Even before Wall Street imploded and the U.S. economy sunk deeper into a nasty recession, Americans were souring on free trade. In recent months, the backlash against globalization has been exacerbated by rising unemployment and a sense of economic crisis. During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama…
Amid our current economic and financial turmoil, Japan's experience during the 1990s looms large in the minds of American policymakers. The 1990s were a "lost decade" for Japan, a period of deflation and widespread economic misery. In just a few short years, Japan went from being the world's model…
BILL EMMOTT, a former editor of the Economist magazine, has written that George W. Bush's "bold initiative" to strengthen U.S. relations with India "may eventually be judged by historians as a move of great strategic importance and imagination." It "may turn out to be the most significant foreign…
Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart, a Cuban-American Republican from the Miami area, puts it bluntly: "We have a very, very serious problem." He is referring to the GOP's lack of support among Hispanics, which could derail the party's future presidential hopes.
April 30 marked the 33rd anniversary of Saigon's fall to the North Vietnamese Communists. The former capital of South Vietnam is now called Ho Chi Minh City, a name that better reflects Vietnam's past than its present and future. As John O'Sullivan has observed, "A Martian landing in Saigon or…
YESTERDAY AFTERNOON, the House of Representatives voted to postpone consideration of the U.S.-Colombia free trade pact, which President Bush sent to Congress earlier this week. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama oppose the Colombia deal on the grounds that Bogotá has not done enough to curb…
SAY THIS FOR Barack Obama's big speech: It is still being analyzed this week, and it will be analyzed more in the weeks and months ahead. Senator Obama went beyond the controversy over his former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and delivered a sweeping address on the recent history of U.S. race…
In January 1959, during the early days of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro declared, "Behind me come others more radical than me." It was a reference to the hardcore Stalinists such as his younger brother, Raúl, and also a warning of what might ensue should Fidel be assassinated. Today, however,…
ACCORDING TO TWO STUDIES cited by Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom in their 1997 book, America in Black and White, the percentage of African Americans with incomes below the poverty line in 1940 was "no fewer than 71 percent" and perhaps as high as 87 percent. By 1966, according to the Census Bureau,…
BARACK OBAMA won't soon be confused with Mitt Romney. But once you peel away their ideological differences, the two candidates have a similar message: Washington is broken, and I can fix it. Romney fancies exactly that language, touting his corporate background and success in righting the 2002 Salt…
NOT SO LONG AGO, Rudy Giuliani was the clear Republican frontrunner among Cuban-American voters in South Florida. When he would arrive in Miami, Cubans treated him like a full-fledged celebrity. "It was like Bono getting off a plane," says Tom Eldon, a Democratic pollster in Florida. "It was like a…
"WHEN REPUBLICANS ACT like Democrats, America loses," Mitt Romney said last night. "You've seen that over the last several years." It was a typical Romney comment, and typical of Thursday's GOP debate, which confirmed much of what we already knew about the top contenders but did not cause any major…
IN 2007, much of America's political oxygen was consumed by the two I-words: Iraq and immigration. If the former was supposed to boost John McCain's GOP primary campaign, the latter was supposed to torpedo it. Not only did the Arizona senator favor a relatively liberal immigration policy, he had…
Medellín, Colombia
UNTIL THIS PAST WEEKEND, John Howard was the great survivor of Australian national politics. In May 1989 he was sacked as leader of the center-right Liberal Party, and quipped that a return to the leadership post would be like "Lazarus with a triple bypass." A few months earlier, a popular Aussie…
