Hawkish conservatives today must secretly reserve a special affection for the late Idaho Democrat Frank Church; after all, he provided them with the cudgel they’ve since used to batter liberal critics of the U.S. intelligence community. As chair of the Senate’s 1975 intelligence investigation, Church famously characterized the Central Intelligence Agency as a “rogue elephant […]
Chris Mooney
Chris Mooney is a Prospect senior correspondent and, most recently, author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatened Our Future (with Sheril Kirshenbaum).
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Surprising Nostradamus
One of the synchronicities of the 2000 election was that interest in Nostradamus spiked after George W. Bush was finally acclaimed president-elect. At the turn of the year, the sixteenth-century French seer was listed at number 32 on the Lycos 50, the search engine’s compilation of top online information requests (the list doesn’t include pornography-related […]
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Land Mass Follies
Despite media and pollster predictions to the contrary, George W. Bush lost the nation’s popular vote to Al Gore on November 7. But according to Republican howitzers Rush Limbaugh, David Horowitz, and others, he won something more important: the most land. During the early stages of the Florida recount, both www.rushlimbaugh.com and Horowitz’s Front Page […]
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Liebermania!
August 10, 2000 — Getting Their Money’s Worth : On August 3rd the Hotline reported the results of a new poll that showed that a clear majority of the public (65 percent) believes that the government’s antitrust case against Microsoft is “politically motivated by competitors” and that roughly twice as many […]
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Don’t Show Me the Money:
Q: The first question I wanted to ask was about “stealth PACs.” Voting on a bipartisan basis, Congress recently closed the loophole that allowed these groups to conceal their donors. But some have questioned the significance of the legislation. Do you think this is a step toward more fundamental reform, or does it just serve […]
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Drawn and Quartered:
Following the Supreme Court’s dramatic 5 to 4 ruling striking down Nebraska’s partial birth abortion ban in Stenberg v. Carhart, George W. Bush got caught without a thesaurus. Condemning the decision, Bush proclaimed that states should be allowed to enact laws “particularly to end the inhumane practice of ending a life that otherwise could live.” […]
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Outrage of Aquarius:
Word came out recently that Dan Kennedy, the talented press critic, will soon be leaving his post at The Boston Phoenix to work on a book about dwarfism. Just in time: A recent article suggests media watchers of Kennedy’s caliber may want to turn their guns on the Phoenix itself, whose sense of journalistic duty […]
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Reflections on Political Catastrophism
On the morning of September 11th — three months ago today — I went into a phone booth at a hotel near my evacuated office building, where I’d taken refuge to watch CNN, and called my parents and girlfriend to let them know I was all right. I wasn’t the only one making such a […]
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Smart — and Stupid — Profiling
Post-September 11, you’d think the political right would be able to make a pretty strong case for some form of racial profiling. After all, we were attacked by young, male Arabs, and we know there are more young, male Arabs among us plotting more such attacks. As Slate editor Michael Kinsley put it in a […]
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Tolkien on Homeland Defense
In a 1954 effusion about his friend J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, C.S. Lewis had this to say: Almost the central theme of the book is the contrast between the Hobbits (or “the Shire”) and the appalling destiny to which some of them are called, the terrifying discovery that the humdrum happiness of […]
