During George W. Bush’s first term and especially after his re-election, Washington settled on a conventional wisdom about his presidency: Bush may be prone to dangerous policy blunders, but his political instinct is unerring. The unpleasant predicament in which the White House finds itself on its signature second-term domestic-policy initiative — revising Social Security by […]
Dispatches
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Blocked Out
Here’s one way to sound the alarm about the impending death of a federal program that tens of millions benefit from and almost no one has heard of: Accuse President Bush of copycatting al-Qaeda. At a February meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, National League of Cities, and National Association of Counties, Baltimore Mayor […]
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Labor Intense
LAS VEGAS — “I think John Sweeney’s administration is rhetorically prepared to embrace any and all proposals for change to stay in power,” one of American labor’s dissident leaders told me in January. “If John Sweeney is re-elected, he’s out of gas. Nothing is going to change over there” at the AFL-CIO, and American labor’s, […]
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Must Joe Go?
Joe Lieberman has a secret: He’s a pretty orthodox Democrat. In the spring of 2001, when 12 of the party’s senators — almost one-quarter of the caucus — voted for the first round of Bush tax cuts, Lieberman voted against them. The liberal group Americans for Democratic Action gave Lieberman’s 2003 voting record a “liberal […]
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That Other Forum
PORTO ALEGRE, BRAZIL — What do Bill Gates, Tony Blair, and Sharon Stone have in common? All spent the last week of January hanging out in Davos, the exclusive Swiss resort town that for the last three decades has been home to the World Economic Forum, where the world’s elite business, financial, and political leaders […]
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A Temporary Fix
With the White House and congressional conservatives ramping up to make the coming four years as memorable as the last, it is easy to miss some of their less conspicuous exploits. Many of those have taken place at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which has issued multiple decisions that are costing millions of Americans […]
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A Listless Party
Like other journalists, I first heard of the Democratic Senate opposition agenda, proposed by Minority Leader Harry Reid in late January, by e-mail — specifically, an e-mail that came from Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Ken Mehlman. The correspondence sarcastically noted that “[t]he ten-point plan Sen. Reid presented today may be called the American ‘promise,’ […]
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Squeeze Time
All budgets have got to be based on priorities,” George W. Bush said on February 8, “and mine are clear.” He wasn’t lying. The president’s $2.57 trillion budget proposal for fiscal year 2006 calls for a 16-percent cut in all non–homeland domestic discretionary spending — which includes most education, housing, environmental-protection, and research programs — […]
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Man-Made Disasters
BANGKOK, THAILAND — On December 26, when the tsunamis struck Asia, I was in Thailand. Like nearly everyone in Bangkok, I turned to any television I could find. The local Thai channels captured the breadth of the devastation, showing grim photos of southern beaches that looked like someone had swept away all the vegetation and […]
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Breach of Faith
At the Muslim Al-Noor school in Brooklyn, New York, all girls wear the hijab. Heads covered with white cloth scarves fill the classrooms, and long blue or green robes hide any Western-style clothing worn underneath. A few are modest beyond what’s mandatory, wearing chador-style coverings that expose only the eyes, but the robes and headscarves […]
