H ealth care is back on the political front burner. Not that anyone is talking about a major overhaul, like the ill-fated Clinton plan that banished the issue from polite political discourse for nearly six years. Instead, both George W. Bush and Al Gore are targeting isolated pieces of the health care system: prescription drug […]
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Race to the Goal Line
T he scene looks like the boot camp episode that figures in countless war movies. In the dead quiet of night, young men are rudely roused from their sleep. Ordered to run their hearts out, they slip-slide across treacherous terrain, willing themselves not to collapse since they know that anyone who doesn’t make it will […]
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Bush is a Little Too RANDy
Although Laura Bush’s speech at the GOP convention dealt more with daughters and dolls than politics, Mrs. Bush did make a foray into policy to trumpet her husband’s record on education. “The highly respected nonpartisan RAND study released just last week found that education reforms in Texas have resulted in some of the highest achievement […]
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Fanning the Flames
Asia | Europe and Russia | Middle East and Africa | The Americas International Commentary Column Archive The Middle East The response of a country or a leader to the Israel-Palestine conflict is the barometer of justice used by many Mideast commentators. Adel Darwish, in the MIDEASTNEWS surveys the Arab coverage of the terrorist attacks, […]
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Don’t Look Back
A fter several millennia’s worth of Orpheus-and-Eurydice stories, it stands to reason that Brazilian director Carlos Diegues’s contemporary filmic retelling of the myth, called simply Orfeu, feels like a trip inside a formidable echo chamber. Most distantly, Diegues’s movie rejoins the Orpheus tales of Aeschylus, Virgil, and especially Ovid, whose love-struck, lyre-playing Thracian was a […]
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The Social Recession
The American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty, by David G. Myers. Yale University Press, 414 pages, $29.95. The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, by Robert Edwards Lane. Yale University Press, 465 pages, $35.00. Over the portal of modernity is written Kant’s famous definition: “What is Enlightenment? It is humankind’s emergence from […]
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Solidarity Sometimes
Coalitions across the Class Divide: Lessons from the Labor, Peace, and Environmental Movements, by Fred Rose. Cornell University Press, 253 pages, $17.95. Taking History to Heart: The Power of the Past in Building Social Movements, by James Green. University of Massachusetts Press, 352 pages, $19.95. In May of 1970, hundreds of flag-waving New York City […]
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Difficult Terrain on Three Fronts
As the two-month anniversary of the World Trade Center attack approaches, the Bush administration faces rougher going on three key fronts – domestic politics, economic and homeland security, and the war itself. Politics. Though the commander-in-chief’s personal approval rating remains around 90 percent, Democrats are poised to pick up two governorships, in moderate New Jersey […]
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Rush-Whacked:
On his radio show on Thursday, Rush Limbaugh went ballistic about my recent American Prospect Online article “The Secret War on Tom Daschle.” Apparently the piece really touched a nerve: Limbaugh read most of the article on the air and pronounced it “fascinating” (needless to say, not in a positive sense). Limbaugh interpreted the article […]
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War on Many Fronts
Asia | Europe and Russia | Middle East and Africa | The Americas The World Responds Column Archive Middle East and Africa The PR Campaign Heats Up In the Middle East region, the spin is all the buzz. Or the buzz is all the spin. As public opinion in favor of the Afghan invasion wavers, […]
