June 2005

"THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that Saddam Hussein was connected in any way to al Qaeda."

FEW PEOPLE have been more critical of the Iraq war than Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat from West Virginia.

Money is like water down the side of the mountain. It will find a way to get around the trees. --Ralph Reed IT WAS JUNE 4, a Saturday, a little after 9 A.M., at the Golden Corral restaurant in Lawrenceville, Georgia, about 20 miles north of downtown Atlanta, and Phyllys Ransom--red hair, white…

AS THE NEW YORK TIMES reported recently, psychiatric epidemiologists from the Harvard Medical School have published studies purporting to demonstrate that some 55 percent of Americans suffer from mental illness in their lifetime. These studies--which cost $20 million, most of it out of the…

PEOPLE OFTEN USE THE WORD "culture" as a synonym for "cuisine." When they claim to adore the "diverse and vibrant culture" of the city they live in, what they're actually trying to say, nine times out of ten, is that they like kung pao chicken. Those of us who grew up in Massachusetts often hear…

BY NOW, RALPH NEAS, head of the liberal group People for the American Way (PFAW), must be used to hyperbolic appraisals of his influence from both friend and foe. The "101st senator," Ted Kennedy once called him on the Senate floor. "When it comes to judicial nominations," opined the conservative…

WHAT LOOKS LIKE A HUMILIATING finale to the Corcoran Gallery of Art's quest for a new wing designed by Frank Gehry has shaken the museum, one of the nation's oldest, to its roots. It is once again wracked by the same sort of institutional self-doubt that afflicted it after it buckled under pressure…

The Pastures of Beyond

THE TONY AWARDS, ALAS, are becoming less tony by the year. Meant to celebrate (however questionably) the best in Broadway theater, they are resorting to ever more desperate stratagems to, as they believe, tailor their TV show to higher ratings, i.e., peddle it to what used to be called the great…

Good Mormon, Romney?

THE QUESTION ASKED OF THE president by a British reporter sounded like a setup, aimed at getting Bush to dismiss Bono and reject the U2 singer's pleas for aid to poor, debt-laden countries as mere "rhetoric from rock stars." And, at first, Bush seemed to take the bait. "Part of this world," he…

GOVERNMENT HEALTH-CARE ENTHUSIASTS in the United States have long looked to Canada as a leading light of health care fairness and equity. From a distance, Canada may seem to have it all: modern medicine and universal insurance. Up close, the story is quite different. On June 9, the Supreme Court of…

NO ONE EVER THOUGHT IT would be easy to conquer the outposts of tyranny or to destroy the sponsors of terror. But it shouldn't be that hard, most of the time, to hold American foreign policy to some minimum standards: no rewards for gross acts of dictatorial oppression; no blind eye to facilitation…

What Stalin Knew

Bulawayo, Zimbabwe

Books in Brief

Brown Shoe Leather

FEDERAL RESERVE CHAIRMAN Alan Greenspan teamed up with Treasury Secretary John Snow to urge calm when they went before a Senate committee last week. Once again, politicians and policy wonks are up in arms about a foreign takeover of an American company, in this case the attempted acquisition of…

Portland, May 26, 10:00 p.m.

FORMER NEW YORK GOVERNOR Mario Cuomo is one slick fella. Like all effective propagandists, he's smooth, articulate, eloquent--and he doesn't let the facts get in his way. Take for example his most recent polemic in the debate over embryonic stem cell research (ESCR). In "Not on Faith Alone,"…

ON MONDAY, it was argued here that Senator Richard Durbin ought to be censured for his remarks last week, and not just those in which he made the outrageous comparison between interrogation tactics at Guantanamo and the practices of the Nazi, Soviet, and Khmer Rouge regime. On Tuesday, Durbin took…

Warning: THIS IS SPECULATION. Obviously, I think it's somewhat well-informed speculation, or else I wouldn't be writing this. But it is speculation.

TO UNDERSTAND the San Francisco Bay area one needs to appreciate its assorted love-hate relationships. That would include Barry Bonds (love the swing, hate the attitude), the landmark bridges (love the vistas, hate the tolls), and Silicon Valley (love the technology, hate the MBAs' self-absorption).

