American Prospect, The

Correspondence

On the domestic front: an America where Social security guarantees the quality of life for older Americans; where a rational system of health care assures security in times of illness and the prevention of illness; where the American way of life is secured from outrageous oil prices by a combination of rational energy conservation and regulation of the oil oligarchs; where the environment is secured for our children; where no child is left without the security of a real education; and where n...

The Question: Tom Delay has Resigned His House Seat! Any New Career Advice?

Time and Again and Again ...

Out of Africa

Parody

The industry-funded Competitive EntarpriM Institute recently aired TV ads on global warming.

Solidarity Man

ON APRIL 3, AT AN UNPUBLICIZED strategy meeting, Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack assembled AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, AFSCME president Gerry McEntee, and several other senior labor leaders with officials of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), including Clinton administration veteran and DLC president Bruce Reed. In fact, Vilsack, 55, has been a popular and highly effective Democratic governor in a state that teeters between the parties at the presidential level, with one conservative Rep...

Cash-and-Parry

The practice held for nearly 20 years, until April 28, when South Africa, on behalf of the developing world and China, forced a resolution to stall a series of management and budget reforms championed by the U.N.'s main donors. [...] the developing world vigorously opposed key personnel and budget reforms that would have transferred authority to the Office of the Secretary General and away from the General Assembly.

Men Overboard

A related argument is the claim that the use of litigation has made pro-choice groups lazy and complacent about reproductive freedom, and that returning abortion to the legislatures would mobilize pro-choice voters and toughen the movement. Recent legal and political science scholarship has convincingly rebutted assumptions that litigation and other forms of political activism exist in a zero-sum struggle for resources; in fact, one often positively builds on the other.

$1.27 Trillion: The Price Is Wrong

Nor do they cover the costs of medical treatment for those seriously injured in the war, or even such basic war-related costs as the replacement of equipment and munitions expended in the conflict or the need to transport soldiers back to their home bases when they rotate out of country. Eliminating unneeded weapons systems like the F/A-22 Raptor plane, the Virginia Class submarine, the DD(X) destroyer, and the V-22 Osprey helicopter could generate more than enough funds to finance needed in...

Up Front

Under the Rug

THE U.S. MILITARY SAYS IT'S CONDUCTING A THOROUGH investigation of the alleged November 2005 massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha.

Wacky in, Wacky Out

Prospects

What's the Matter with Class?

Two years ago, writing in the Prospect, Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels reported that voters of all classes supported repeal of the estate tax, which affected only the richest 2 percent Even moderate-income voters who deplored rising inequality and supported activist government favored repeal by 2-to-1.

The Out Years

It Takes a Movement

IN "REVISITING THE Montana Miracle," a short paper circulated last year, Terry Kendrick and Judy Smith, long-time activists in Montana women's groups, point out that Schweitzer chose a Republican state senator as his running mate "in an effort to take the political parties out of the campaign." A second memo, "An Analysis of the Montana Miracle," by political consultant and labor organizer Don Judge, shows that Democratic success in legislative races did not come on Schweitzer's coattails.

Dispatches

Watching the Detectives

Interviews with colleagues and associates of Wilkes, and his childhood best friend, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who recently resigned as executive director of the CIA when he was reported to be the subject of a federal corruption investigation, have illuminated the friendships and favors now bringing members of the southern California GOP delegation under intense scrutiny by the Justice Department's public integrity division.

Culture & Books

Chicken Wing

During hearings held to determine whether Bartlett had lied about his health during the campaign, Representative Darren Gibson, a Republican member of the Judiciary Committee, was set to reveal that McGarry suffered a relapse into alcoholism only moments before a presidential debate. If Joe Klein characterized Bill Clinton in Primary Colors as so talented that the universe seemed unwilling to let events drive him from politics, The West Wing made Vinick so good that the world refused to abet...

All the President's Pets

Outside The Boston Globe-whose Walter Robinson did yeoman work on discrepancies, omissions, and plain distortions in Bush's accounts-the total number of media accounts that mentioned both his absenteeism and Texas pol's Ben Barnes' acknowledgment that he tried to sneak young Bush into the Guard: two. On National Review Online, Stephen Spruiell thinks he has scored the gotcha of all gotchas with this: "Eric Boehlert would freak out if you were to point out to him how much his book Lapdogs... ...

Report

Hard Labor

The federation of the seven unions that recently left the AFLcio-the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Teamsters, which both left a year ago this July; the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW); the Carpenters (which left years ago); UNITE HERE; the United Farm Workers (UFW); and the Laborers-came to Change to Win's founding convention last September in St. Louis pledging to organize the port truckers and 44 million American workers like them. Tom Woodruff, an SEIU vic...

Appraisal

Is It Good for the Jews?

Israel's Six Day War military victory and the Jewish nationalist passions it stirred just as the U.S.-Israel Cold War alliance was being cemented; the mass campaign for Soviet Jewry and its lynchpin role in U.S.-Soviet relations; and the belated rise of Holocaust awareness (and guilt) in popular culture and its attendant "never again" maxim. During the Rabin period, as Israel flourished diplomatically, the Jewish community started to focus inward, 52 percent assimilation rates supplanted Ara...