HEALTH CARE is often touted as yet another sign of American exceptionalism. While the Canadians and the British provide "universal" care through government-run systems, it is said, the U.S. depends on free markets. In reality, the American health-care market has been heavily distorted by public…
Like many other House Republicans, Wisconsin's Paul Ryan felt deeply torn over the 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill. He was loath to endorse a massive new entitlement program, given the already parlous future of U.S. retirement spending. But Ryan also viewed Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), the…
IS EUROPE DOOMED? Many Americans seem to think so, and the chief reason is demography: European countries have had low fertility rates for decades, and now they face spiraling population decline. By 2050, the European Union's share of the global population is projected to plummet below 10 percent.…
Venezuela's cocksure president, Hugo Chávez, might take a sobering glance through the latest Pew Global Attitudes Survey, conducted this spring and released over the summer. Of the seven Latin American nations polled, large majorities of Chileans (75 percent), Brazilians (74 percent), Peruvians (70…
SEVERAL FORMER CLINTON administration officials--including Bruce Babbitt, Sandy Berger, Henry Cisneros, Richard Feinberg, Dan Glickman, Leon Panetta, Donna Shalala, and Ira Shapiro--have endorsed an open letter to Congressional Democrats urging them to ratify free trade agreements with Latin…
JUNICHIRO KOIZUMI was a tough act to follow. The former Japanese prime minister, who stepped down a year ago this month, swung into office in April 2001 like a wrecking ball, pledging to "destroy" his ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) if it didn't accept free-market reforms and seeking to…
HARKENING BACK to "the early 20th century," Raymond Keating, chief economist for the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council and a New York Newsday columnist, recalls that "sports facilities were once private ventures. Team owners bought the land and privately funded their stadiums. What a…
In June of 1992, right before President George H.W. Bush's scheduled visit, a group of Panamanian thugs ambushed an American Humvee north of Panama City, killing a U.S. soldier. Among the murderers, according to a U.S. indictment, was a man named Pedro Miguel González. Over the weekend, González…
In late July, Cambridge University Press announced it was destroying all its remaining copies of Alms for Jihad, a 2006 book exploring the nexus of Islamic charities and Islamic radicalism. At the same time, Cambridge asked libraries around the world to stop carrying the book on their shelves. The…
Earlier this week, President Bush spoke by phone with Australian Prime Minister John Howard, who has supported the Iraq war more robustly and consistently than any foreign leader save Tony Blair. (Australia dispatched around 2,000 troops for the initial invasion.) In a subsequent radio interview,…
West Harlem
It was a bad week for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, one of America's most important allies. First his party took a "thumping" (as George W. Bush might say) in upper house elections on Sunday, July 29th. Then, a day later, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution urging Tokyo to…
Coral Gables, Florida
Congress seems poised to scuttle a free trade agreement with Colombia--and thus hand Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, the anti-Yanqui gadfly, an unexpected gift. In late June, Democratic House leaders announced that the U.S.-Colombia FTA, signed last November and awaiting congres sional approval,…
IN NOVEMBER 2001, long before the Kelo ruling threw the floodlights on eminent domain abuse, Susan Watson sent a distressed letter to James D. Sinegal, the president and CEO of Costco. She owned several hundred shares in the retail giant--and, as she put it, had been "a loyal customer and ardent…
YOU WOULDN'T KNOW IT from George Bush's dismal approval rating, but 70 percent of Americans still "favor the U.S.-led efforts to fight terrorism." At least that was the finding of a Pew Global Attitudes Survey conducted this spring and released late last month.
