Dispatches

Tova Rosenberg (not her real name) lives in Rosh Pina, a little hippie town in the Galilee region of Israel that overlooks the Hula Valley. She is pretty in an unadorned way — her long red hair is cut in a blunt straight style, her glasses are wire and speak to function over form, and […]

One of the most important Supreme Court rulings of the last few years was not about church-state issues, affirmative action, or even the war on terrorism. It was about real estate — 15 houses located in a forlorn part of southeastern Connecticut called New London. On its face, the case, Kelo v. New London, which […]

It takes a unique sort of administration to decide that the reason its almost three-year-old war shows no signs of concluding successfully is that the president hasn’t given enough speeches yet. But on the morning of November 30, the commander-in-chief was trotted out to do just that before an audience of midshipmen at the U.S. […]

In a year marked by Democrats’ increasingly audacious push-back against Republicans, one move stood out for its legislative moxie and for the very public defeat it dealt the president. Nine days after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf, George W. Bush suspended the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act, a law Republicans have wanted to do away with for […]

They may be a bit rusty at winning presidential elections, but Democrats haven’t lost an ounce of their storied devotion to mucking with party procedures. On December 10, assorted party bigwigs assembled in a cavernous ballroom at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill for the fifth and final meeting of the Democratic National Committee’s […]

This February in North Carolina, George W. Bush told a giddy crowd, “I’m here to talk about an issue that is going to be an interesting experience in dealing with the Congress [laughter]. And that is Social Security — formerly known as the third rail of American politics [laughter]. That meant, if you touched it, […]

Over several days this fall, an estimated 1,500 sub-Saharan Africans tried to enter Europe by scaling the wire fences that separate the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla from the rest of Morocco. In the midst of this attempt, on September 29, Morocco’s prime minister, Driss Jettou, signaled in talks with Spain’s president, José Luis […]

It’s not exactly rare to see the blogosphere in an uproar. But the recent row between supporters of Paul Hackett and backers of Representative Sherrod Brown, who are vying for the Democratic nomination for senator from Ohio, was a bit odder than most. In this fight, the “netroots,” the term for the blogosphere and the […]

Melanie Sloan is at a loss. “I would never have thought that the Democrats would be so … I just need more words for ‘spineless.’ I don’t have enough,” she says. “She turns around and grabs a thesaurus from her desk. “‘Wimpy,’” she reads, “‘irresolute,’ ‘chicken,’ ‘weak-willed,’ ‘timid,’ ‘lily-livered’ — I like that one — […]

If Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee get their way, the United States may soon have a law that could permit state-sanctioned murder. Sound improbable? Naturally the bill’s chief sponsor, John Kyl of Arizona, doesn’t say his measure would do that. He’s given the bill a genial moniker — the Streamlined Procedures Act — and […]