Dispatches

Hundreds of voters mysteriously “dropped or displaced” from registration rolls when master lists were electronically merged. Absentee ballots invalidated because voters didn’t receive a flier telling them not to remove a security stub. Poll workers who didn’t show up to work on Election Day. Polling places unable to open on time because computer memory cards […]

Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations and veteran of policy circles dating back to the Johnson administration, was an unlikely candidate to surprise the routine world of Washington national-security roundtable discussions. But debating Iraq with Lawrence Korb on July 20 at the Center for American Progress, he did just that. When […]

If you look at the polls and nothing else, it seems almost self-evident that Nancy Pelosi will be wielding the speaker’s gavel come January. Nationally, voters give Democrats a 10-point edge over Republicans in their congressional preferences. Another survey, of 50 swing House districts conducted for National Public Radio, found Democrats leading in the 10 […]

The size of the trade deficit with China is one of the hottest potatoes in American economic policy these days. It is about to get a little hotter, thanks to Beijing’s highly provocative, if hitherto largely overlooked, controls on outbound tourism. In theory the United States should be a major beneficiary — perhaps the major […]

What would happen if the United Nations ran out of money? Will unpaid translators show up to work at the Security Council? Will Con Edison simply turn the lights off at First Avenue and 42nd Street? More importantly: Will peacekeeping troops across the globe have to pack up and go home? We may soon find […]

Larry Berman didn’t really believe that a journal article he was writing in 2004 would break much new ground in telling the story of Lyndon B. Johnson and his conduct of the Vietnam War. Berman, a political science professor at the University of California at Davis, already had published two books on presidential decision making […]

On April 3, at an unpublicized strategy meeting, Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack assembled AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, AFSCME president Gerry McEntee, and several other senior labor leaders with officials of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), including Clinton administration veteran and DLC president Bruce Reed. Vilsack, the current DLC chairman, encouraged the two factions to stop […]

When Nick Schwellenbach went down to the House of Representatives’ legislative resource center in May to look into the widening Duke Cunningham corruption probe, he noticed a couple of other visitors at a neighboring table — a man and a woman, both crisply dressed, who were getting attentive service from the office staff. As the […]

In early April, after weeks of massive student demonstrations, the French government backed down and withdrew its proposed changes in national labor law. Under French law, workers are protected from arbitrary firings by a system that requires employers to justify dismissals. The government, most notably Prime Minister Dominque de Villepin, wanted to allow employers the […]

Cairo, Egypt — The view from the 26th floor of Nawal el Saadawi’s apartment in Shoubra Gardens, a working-class neighborhood in east Cairo, may once have been spectacular. But as I sit in a rattan chair in Saadawi’s sunroom, enjoying a cool breeze and a view of the nearby Nile through the haze of a […]