Of former Bush officials, Christine Todd Whitman would seem to be the most difficult to cast as a White House puppet. During her tenure as Environmental Protection Agency director from 2001 to 2003, Whitman looked askance at the Bush line on global warming. It became clear early on, says one…
When George Bush dropped by Bogotá during his recent tour of Latin America, he became the first president to visit the Colombian capital since Ronald Reagan in 1982. His brief stopover was mainly symbolic: a sign of the improved security climate and a tribute to Colombian president Alvaro Uribe,…
"YOU SAY that you're a full-scale Ronald Reagan Republican, and yet, as you mentioned, you opposed the troop surge and you support comprehensive immigration reform. Are those the stands that Ronald Reagan would take?" Thus did Fox News debate moderator Chris Wallace put Senator Sam Brownback on the…
The last time a Japanese premier met George Bush in America, ten months ago, he wound up touring Graceland and serenading his host with Elvis numbers. Junichiro Koizumi won't soon be confused with the King, but the "Sayonara Summit" of June 2006 affirmed his status as one of Bush's favorite foreign…
MAXINE WATERS and John Cornyn don't agree on much, but they do agree that government should not be acquiring private property for private economic development via eminent domain. They were both unnerved by the 2005 Supreme Court ruling in Kelo v. City of New London, which gave such takings a…
THIS PAST JANUARY, speaking to the North Atlantic Council, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe laid out an admirable vision for Japanese foreign policy. "We have to elevate democracy in places where it is emerging; consolidate respect for human rights where it is suppressed; and offer hope for a brighter…
Speaking before a joint hearing of two House panels on March 21, Al Gore likened the fight against "the climate crisis" to the battle waged against overwhelming odds by a band of Spartan warriors at Thermopylae in 480 B.C., dramatized in the new movie 300. "This Congress is now the '535,'" said the…
Governor Tom Kean
More encouraging news from a former U.S. enemy. For many years now political reform has lagged woefully behind Vietnam's vaunted "doi moi" agenda of economic liberalization. But in late January, the Vietnamese prime minister met with Pope Benedict, which the Vatican called an "important step…
REPUBLICANS who still can't figure out the Jim Webb phenomenon need only recall the top tier of Democratic presidential candidates in 2004. Each carved out his niche with a signature trait or theme that made party activists swoon and voters cheer. Howard Dean had the Iraq war: Unlike many prominent…
Jerusalem
Jerusalem
The Democratic freshmen in the House are said to be a moderate bunch--by some lights even conservative. It is probably safer to call them economic populists, with a few border hawks, pro-lifers, and gun owners sprinkled here and there. Beyond basic partisanship and amorphous cries for "ethics"…
IT HAS NOT BEEN an especially good decade for the Japanese left. The old Socialist party has splintered. The main opposition party, founded in 1998, has absorbed former members of the right-wing Liberal party. (Its leader is now ex-Liberal boss Ichiro Ozawa, a prominent conservative.) The consensus…
The other day, getting dressed, I reached for a T-shirt to put on, and grabbed one that turned out to be faded and threadbare. Rummaging through my drawers, I noticed it wasn't the only one. My entire stockpile had thinned, and it left me with a pang of nostalgia. Let me explain.
THIS PAST JULY, at an event at the Ronald Reagan Building on Pennsylvania Avenue that amounts to a kind of prom for trade policy wonks, the Washington International Trade Association (WITA) presented its annual Lifetime Achievement Award to outgoing Republican congressman Jim Kolbe of Arizona. That…
BY APPOINTING Florida senator Mel Martinez to chair the Republican National Committee, President Bush sent a blunt message to conservatives: "Drop dead." That's the opinion of Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, who has lobbied hard against Bush's…
FOR A FORMER talk-radio host, Mike Pence sure speaks softly and politely. A three-term Indiana congressman, Pence, 47, describes himself as "a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican--in that order." As head of the conservative Republican Study Committee, he's also become the sentinel of GOP…
After Fidel
SIX STATES VOTED Tuesday on ballot initiatives to raise the minimum wage. All six endorsed those initiatives, mostly by solid or overwhelming majorities. (The states were Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and Ohio.) This news may come as little surprise--boosting the minimum wage always…
THE WORDS "somatic cell nuclear transfer" don't slide gracefully off the tongue. Nor do they trigger a visceral response the way, for example, the word "cloning" does. That helps explain why Missouri's Amendment 2 has prompted so much confusion and bitter acrimony.
