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The Politics of Definition, Part II

Editor’s Note: This is the second installment of this important paper, which describes the precise nature of the dilemma faced by progressives and Democrats today and offers new solutions for the way forward. In Part I, posted last week, the authors described the basic problem facing progressives and the Democratic Party — the “identity gap” […]

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Breakfast with Dr. Dean

On Wednesday, April 12, we held our third Prospect breakfast, this one featuring Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean. Journalists in attendance included Michael Tomasky and Mark Leon Goldberg from The American Prospect; Jane Mayer, The New Yorker; James Fallows and Josh Green, The Atlantic; Thomas Edsall, The Washington Post; Ari Berman, The Nation; Walter […]

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The Tchotchke Economy

As Congress grapples with immigration policy, most experts agree that wide-open immigration slightly depresses wages, especially among unskilled workers. But the main reason for static wages has more do with policies made in the United States. Immigrants, coming from destitution at home, will work for less than American wages. And, if they are here illegally, […]

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Kash on Immigration

This is basically what I was trying to say in my post below, though I wasn’t addressing the question of skills: Is it better to allow a doctor from Nigeria to come to the US and increase his standard of living from being relatively well-off in Nigeria to being relatively well-off in the US, instead […]

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Consternation Over Immigration

Congress is belatedly grappling with immigration reform. There is no more difficult dilemma, both in terms of the politics and the need to balance contradictory policy objectives. The heightened concern with terrorism only complicates the job. America today is failing to control its borders. Most estimates place the number of immigrants here illegally at around […]

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So You Say You Want a Deevolution?

In 1994, Newt Gingrich became that rarest of creatures: a successful revolutionary. That’s when his decades-long emasculation of the Democratic majority finally broke them — as he always knew it would – and the Republicans, with Gingrich at their helm, retook the House for the first time in 40 years. Then, in 1998, he entered […]

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Edifying

You can learn a lot of what you need to know about the Bush administration by reading this AP headline: Bush to Take Unscripted Audience Questions That that’s even news is a modern civics education in and of itself. That the headline doesn’t include the words “timid” and “finally” offers a side lesson in media […]

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Remapping the Culture Debate

Ted Nordhaus, a self-proclaimed “recovering pollster,” and Michael Shellenberger, a former San Francisco public relations executive, began quietly sending out e-mails in the spring of 2005. Love your work, they’d write people they thought would be like-minded. We should meet. The duo had created a minor stir that fall with the essay “The Death of […]

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Great Expectations

By 30 minutes and several days, Barack Obama is running late. He is supposed to be at his grandmother’s in Hawaii — his wife and daughters already are there — but the Senate is still voting on some fairly significant legislation. So here he is, stuck in Washington nine days before Christmas. Illinois’ junior senator […]

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So…No On “Operation: Sugar Mama”?

From Tierney’s column: A woman’s earning power, while hardly the first thing that men look for, has become a bigger draw, as shown in surveys of college students over the decades. In 1996, for the first time, college men rated a potential mate’s financial prospects as more important than her skills as a cook or […]

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