Dispatches

“Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.” –John Maynard Keynes * * * John Kenneth Galbraith loved words. Above all, he loved words he and others wrote about him. On this, “Galbraith’s First Law” left no confusion: “Modesty is a vastly overrated […]

A “no-consent” medical study of an experimental blood substitute is creating an uproar among researchers and bioethicists. Controversy over the study, which is under way at 31 hospitals across the nation, is pulling back the curtain on similar studies ready to be launched under President Bush’s “war on terrorism” as well as Project Bioshield, an […]

The Bill Clinton of the 2008 election is not, in fact, likely to share his surname. Hillary will probably run, to be sure. But the part Clinton played in 1992 — that of an attractive, technocratic, successful governor from a state normally hostile to his kind and boasting substantive accomplishments on issues his party rarely […]

Silvio Berlusconi was trailing his center-left rival, Romano Prodi, in polls preceding Italy’s general elections on April 9 and 10. So, less than two weeks before the vote, he did what most politicians in such situations do: He moved to shore up the base — his allies in the hard right Italian Northern League. His […]

Manila, The Philippines — For a man who might be jailed at any moment, Harry Roque Jr., appeared very relaxed when I met him in Manila in early March. Dressed in a white barong tagalog — the long, delicately embroidered shirt worn untucked by Philippine men — he welcomed me into his law office, crowded […]

Managua, Nicaragua — Within hours after the left-wing indigenous leader Evo Morales was elected president of Bolivia last December, another outspoken critic of American power in the hemisphere, Daniel Ortega, sent him a message of “revolutionary jubilation.” As the head of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government in the 1980s, Ortega led his country in a war against […]

If the 2004 presidential race taught Democrats any lesson, it’s that all the policy pronouncements in the world, even if delivered by a decorated veteran, are no match for a relentless barrage of early negative ads that poison the well of public opinion and plant false information in the minds of voters. That Republican strategy […]

The Republican two-step on ethics reform has proven an amusing spectacle this season. First come panicked promises of reform from GOP congressional leaders; then come rank-and-file pushback and a hasty public retreat. A typical case presented itself when Speaker Dennis Hastert and House Rules Committee baron David Dreier proposed a blanket ban on all privately […]

Ned Lamont is an unlikely insurgent. The founder of a small cable company that specializes in telecommunications systems for college campuses, Lamont is a wealthy man who speaks with the measured cadence of one who earns his living making deals, not political speeches. Yet the Greenwich businessman has got Connecticut Democrats all wired up: Lamont […]

The atmosphere on the morning of Monday, January 23, was more of a bad dream than a press conference. I was in a small room in the basement of the U.S. Capitol; sitting directly behind me amid the rows of cheap folding chairs was a young man from the National Union for Democracy in Iran, […]