St. Louis
Nashville
PACIFISM AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS DON'T MIX. Just look at Japan. In October 1999, when Liberal vice defense minister Shingo Nishimura casually remarked that Tokyo should consider going nuclear, his colleagues nearly choked. Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi rebuked him, as did Liberal party boss Ichiro Ozawa,…
Port St. Lucie, Florida
General James L. Jones, the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, does not soft-pedal the growing troubles in Afghanistan. Drug trafficking, corruption, dodgy police forces, terrorist mayhem--to rattle off the list can be dispiriting. Afghanistan has held two successful national elections since 2004,…
Warwick, Rhode Island
SENATOR JOE BIDEN wants to save Iraq by dividing it--sort of. The speech Biden delivered Wednesday morning to the Council on Foreign Relations elaborated on the "five-point plan" he first laid out in a New York Times op-ed (co-written with CFR president emeritus Leslie Gelb) last May. Biden spoke…
North Hills, New York
WHETHER FIDEL CASTRO is sick, dead, or almost dead, the post-Fidel era has already begun, just in time for his 80th birthday on August 13. And while they may be honking horns and dancing in the streets of Miami, a sober look at Cuba suggests keeping the champagne on ice. Havana does not yet…
Lakewood, New Jersey
LAST SUMMER, in the case of Kelo v. New London, a bitterly divided U.S. Supreme Court upheld (and slightly expanded) the constitutionality of local governments' seizing private property for economic development via the "takings power" of eminent domain. But in his majority opinion, Justice John…
IT LACKED THE SCALE and profile of Tiananmen Square, but was no less brutal. In the early morning hours of July 13, 1994, Cuban fireboats rammed and attacked a rickety tugboat ferrying more than 70 would-be defectors away from the Port of Havana. Using water cannons, Fidel Castro's ships quickly…
IN JUNE 2001, as he flew to his first visit with George W. Bush, newly elected Japanese premier Junichiro Koizumi called himself "a diehard pro-American from long before." It was "fate," he told reporters, that his maiden foreign trip as prime minister was to the United States. He soon built a…
FORGIVE JAPANESE PRIME MINISTER Junichiro Koizumi if he seems at all impatient during his White House dinner tonight. The toasts and backslapping with George Bush may provide an ego boost, but tomorrow the real fun begins, when the president accompanies Koizumi on a tour of Graceland. That might be…
Norwood, Ohio
MAYBE THE HYPE WAS INEVITABLE. When HBO aired the final episode of Sex and the City two years ago, the network lost its chief serial attraction to the coveted 18-34 demographic. Sex and the City was a Beautiful People show, glamorizing a Cosmo-drenched lifestyle of chic clubs and eateries and…
BESIDES BOASTING ONE OF THE great names in American history, Hawaii's Queen Liliuokalani holds a unique distinction. She is the only foreign monarch to have been deposed with the apparent help of U.S. armed forces and then asked to resume her throne by a compunctious U.S. president (Grover…
FOR NEARLY AS LONG as Hawaii has been a state, its most famous pop culture icon has been the organ-playing singer Don Ho. Born in Honolulu in 1930, Ho claims Hawaiian, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, and German ancestry. Few figures better epitomize the Aloha State's proud history of ethnic…
AMERICA'S IMMIGRATION DEBATE is fraught with demagoguery and suspect analogies. Witness Rep. James Sensenbrenner's recent description of employers who exploit illegal immigrant labor as "21st-century slave masters."
Annapolis, Maryland
AMIDST ALL THE WRANGLING over our troubles in Iraq, on one point there is surprising consensus: Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the pro-democracy Shiite leader, has been an indispensable anchor for Iraq's fissiparous political system. In March of 2005, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman went…
"EVER SINCE THOSE CARTOONS in Denmark, the rules have changed. Nobody shows an image of Muhammad anymore." When a character on the animated TV show South Park made that avowal a few weeks ago, he could easily have been speaking for media outlets across Europe and North America. This past winter's…
Newark
IN NOVEMBER OF 1999, when he was first running for the White House, then-Texas governor George W. Bush famously flubbed a Boston TV reporter's challenge to name Pakistan's military chief, who had seized power in a bloodless coup just weeks earlier. "The new Pakistani general," Bush stammered. "I…
