, of his campaign. And even Democrat Al…
The Vindication of the IRS
Back in April of 1998, several employees of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) came before the Senate oversight committee to testify about a litany of supposed fraud and abuse at the agency. IRS officials, they charged, had pursued vendettas against outside individuals and corporations and fudged audits to help former co-workers who had moved to…
The Taxonomist
Don’t be surprised if later this year the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the White House sharply raise their projections of future budget surpluses–perhaps by $1 trillion or more over the next 10 years, not even counting Social Security funds. Such good news, if it occurs, will cheer Republican tax cutters, especially George W. Bush,…
Comment: Beyond the Fringe
As we go to press, polls show Al Gore running as much as eight points behind George W. Bush nationally, and behind among every major age group except for voters over 65. This is truly remarkable. The economy is strong, the Republicans got the worst of the impeachment scandal, there are no serious foreign-policy problems,…
Those Goofy Plutocrats
Has the Microsoft case helped bring back the term “monopolist” as an insult of choice even in corporate America? When the Walt Disney Company and its ABC television stations tangled early in May with Time Warner Cable, some television viewers were briefly deprived of such vital ABC programming as “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”…
Abortion and Autonomy
Two important abortion cases will be decided by the Supreme Court this term. In Hill v. Colorado, the Court will rule on the constitutionality of statutory buffer or bubble zones–no-speech zones around abortion clinics and individuals entering clinics, in which even peaceful anti-abortion protests are prohibited. In Stenberg v. Carhart, it will determine the constitutionality…
Love, Sorrow, and Rage; Destitute Women in a Manhattan Residence
Love, Sorrow, and Rage: Destitute Women in a Manhattan Residence, by Alisse Waterston. Temple University Press, 234 pages, $59.50. Alisse Waterston originally went to Woodhouse, a New York City residence for mentally ill women, to conduct HIV research. She left with Love, Sorrow, and Rage, not one of those “‘scientific’ reports [that] teach us all…
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
American readers of newspapers, magazines, and books are now subjected to a veritable fire hose of information about the Internet every day. The Internet has become, in the past few years, its own genre of news, like sports or entertainment. In many major U.S. cities, it seems even to dominate the social conversations one inevitably…
Social Security: The Phony Crisis
Social Security: The Phony Crisis, by Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot. University of Chicago Press, 176 pages, $22.00. Economists Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot lay out a devastating critique of those who say Social Security is going broke and that something drastic needs to be done. Their useful book deconstructs the gimmicks, accounting tricks, and…
Bloom in Love
The chief vice and virtue of friendship come to the same thing: overestimation. In the narrow world of those who knew him personally, it seemed possible that Allan Bloom, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, author in 1987 of The Closing of the American Mind, should have been counted among the immortal…
Interstate Hero
Truckers operate outside all sorts of boundaries. They know the whole country better than most of us know our own towns. They pick up hitchhikers. They speak in code. And a good part of America is enthralled. Kids in sedans throw desperate air-horn gestures out backseat windows in search of one reciprocating honk. We eat…
Playing Soldier
Young Hollywood actors like to boast of the hellish basic training they go through to star in war movies like Saving Private Ryan or U-571. Their stories are always similar. The message is always the same: Playing soldier will make a man of you. The extraordinary French director Claire Denis hired a choreographer, not a…
Don’t Mess with Television
The stage is set for Vice President Al Gore. There’s a lectern at center stage with the vice presidential seal. Off to the left is an antique television, which Gore will later tell us is a vintage 1946 model. This is in the auditorium of the Herbert C. Hoover Building, which houses the United States…
Peeking Over the Great Wall
ACROSS: 1 BONN + IEST (site anag.); 5 S + CAN; 9 NI(NE)S; 10 A…T + TRACT; 11 TAHI(T)I (Haiti anag.); 12 PAT + I + O; 14 CATCHMENT AREA (anag.); 17 EARTH (h shifted in heart); 19 ERNES + T; 22 CHIC + A + GO; 23 (d)INNER; 24 YARD (2 defs.); 25 STAR…
