What Democracy Looks Like
“Virtually all the leaders who met in Quebec to expand trade were democratically elected, while ‘the people’ in the streets clamoring for ‘justice’ were self-appointed or paid union activists.” — Thomas Friedman, New York Times, April 24, 2001 Somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 protesters descended on Quebec City last month to demonstrate against the Free…
Can Insiders Be Outsiders?
Imagine that you’re Senator Tom Daschle. You have two somewhat conflicting goals. One is to block the worst parts of the Bush program, this year. The other is to move down the hall to the big office, the one that says Majority Leader instead of Minority Leader, probably in November 2002. You could get lucky,…
Body Count
For congressional Democrats, losing the White House meant the loss of more than the president’s veto power over Republican-sponsored legislation. It also left the Democrats without a central idea factory and place to commune with the Democratic Party’s constituency groups. “The loss of the White House left us in a vacuum,” said a staffer for…
This Time, It’s Personal
It was, on the whole, an unusual display of Democratic solidarity. On April 27, all nine Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee — backed, according to ranking member Patrick Leahy, by the entire Democratic caucus — signed a letter to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales about George W. Bush’s proposed nominations to the federal bench.…
Parodies Lost
On April 20, a federal judge named Charles Pannell, Jr., barred Houghton Mifflin from publishing Alice Randall’s novel The Wind Done Gone–a takeoff on Gone With the Wind from a slave’s perspective–on the grounds that the book’s borrowings of characters and scenes constitute “piracy.” The ruling has prompted widespread critical derision and may well be…
Screen Saviors
Protecting civil liberties is an exercise in déjà vu. On March 20, 2001, for the third time in five years, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia seeking to enjoin a federal law aimed at protecting children from the ravages of the Internet. First, the ACLU…
Black Death
In early April, a group of prominent African-American businessmen led by Black Entertainment Television mogul Robert Johnson ran a full-page advertisement in The New York Times and The Washington Post calling for an end to the estate tax. What was notable about the ads wasn’t their message — the movement to repeal the estate tax…
Ending Executions
As I write, the United States is preparing to execute Timothy McVeigh on May 16. If the death penalty is to exist at all, it’s hard to imagine a more compelling candidate–a terrorist and mass murderer, apparently sane and unremorseful. Yet, remarkably, there are stirrings of debate about McVeigh’s execution, led by the doubts expressed…
The Lottery Gamble
Here’s the best news to come out of the otherwise screwed-up 2000 election: The political juggernaut that during the last third of the twentieth century transformed the states from staunch foes of gambling into gambling’s chief sponsors has slowed to a crawl. The voters of Arkansas rejected a lottery-casino ballot measure, joining the voters of…
Spectrum Lords
In late March, when the National Association of Broadcasters held its annual Futures Summit in Pebble Beach, California, the assembled pack of Wall Street financial-analyst invitees presented the broadcasters with an astonishing but presumably welcome fact: Recent auctions in Europe and the United States indicated that the market value of the spectrum space–the airwaves over…
Kicking the Hobbit
When it comes to the fantasy novels of J.R.R. Tolkien, it is a truism that critics either love the books or hate them: Concerning Middle Earth, there is no middle ground. Such has been the case ever since Tolkien, an Oxford philologist, first published his epic novel The Lord of the Rings in three volumes…
Where the Public Good Prevailed
Many Americans know, all too well, what is wrong with health care. Ask the single mother who waits half a day in a crowded clinic for a five-minute visit with a harried physician, or the unemployed worker who has been downsized out of his job and his health insurance. Their experience tells a devastating tale…