LEST I RUN AFOUL of the munificent and trusting folks over at HBO, I won't tell you what happens in the first four episodes of The Sopranos, whose sixth (and probably final) season premieres this Sunday at 9:00 p.m. Believe me, I wish I could; but like Tony, I took an oath. So I'll just paint with…
Coral Gables
"Night of shame stuns England," read the headline in London's Daily Telegraph. It was November 18, 2004. The previous evening, at Madrid's Santiago Bernabeu stadium, England's national soccer team had lost a friendly to Spain, 1-0. But the "shame" had precious little to do with what transpired on…
LINCOLN CHAFEE, easily the Senate's most liberal Republican, didn't vote for George W. Bush in 2004. Instead, he lodged a "symbolic protest" by casting a write-in ballot for former president George H.W. Bush. Chafee's beef with the younger Bush? Iraq ("a very, very costly quagmire"), tax cuts, the…
IT IS STRANGE for an obscure branch of the U.S. Treasury Department to unite embargo critics, sports fans, Major League Baseball, Puerto Rico's amateur baseball federation, the International Baseball Federation, and the International Olympic Committee in a strident public denunciation of America's…
FORGET MAGAZINES AND EDITORIAL PAGES. The only endorsements that really matter in the GOP House leadership contest are those from the members themselves, especially the members with clout. Two such Republicans are Jim Sensenbrenner, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Mike Pence, head of…
PICK YOUR STATISTIC. He had 694 career goals, 1,193 assists, and 1,887 total points in the regular season--making him the National Hockey League's second all-time leading scorer, behind only Wayne Gretzky--plus 109 goals, 186 assists, and 295 points in the playoffs. He appeared in 15 NHL All-Star…
IN MANY WAYS, the year 2005 ends as it began: with millions of Iraqis defying the terrorists to cast ballots; with President Bush hailing the election as a milestone; with nit-pickers fretting about the sulky Sunnis; with the White House coming under fire for its homeland-security efforts; and with…
ONE OF MY FAVORITE SCENES from The Sopranos, HBO's hit series about a New Jersey mob boss and his dual "families," happens in Season 1, Episode 8, shortly after the feds rummage through the Soprano home looking for contraband. Munching on Chinese food with his wife and two kids, Tony grumbles about…
IF THE SAHARA DESERT WENT Marxist, ran a Cold War-era joke, pretty soon it would have to import sand. Today the gag might be: If Venezuela, the world's fifth-largest oil exporter, elected Hugo Chávez, pretty soon it would have to import petroleum. Except it's not a gag. In December 2002, less than…
REMEMBER THE "Arab Spring"? That ephemeral blip of, oh, six or seven weeks last February and March when scattered Bush critics second-guessed their opposition to the Iraq war and the president's Mideast-democracy project? Given that most Americans now deem the war a mistake, it's easy to forget…
THOSE WHO VIEW George W. Bush as a perpetually tongue-tied bumbler might take note of his landmark speech last week in Kyoto, where he eloquently outlined a vision for economic liberalization and democratization throughout East Asia--and which, at its most provocative moment, embraced Taiwan as a…
"THE FRENCH," wrote journalist James Cameron, are "an erratic and brilliant people, who have all the gifts except of running their country." By the time French officials tease out just why gangs of disaffected "youths" have been torching cars and attacking policemen, large swathes of the Paris…
IF CHUTZPAH WERE A TRADABLE currency, chances are George Galloway could buy out Microsoft. Last week the renegade British member of parliament, always full of bluster, responded to allegations that he lied under oath before a U.S. Senate panel about his financial dealings with Saddam Hussein's Iraq…
THAT WAS FAST. The ink on Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court was barely dry before the chattering classes fell into feverish debate over how it would influence Italian-American voting patterns. Their ensuing ruminations have confirmed at least three things: (1) Like Paris Hilton and…
WRITING IN the Wall Street Journal, editorial board member Melanie Kirkpatrick counsels her "friends on the right" to "brew themselves a cup of chamomile tea and go back and review the roster of Bush judges." Such an exercise may help them "sleep better" with the nomination of Harriet Miers to the…
Union City, New Jersey
NEARLY SIX YEARS LATER, Elián Gonzalez remains as ineffably cute as ever. Sunday night's 60 Minutes piece on the Cuban boy plucked from the sea taught us that--and not much else we didn't already know.
