Joshua Green

T he first thing visitors to Maine’s statehouse in Augusta notice is that one-third of the historic building is boarded up, sealed off, and undergoing a late-summer renovation. It’s a fitting parallel to the historic transformation taking place within the legislature itself: Maine’s Clean Election Act, the first campaign finance reform of its kind, has […]

Some Democrats may have lost faith that they’ll be electing another president in the year 2000. But a host of evangelical novelists seem to think a liberal president in the new millennium is a near certainty. They just expect his stay in office will be a short one. And his downfall won’t come by scandal, […]

In January, Salon reported that drug czar Barry McCaffrey and the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) had coerced television networks to include governmentapproved antidrug messages in prime-time shows. Under the arrangement, the major networks secretly submitted scripts to McCaffrey’s office in exchange for credit toward public-service advertising that Congress had required them to […]

George Orwell‘s classic essay “Politics and the English Language” noted that euphemistic language had political effects. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, murder of political opponents was politely termed “liquidation.” Get people to change language, and you change how they think. This is a banner year for political euphemisms, and the right seems to do it better […]

Like many administrators, Edward Blakely doesn’t need to be convinced of the Internet’s importance to the future of his university. As the new dean of the Graduate School of Management and Public Policy at the New School University in New York, he seems primed to capitalize on it. Blakely’s school was among the first to […]

The Bush presidency has already been a nauseating roller coaster ride for environmentalists. “There was tremendous disappointment once it became clear that George W. Bush would be president,” says a senior attorney at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). “That was followed by a real sense of hope when Christie Todd Whitman came in [as EPA […]