Travel: Lonelier Planet
I was in Bombay on January 17, 1991, sitting in the Indian Airlines office in the financial district, when I heard the first rumors of bombs falling on Baghdad. My mission was to make last-minute ticket changes while my traveling companion, a fellow American, went to Bombay’s Victoria Terminus to book us on that evening’s…
Networks:
Bang for the Buck, Bust in the States The White House wants another round of elite tax cuts masquerading as a $214-billion “stimulus” plan for the economy. Now, even the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (www.cbo.gov) has issued a report that undermines the bulk of the plan. For a good, reader-friendly summary of the CBO’s debunking,…
Bingaman with a Plan
After two decades of drift and a year of crisis, the Democrats have finally proposed a serious, future-oriented energy policy. The Energy Policy Act of 2002 (Senate bill S1766), introduced by Senate Energy Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, does not come a moment too soon: The lack of a coherent Democratic energy doctrine…
A More Civil Society
News of unrelenting violence in the Mideast may suggest that it’s utopian to expect peaceful resolution of abiding ethnic and religious hatreds, but some less visible efforts at cross-ethnic cooperation are getting results. Consider Northern Ireland, watered by many rivers–the Lagan, Bann,Ballinamallard, and Cam–but none so powerful as the river of religious hatred.Regularly overflowing its…
Trouble in the High Command
The Chastening: Inside the Crisis That Rocked the GlobalFinancial System and Humbled the IMF By Paul Blustein. Public Affairs, 431 pages, $30.00 There’s nothing like a nice vacation to take yourmind off looming globalfinancial meltdown. Just ask former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, whosneaked away for a fishing trip to the British Virgin Islands as…
Posner Proves His Case
Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline By Richard A. Posner. Harvard University Press, 408 pages, $29.95 Richard A. Posner’s Public Intellectuals reminds me of my grandmother’s attic: here an elephant table brought home from Africa; there a cuckoo clock; all around, a miscellany of items collected under one roof. Alas, Posner, a judge on the…
TR Grit
Theodore Rex By Edmund Morris. Random House, 864 pages, $35.00 Theodore Roosevelt By Louis Auchincloss. Henry Holt and Company, 155 pages, $20.00 Of all the presidential monuments in Washington,perhaps the most fitting isalso one of the least known: the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial, which hides amidthe woods of an 88-acre island in the Potomac. Most people…
The Poll Truth
Over the last few months, the public’s attention has shifted dramatically from a single-minded focus on combating terrorism to concerns about the ailing economy. That’s a big and politically significant change: A bad economy almost always hurts the incumbent president’s party in congressional elections. While this shift in our collective concern should mean a big…
Energy Forever
The world is dangerous. America’s energy policy makes it more so. In 1981 we wrote for the Pentagon what is still the definitive unclassified study of domestic energy vulnerability. We found, and government and industry experts later confirmed, that a handful of people could shut down three-quarters of the oil and gas supplies to the…
Return of the Madhouse
Last summer, some 600 inmates in the notorious supermaximum-security unit at California’s Pelican Bay State Prison stopped eating. They were protesting the conditions in which the state says it must hold its most difficult prisoners: locked up for 23 hours out of every 24 in a barren concrete cell measuring 7 1/2 by 11 feet.…
Insufficient Evidence
I don’t understand why everybody is making such a fuss over In the Bedroom, Todd Field’s first feature-length movie. The film has a few surprisingly good moments, but these are vastly outweighed by its creakinesses, its unlikelihoods, and its forced, false emotions. It deals with a subject–the murder of a beloved only child–that is almost…
Statehouse Subversion
In the mid-1990s, a group of liberal activists, with the support of a few wealthy donors, developed a new strategy to reduce the power of money in national politics. Let’s not waste so much energy trying to get minor reforms through Congress, they reasoned. Let’s take the battle to the states and push for something…
Comic Strips: Lame Duck
Back when the world still cared about Gary Condit (which is to say, not too long ago), the politically conservative comic-strip duck Mallard Fillmore doled out some predictable partisan criticism: “Before the Chandra Levy story, ABC, NBC and CBS usually referred to Congressman Condit’s party affiliation! Now 92% of the time, they don’t!” Dramatic pause.…
Afghan Assessment
When American warplanes began bombing Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, the Pentagon and the press cautioned that victory would not come quickly. The fabled Taliban warriors were battle-tested, schooled in guerrilla warfare, and uniquely familiar with Afghanistan’s rugged terrain. They also fielded some 45,000 troops, versus the Northern Alliance’s 12,000–a sure recipe for a Vietnam-style…
Daschle and Destiny
In late December, as Republicans and Democrats clashed by night over rival economic-stimulus plans, the nation’s newspapers began to take note of a top-down GOP campaign to “demonize” Senate majority leader Tom Daschle. “Republicans leave little doubt about their strategy, or its antecedents,” wrote Todd Purdum in The New York Times. The game plan, Purdum…
Freedom’s Edge
In San Francisco, two militant advocates for AIDS patients have been charged with stalking and threatening public-health officials, researchers, and reporters who have made or disseminated what they deem to be objectionable statements about AIDS prevention and the behavior of infected gay men. Naturally, with no apparent sense of irony, they assert a First Amendment…
Enron’s Enablers
Okay, let’s take the Bush administration at its word, however mutable that word may be. Let’s say only a handful of officials–the commerce and treasury secretaries, and (according to a subsequent clarification) several lesser officials at Treasury, and (oh, yes, we forgot) White House Chief of Staff Andy Card–knew about Ken Lay’s phone calls imploring…
Comment: Fool Me Twice
“Fool me once, shame on you,” says a wise political maxim. “Fool me twice, shame on me.” In his State of the Union address, President Bush will perpetrate a consumer fraud that makes his feint to the center in the 2000 campaign seem like truth-in-advertising. You’ll recall that the kinder, gentler Bush of the…
