The A.G. Is Their Shepherd
When Attorney General John Ashcroft began conducting daily prayer sessions withJustice Department employees, he confirmed the hopes of religious conservativesand the fears of secularists: The new Republican regime would make governmentmore godly. Ashcroft has loudly lamented the separation of church and state and hasadvocated government funding for religious groups, as well as the reintroductionof official…
Comment: Drug Stupor
The Democrats have had a pretty good month.President Bush has been unable tohold Republican legislators on an array of issues ranging from oil drilling tostem cell research. Particularly sweet was the Senate’s passage of thepatients-rights bill, with nine Republican defectors voting aye. The vote isawkward for the White House, which has threatened a veto that…
The Rebirth of the Democratic Party
Democratic activists are pushing for a midtermconvention next summer. Theparty hasn’t met at midterm for more than two decades. But activists make aconvincing case for rallying the troops next year before the 2002 midtermelections and using the occasion to articulate a new progressivism for America. The stakes in 2002 are huge. If the Democrats don’t…
Bush’s Climate Follies
By withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol–the attempt by 160nations to forge a treaty that will reduce worldwide emissions from coalcombustion and oil burning, thus averting a global-warming catastrophe–PresidentGeorge W. Bush trashed years of work by European negotiators just as he was aboutto make his European diplomatic debut. By declaring climate science “unsettled” and calling on…
The Broken Machinery Of Death
No longer can a jury wantonly and freakishly impose the death sentence; it is always circumscribed by the legislative guidelines. –Gregg v. Georgia Twenty-five years ago this month, on July 2, 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 7-2 in Gregg v. Georgia to reinstate the death penalty after a brief official hiatus. Implicit in the…
Knockin’ on Dylan’s Door
Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña, David Hajdu. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 328 pages, $25.00. Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, Howard Sounes. Grove Press, 527 pages, $27.50. Because folk music in the 1960s was driven…
Domestic Spy
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 221 pages, $23.00. Women’s work in America can be an ugly business–hard, repetitive labor,usually for low wages and male bosses. There is the pink-collar ghetto of retailand office jobs, and then there is worse: employment in sweatshops and fast-foodrestaurants and domestic…
Pretty in Pink
In the black-and-white introduction to Chinese director Zhang Yimou’saward-winning film The Road Home, a citified businessman returns, with down parka and four-wheel drive, to the remote mountain village where he grew up. His father has just died, and he has come back to this rural, snowbound enclave to help prepare for the funeral. Devastated by…
Yesterday’s Realism
Of course America needs a foreign policy! The title of Henry Kissinger’s newbook suggests that it hasn’t had one recently–a thesis supported by his manycriticisms of President Bill Clinton’s diplomacy as well as by the statement,early in the book, that “in the face of perhaps the most profound and widespreadupheavals the world has ever seen,”…
Epidemic Proportions
The United Nations has made global public health a top priority. At April’s anti-AIDS summit in Abuja, Nigeria, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan spelled out what is needed in order to launch a serious attack against AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis: at least $7 billion per year. The initial $200 million that President George W. Bush…
Kissinger, In Deed
The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens. Verso, 160 pages, $22.00. From the way that Christopher Hitchens tears into bloated reputations, it’seasy to imagine that in another age he would have spent many a predawn hourhappily preparing to duel. Now he has flung his challenge at Henry Kissinger, aman who generally liked to use the…