THE LEADERSHIP of California's largest public labor unions declared a crisis last week--and it had nothing to do with outsourcing, Enron, WorldCom, the minimum wage, healthcare, or any of the other causes that usually whip union bosses into frenzy. Instead, the controversy surrounds an initiative…

THE BUSH ECONOMIC TEAM SAYS IT IS WORRIED. Its key players fret that life has gotten difficult for Americans with incomes below the middle level of around $45,000 per year. High gasoline prices are hitting the wallets of workers who must use their cars to get to work and the pocketbooks of moms who…

THE G8 SUMMIT IN GLENEAGLES, Scotland, which begins July 6, should be a slightly excruciating affair. While the American economy is chugging along, Europe's growth is largely confined to its unemployment figures. Russia's Vladimir Putin will be aware that his autocratic style of government in…

AS LEAKED GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS GO, the "Downing Street Memo" is pretty sexy. Not actually a memo but the official notes of a July 23, 2002, meeting in the British prime minister's office, the document reproduces the thoughts and concerns about Iraq of Tony Blair and his key advisers, including his…

Why Birds Sing

Open Secrets / Inward Prospects

Roanoke, Virginia

Grading John Kerry

SAY WHAT YOU WILL, there is a kind of exquisite irony about the record-breaking show of "Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre" at Washington's National Gallery having Time Warner as its corporate sponsor. The more than 340 works created primarily by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec include not merely…

Mormon President?

I USED TO BE PERFECTLY confident I knew what the end of Western civilization would look like. It was obvious to me that celebrity-gossip magazines such as People, Us Weekly, In Touch, and Star offered a glimpse into the cultural abyss.

Sarajevo

Books in Brief

True Story

AS THE DUST SETTLES after the explosive referenda at the heart of the European Union, interested parties from all sides are peering nervously into the crater, trying to figure out what remains of the European "project." E.U. heads of government will meet next weekend to map an immediate route out…

FATHER'S DAY NO LONGER ARRIVES without the national media highlighting Mr. Moms. The year before last, for example, Lisa Belkin of the New York Times described the life of one Michael Zorek, whose only job was taking care of his 14-month-old son Jeremy. Zorek, whose wife brought home a good salary…

WHO'S WINNING IN WASHINGTON RIGHT now? Republicans, President Bush included. But they are winning ugly, and just barely. Actually, if success on Social Security reform is the yardstick, Republicans aren't winning at all. What changes the score is success on judges. Thanks to the Gang of 14 deal to…

CONSERVATIVES (and, one trusts, many liberals) have been appalled by Sen. Durbin's comparison last Tuesday, on the Senate floor, between "what Americans had done to prisoners in their control" at Guantanamo and what was done by Nazis, Soviets, and Pol Pot. Conservatives (and, one trusts, many…

SENATE MAJORITY LEADER BILL FRIST and Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter should move this week to initiate a censure resolution of Illinois Senator Dick Durbin for his remarks on the Senate's floor on June 14, 2005. Not only did Durbin's remarks injure America's position in the world, provide an…

STUDENTS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE missed an unusual opportunity to contribute to public understanding of current events in connection with the announcement of the compromise agreement on the filibuster reached by the bipartisan group of 14 senators on May 23. In his role as the cornpone…

"DORIS? She's the one who's always reading War and Peace. That's how I know it's the summer, when Doris is reading War and Peace." Like Doris Klugman in Goodbye Columbus, Oprah Winfrey thinks summer is a fine time for heavy reading. Not long ago, of course, Oprah's name was synonymous with…

TO UNDERSTAND WHY President Bush is relatively unpopular, one only has to look to the case of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California. After his election in November 2003, Schwarzenegger experienced a political honeymoon. He governed mostly by compromise and without pushing for sweeping change.…

IN A FEW DAYS Condoleezza Rice will visit the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. She will not be the first woman secretary of State to visit the territory of Wahhabism, the extremist state religion imposed on the people of historic Arabia. Madeleine Albright preceded Secretary Rice. But of course U.S.-Saudi…

I RETURNED FROM A TRIP to Israel last week, at the beginning of what promises to be one of the most wrenching seasons in the country's history. The "disengagement" (the tolerable if imprecise and probably misleading term used to describe the Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip, now scheduled for…

THE LOS ANGELES WEEKLY'S "The New Blacklist" is author Douglas Ireland's attempt to equate consumer boycotts of gay-themed entertainment sponsors with McCarthyism.

