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Earth to Kerry …

When other aspects of the Iraq War have long been forgotten, the images of American soldiers torturing Iraqis in Abu Ghraib prison will still be remembered. No, the soldiers who committed the abuse are not representative of Americans in Iraq, but the torture itself is representative of the perversion of American ideals and collapse of […]

How long is the United States going to be in Iraq? And in whose hands and what shape are we going to leave it? Recent events ought to force us all to re-examine these questions no matter whether we opposed or supported the original invasion. As this magazine goes to press (April 12), U.S. forces […]

More than two decades ago, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Wassily Leontief imagined a world where productivity was so high that machines would produce all physical goods. There would be just one manufacturing job: the human worker who flipped the switch. Leontief wondered, what would everyone else do for a living? His answer was that the […]

Money corrodes democracy in multiple ways. It influences who gets into politics. It allows the wealthy to speak with a louder voice. It compels candidates to spend inordinate time cultivating donors rather than speaking to voters. The money-and-politics dilemma has a partisan aspect as well as a civic one, because the people with the most […]

I. WHAT’S RIGHT WITH THIS PICTURE? LAS VEGAS — In the middle of his life, Sylvester Garcia decided he’d had enough of the cold and the heat. He’d been a welder in the copper-mining towns of New Mexico for almost a quarter of a century, but, he says, “I got tired of welding, […]

It’s no secret that much of the Democratic establishment fears Howard Dean. For months, rumors have abounded that party insiders will mount some kind of last-ditch effort to deny him the nomination he seems ever closer to securing. One natural focus of such speculation has been the 715 “superdelegates,” party mandarins appointed to the Democratic […]

Forget what you learned in Government 101 (or math class for that matter), because in Congress these days, a negative plus a negative equals a positive. And even though R’s control everything, a House “yea” plus a Senate “yea” can still equal a firm “no” when the White House horns in. A quick lesson: Our […]

The hallmark of the Bush foreign policy has been a naive radicalism married to an operational incompetence. A small clique with a preconceived blueprint took advantage of a national emergency and a callow president, blowing a containable threat into war while dismissing more ominous menaces. These people are out to remake the world, with little […]