Coral Gables, Florida
"EVEN MONKEYS FALL FROM TREES," says an old Japanese proverb. Opponents of Junichiro Koizumi, Japan's intrepid prime minister, have been predicting his fall for some time now. Known for his high-stakes gambles--on, among other things, deploying troops to Iraq and revamping the Japanese postal…
EVERY TIME the National Hockey League makes headlines with a particularly ghastly bit of on-ice thuggery, a chorus of tut-tutters laments the "violent culture" that besmirches an otherwise magnificent sport. In most cases, these handwringers come off as ignorant fusspots: folks who never played…
SAY THIS FOR JUNICHIRO KOIZUMI: He's a gambler, with a penchant for the bold stroke. At home, Japan's maverick prime minister seeks to overhaul the farming, highway, construction, banking, pension, and postal systems. Abroad, he dances nimbly around the limits of a pacifist constitution, sending…
ON THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we can affirm the following with near certainty: Barring some horrific dissolution of the international order--and/or a direct nuclear threat to the U.S. homeland--America will never again target an enemy population with atomic weapons. Of course,…
SENATOR TED KENNEDY CHARGES SUPREME Court nominee John Roberts with embracing a "rather cramped view of the Voting Rights Act." The NAACP's Theodore Shaw is "deeply disturbed" by Roberts's record. "Extremely troubling" documents cast him as "a deeply committed ideologue," according to Wade…
CALL IT THE ESTRADA/Bolton strategy. One way Senate Democrats may seek to derail, or at least muddy, the confirmation of John Roberts to the Supreme Court is by asking for confidential case memos the nominee wrote while serving as deputy solicitor general under President George H.W. Bush. The…
REJOICE! The National Hockey League is back! All it took was a lost season, a lost TV contract with ESPN, a lost draft, God knows how much lost revenue, untold numbers of lost fans--but, fear not, pro hockey is ready to go for 2005-06. And who among us isn't brimming with anticipation?
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…
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.
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…
CUBAN DISSIDENTS have never had a Lech Walesa or a Václav Havel. Nor is there a pro-democracy force on the island comparable to Solidarity or Charter 77. But that might be changing.
IF THE UNITED NATIONS Oil-for-Food scandal brings down Kofi Annan, historians might fix the start of his fall at December 1, 2004. That's when Minnesota senator Norm Coleman published a blistering Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for the secretary general's exit. "As long as Mr. Annan remains in…
THE PETITION CANDIDATES DID IT. In a stunning--at least to their critics--upset, Peter Robinson and Todd Zywicki each won an alumni seat on Dartmouth College's board of trustees. The results were made public yesterday afternoon, following two months of electronic and mail-in voting.
CRANKY CONSERVATIVES often dismiss symbolic pro-democracy legislation as so much claptrap. Of course everyone supports the flowering of liberty on foreign soil, they insist. Of course everyone wants to nourish oases of civil society in the deserts of despotism. So why bother with all these vacuous…
JOHN KERRY BORE A GOOD deal of mockery for his sports gaffes during the 2004 campaign. First he botched the details of Bill Buckner's famous '86 World Series error--after claiming to have been at the game. Then the Boston native praised Red Sox all-star "Manny Ortez" (he pronounced the surname…
IT'S THE $64,000 QUESTION on Capitol Hill these days: Do Republican senators have the 50 votes needed to end judicial filibusters? Senate majority whip Mitch McConnell thinks so. "I never announce my whip count," he said Sunday on the CBS program Face the Nation. "But I'm telling you there's no…
IF YOU'RE NOT A DARTMOUTH alum, there are still two reasons to care about this year's alumni trustee election: Peter Robinson and Todd Zywicki, who are running as insurgents. Robinson is an author and Hoover Institution scholar best known for penning Ronald Reagan's Berlin Wall speech in 1987.…
RONALD REAGAN'S DEATH LAST JUNE posed a dilemma for much of the press. How do you hash out the posthumous legacy of a man who, in life, you failed to understand? The befuddled fourth estate deployed the principle that says the simplest explanation is best. Reagan succeeded, they reckoned, because…