DID LAST WEEK'S Blair-Bush aid commitment "do enough" for Africa? The question posed by media commentators, is answered by campaigners, notably rock stars like Bono, in the negative. And they may be right, but for entirely the wrong reasons. For while humanitarian assistance undoubtedly saves lives…

BY MY ROUGH COUNT, there are 13 procedural crime shows on network television right now; they represent the only significant dramatic challenge to the plague of reality television that has descended on our landscape. Consider that the four networks have 77 hours of primetime space to fill every week…

WELL, we have now heard from all the players in the Eurodrama. The French are angry with the Brits for canceling--oops--postponing their referendum on the constitution. It seems that it is not the French "non" but the British postponement that has put paid to this adventure in superstatism. The…

DURING THE MOST RECENT PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN, various antagonists repeatedly urged John Kerry to sign a Standard Form 180; by signing Form 180, Kerry would have released the entirety of his military records for public consumption. The senator stubbornly refused these pleas. (Actually he "stubbornly…

LOOKING AROUND THEM, AMERICANS see a relentlessly individualistic brand of Christianity. Members of informal Protestant sects in growing exurbs shop for their megachurch of choice to listen to preachers often certified by mail. And many Christians belonging to mainstream churches adopt the…

"It's an absurd allegation," said President Bush. Vice President Cheney said he was "offended by it." Donald Rumsfeld said the charge was "reprehensible." And Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Richard B. Myers called it "absolutely irresponsible."

Another Anti-Bush Factoid Bites the Dust

EXTRAVAGANCE OF LANGUAGE, SWELLING sometimes to full-throated verbal hysteria, is a defining quality of today's politics. Even so, we confess to being surprised at the cascades of abuse that have recently fallen about the ears of Kenneth Tomlinson, the chairman of the Corporation for Public…

Ripping on Galloway

AN ORGANIZATION THAT NORMALLY WELCOMES press coverage of its bustling worksites and sweating volunteers, Habitat for Humanity has spent recent months in the awkward role of media target. News reports have tracked every move in a seedy executive-suite scandal that led to the January firing of the…

Guadeloupe

An Intelligent Person's Guide to Genetics

IN SPRING THE WORLD FILLS up with exhibitionists. All the flowers come up with colors they think bees will have to notice, and young people appear in class plays and dance recitals and get strange haircuts, all by way of saying, "Look at me! Look at me!" (Or, in this multicultural age, "Mira,…

MY MOTHER, ROSA MILLER Barnes, was the Billy Graham of our family. With my dad's help, she converted all of us to orthodox Christianity. Her approach was not to deliver a sermon or drag everyone off to church or insist we read a religious book or tract. It wasn't that she was shy about discussing…

The World Is Flat

FRIEDBERT PFLÜGER COULD BARELY CONTAIN himself. It was last April when I asked the foreign policy spokesman for Germany's Christian Democratic/Christian Social Union opposition alliance about elections taking place the following month in North Rhine-Westphalia. "The Social Democrats have governed…

Books in Brief

IT'S PAYBACK TIME IN WASHINGTON. Britain's prime minister, Tony Blair, is coming to town to discuss the state of the world with President Bush: His steadfast support of Bush and America in Iraq entitles him to more than a friendly photo-op. Blair paid a heavy price at the polls for that support,…

SINCE MAY 27, THE Saudis have arrested eight Christians from India and seized documents naming others. One of those arrested, Chittirical John Thomas, was pulled away from work and beaten in front of his five-year-old son. He is reportedly in the Shemaissy Detention Center.

WHEN HOLLY BURKHALTER IS NOT working, she often unwinds by taking her dog over to Congressional Cemetery in southeast Washington, D.C., and letting the German shepherd roam around the historic graveyard. Burkhalter is the chief lobbyist for Physicians for Human Rights and a member of the Council on…

WHEN THE RUSSIAN ARMY CHASED Napoleon's troops all the way back to Paris in 1814, the occupiers were not just tolerated but welcomed. They were chic. The empress Josephine herself went riding with the young czar. The locals seemed to delight in subjugation, the more undignified, the better. "We…

NO ISSUES have dominated recent political debate more than the fight over President Bush's judicial nominees and the controversy over U.S. treatment of detainees in the war on terrorism. The two issues will merge when the Senate considers the nomination of William James Haynes, general counsel of…

IT'S NOT EASY for Senator John Kerry these days. Having failed to capture the White House and facing the likely prospect of getting steamrolled by Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nod, Kerry has been doing all he can to stay on the national radar screen. His latest tactic, on…

THE NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE'S long march to irrelevance continues apace. Last week, cable-sports king ESPN broke off negotiations with NHL execs and said it will move to schedule alternate programming for next season. This came just days after the network announced it would not exercise its…

HERE ARE A FEW THOUGHTS to ponder regarding Germany's descent into political kaos:

THERE ARE THREE MEDIA ANALYSTS who command wide readership and deserve their influence--Jay Rosen of NYU, who writes PressThink, Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine and now the New York Times, and Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post.

