Dispatches

“City and state, please?” For a moment I think the voice at the other end of the phone belongs to a telephone operator, but I’ve been conned: I’m talking to a piece of voice-recognition technology. Over the course of the last two decades, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) has seen the loss of thousands […]

Richard Clarke, the former National Security Council counterterrorism chief whose book criticizing the Bush administration — and the White House’s ferocious counterattack — briefly dominated public debate in summer 2004, doesn’t seem to have enjoyed the experience. At a lunch in Washington organized by Steve Clemons, director of the New America Foundation’s foreign-policy program, Clarke […]

Midway through Virginia Lieutenant Governor Tim Kaine’s presentation–cum–slide show, a tour de force on education policy in the state where Democrat Kaine is running for governor in November’s upcoming election, a slide like no other abruptly appears on the screen. It shows mestizo peasant children in a barren room clustering around some young Yanqui — […]

The story of Kenneth Tomlinson’s efforts to impose his right-tilting version of “balance” on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) has incited national controversy. But while that tale is well-known, Tomlinson’s malign influence on another respected media institution, the Voice of America (VOA), has received far less attention. What’s happened at the VOA — which […]

Outside the National Press Club on the morning of August 3, the Washington summer was as hot and oppressive as ever. But inside, Warren Rudman and Lee Hamilton, two grizzled veterans of the national-security world, called for cool at the launch event for a new group dedicated to ending “the partisan rancor in Washington” on […]

In early March, George W. Bush named his longtime adviser Karen Hughes the administration’s undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. Apparently, it’s a woman’s job: She was the third to be named to that post since September 11. At her confirmation hearing, she spoke in familiar terms about the daunting task of […]

Mohammed, a 36-year-old graduate of Baghdad University’s College of Art, says he was examined by an American physician in a detention facility near Baghdad International Airport shortly after being arrested in late 2003. “The doctor said, ‘Maybe you have a bullet wound you are not aware of,’” recalls Mohammed, sitting in a hotel room in […]

On July 6, President George W. Bush celebrated his 59th birthday in Copenhagen with a friend, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. It was an important moment for Bush, and not only because of the Greenland stamp collection he received as a birthday present. He also got a chance to show his appreciation to members […]

The verb “bork” is one of the more tendentious entries in Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary. Webster’s records “bork” as meaning “to seek to obstruct a political appointment or selection; also, to attack a political opponent viciously.” While the first half of the definition is accurate, the second element is but one version of recent history, […]

Most economists expect something bad to happen to the U.S. economy sometime this decade, due to the deficit and debt overhang, the trade imbalance, the dependence on foreign borrowing, the sundry asset bubbles, and more. When the history of the next crash is written, President Bush’s appointment of California Republican Congressman Christopher Cox to chair […]