Someday soon, when it can no longer be denied that the Bush administration’s effort to phase out Social Security is dead, the president might call his team into the Oval Office for a postmortem. “What went wrong?” he’ll ask. “I want complete honesty.” (Did I mention that this conversation is fictional?) Fingers will be pointed: […]
Issue: The Reverend, the Dictator & the Newspaper
Posted inColumns
End of the Private New Deal
A ripple of economic anxiety passed through middle America this spring when a bankrupt United Airlines ditched its pension obligations and General Motors announced it would cut 25,000 jobs. That’s capitalism, you may say: Individual companies rise and fall, and America’s prosperity should never be equated with their fortunes. But United’s abandonment of its pensions […]
Posted inFeatures
Dear Leader’s Paper Moon
“[The Reverend Sun Myung] Moon’s speeches foresee an apocalyptic confrontation involving the United States, Russia, China, Japan, and North and South Korea, in which the Moon Organization would play a key role. Under these circumstances, the subcommittee believes it is in the interest of the United States to know what control Moon and his followers […]
Posted inFeatures
Disorder in the Court
On May 12, leading lights of the conservative movement threw a gala banquet at the Capital Hilton in Washington to honor House Majority Leader Tom DeLay in his moment of need. After dessert and a closing invocation by Family Research Council head Tony Perkins, the crowd of almost 800 rose up and began shuffling out […]
Posted inDispatches
Fork in the Road Map
When Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas visited Washington in early June, one might have expected him to be heralded as the poster boy for “freedom’s march” in the Middle East — democratically elected, a reformer, and a recognized man of peace. Yet after the meeting, Palestinian delegation members spoke to me in terms of only a […]
Posted inFeatures
The Chauffeur’s Dilemma
Let’s consider our political moment through a story. Suppose a chauffeur drives a sleek limousine through the streets of New York, a millionaire in the backseat. Through the window, the millionaire spots a homeless woman and her two children huddling in the cold, sharing a loaf of bread. He orders the chauffeur to stop the […]
Posted inFeatures
Pray and Tell
On May 13, 2004, as the world media were in full scrum over Abu Ghraib, an FBI agent who had spent time interviewing terrorism suspects at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, fired off a gloomy e-mail to a colleague. Venting about what had happened in Iraq and expressing his fears that, despite […]
Posted inDispatches
Tune In, Turn On, Fight Back
Public television is under attack from within, undermined by a Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) that is stacked with highly political appointees who think any programming based on “freedom, imagination, and initiative” — the words are from the first section of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 — is inherently liberal. But can they be […]
Posted inDepartments
Dossier: The Stem-Cell Gap
Embryonic stem-cell research may produce a renewable source of tissue transplants and lead to cures for diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson’s … Embryonic stem cells are derived from 4- to 5-day-old blastocysts, clusters of about 150 cells that measure no more than two-tenths of a millimeter … On August 9, 2001, George W. Bush […]
Posted inDispatches
We’re Number 13!
Most Americans blithely assume that they live in the country that’s the world leader in information technologies. Ours is, after all, home to the most recognizable high-tech corporate brands and the land where the Internet’s fundamental architecture was first worked out. As a CIA assessment puts it, we enjoy “the largest and most technologically powerful […]