ON TUESDAY, June 7, Sen. Arlen Specter took an action that may substantially improve the difficult--some might say despicable--state of U.S.-Saudi relations. Specter dropped the Saudi Arabia Accountability Act of 2005 into the hopper; the text was designated Senate bill 1171. Its cosponsors, so…

BY CHANCE, the same day that Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith was released in theaters across the country, the world learned of the Bush administration's plans to weaponize space. So while critics speculated about the parallels between the Evil Empire and the Bush administration, pundits debated the…

THE FIRST SALVOS have been fired in a trade war that is unlike any other. Not that all has been peace and quiet on the trade front until now. Opposition to the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) by America's inefficient but politically potent sugar beet producers and apparel makers has…

WHEN NEWSWEEK REPORTED that a Guantanamo Bay guard had flushed a detainee's Koran down a toilet, the Muslim world erupted in protests, some of which turned violent. Newsweek later retracted the story. More significantly, so did the detainee who made the original allegation--a fact that went largely…

IN THE FACE OF AN arrogant, out-of-touch, debate-stifling old regime, a whiff of democracy can be liberating. And not just in the Middle East.

NEWSWEEK recently published its ranking of the nation's "100 Best" public high schools. Unlike, say, U.S. News & World Report's rankings of law schools, which can be read as a kind of Michelin Guide for aspiring lawyers, the Newsweek list offers no such concrete consumer service. It may feed the…

Seoul

Icarus in the Boardroom

American Prometheus

YOU REMEMBER, OR PERHAPS you don't, Sen. Orrin Hatch's 2000 presidential campaign. The senator talks about it in soft inflections, recalling this event and that debate. But especially he talks about what motivated him to run. Hatch, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, cites…

CINDERELLA MAN is the sort of movie Hollywood gave up on long ago. It's a sentimental period piece about working-class folk who speak in dese-dem-dose accents--a mother who takes in sewing, a father who works down by the docks, and three kids who fear being sent away because there's not enough…

Reaganomics

IN WASHINGTON, POLITICAL TYPES speak of good weeks and bad weeks, the good weeks being those in which your side comes out ahead. Then there are weeks--this is rare--when confusion reigns, because no one is quite sure who has won and who has lost.

"SPANISH POLITICAL ADS KICK off Bloomberg TV campaign" was the New York Daily News headline the other day discussing the early opening of New York City's mayoral campaign. The headline brought back childhood memories of New York's Lower East Side when a politician who didn't speak some foreign…

I'VE READ THAT SOMETHING LIKE 80 percent of the people eligible for rebates on purchases of new appliances, computers, even automobiles, faced with the irritating paperwork involved in collecting the money, adapt what are supposed to have been W.C. Fields's deathbed words and say, On second…

THE "O.C." of The O.C. doesn't stand for "Orange County," the supposed setting of this Newport Beach-based prime-time soap that's a cross between Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210, although many of the fan websites that have sprung up to track the doings of its many characters seem to think so.

The Scrapbook's Decline and Pratfall

LAST MONTH A GROUP OF Arab intellectuals released their third report in an unprecedented study of the many failures--economic, social, and political--that plague the world's Arab states. The latest report, "Towards Freedom in the Arab World," endorses democracy and laments the "acute deficit of…

IN EARLY MAY, San Francisco was chosen as the headquarters city for California's new stem-cell research endeavor (officially: the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine). The winning bid included 10 years' worth of free office space across the street from SBC Park, home of the San Francisco…

WHEN THE HARVARD-YALE FOOTBALL GAME was played in Cambridge last fall, Yale students pulled off one of the great college pranks of all time. During the game a fake Harvard pep squad wearing red and white face paint distributed 1,800 pieces of construction paper on seats covering the Harvard side of…

SO, what books to buy to take to the beach? Two suggestions, both thrillers, and both with great additional merit beyond their page turning plots.

WHEN LYNDON JOHNSON made the historic appointment of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court in 1967, all was not sweetness and light. The honorable gentleman who had formerly served as Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan--West Virginia's Robert Byrd--believed that Marshall was too liberal and asked FBI…