TO A CASUAL EUROPEAN OBSERVER, the row over President Bush's judicial picks may seem a bit dippy. Democrats fight tooth-and-nail to block mid-level nominees. Republicans talk of a "nuclear option" to break the impasse. Democrats warn they'll bring Senate business to a halt. Republicans dare them to…
FOR A PRO-LIFE Democrat, Bob Casey Jr. finds himself wooed by some unlikely backers. New York senator Chuck Schumer, for one. Earlier this year, the unfailingly pro-choice Schumer recruited Casey to challenge GOP incumbent Rick Santorum in the 2006 Pennsylvania Senate race. The very day Casey…
BILL CLINTON has always bedeviled simple ideological classification. His presidency bore this out in spades. Clinton began in 1993 by tacking left--gays in the military, a big tax hike, national health care, the assault-weapons ban (NAFTA was a key exception). Then, post-1994, he lurched rightward…
Cambridge, Massachusetts
LAST MONTH marked the silver anniversary of hockey's shining moment, the 1980 Olympic semifinal game in which a bunch of fresh-faced American collegians beat the Soviets. But few National Hockey League players--or fans--saw cause to celebrate. February 2005 may go down as the blackest month in NHL…
IT'S EASY to dismiss Kim Jong Il as a cartoonish lunatic. The Don King-like hair, the goofy glasses, the drab olive jumpsuit, the eccentric habits, the secrecy--Kim looks, and often acts, downright cuckoo. Even as bloodstained dictators go, his Q-rating is abysmal. But never underestimate his wily…
IF SPORTS ARE A CIVIC religion, then Super Bowl Sunday is Christmas and Hanukkah wrapped into one. For a single night, we all get to play Joe Superfan and lose ourselves in bacchanalian excess. As Dennis Miller once quipped, "More toilets are flushed during Super Bowl halftime than at any other…
FOR ELECTION NIGHT 2004, America's senior diplomat in Havana threw a party--the only such gala in town. James Cason decked out his residence with balloons, campaign materials, a giant-screen TV, and a mock voting station. His Cuban guests, maybe 180 people, watched CNN en Español, and learned of…
ADRIANA BOSCH'S much-touted documentary Fidel Castro made its PBS debut Monday night, as part of the network's "American Experience" series. I can already picture conservatives rolling their eyes. "A PBS special on Castro?" But Bosch's piece is remarkable--remarkably good, that is. It explains (1)…
TOO EARLY FOR REPUBLICANS TO fret about 2008? Never! Before last week's inaugural fireworks had even been lit, the handicapping of 2008 Republican hopefuls was well underway. GOP sources slice the potential '08ers into an A-list and a B-list. Here's a quick roundup of who's where, as President Bush…
FDR REPORTEDLY SAID IT FIRST, though the story could be apocryphal. Sizing up Anastasio Somoza, Nicaragua's brutal (but pro-American) dictator, Roosevelt quipped, "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."
AUBURN FANS know exactly how Joe Jacobs must've felt. Jacobs, a boxing manager, coined the adage "We wuz robbed!" back in 1932. His fighter, Max Schmeling, had just lost a controversial split decision to pugilist Jack Sharkey. Since then, myriad athletic teams have adopted Jacobs's phrase to…
WHO WILL MAKE the biggest political splash of 2005? Will it be an Indian-American Rhodes Scholar from Louisiana? Or the star of the Democratic convention? Or maybe a conservative Republican winning the New Jersey governorship? Who knows. But here's a list of five politicians to keep an eye on…
FIDEL CASTRO never much liked Christmas. He officially banned the holiday in 1969, hoping to maximize Cuba's sugar harvest. He loosened this restriction in December 1997--but only to coincide with the pending visit of Pope John Paul II. Now, thanks to James Cason, it's safe to say Fidel likes…
DURING THE 1980S, RONALD Reagan got on famously with then Japanese prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone. Their personal comity, dubbed the "Ron-Yasu" friendship, boosted American interests on a slew of Cold War and trade issues. And, at the time, U.S.-Japan ties reached historic postwar heights.
"THE GHOSTS OF 1917 have not been laid to rest." That's how Orlando Figes closed A People's Tragedy, his magisterial history of the Russian Revolution. Figes was writing in the mid-1990s, at a time when the success of democracy in ex-Soviet bloc nations did not seem a fait accompli. Sound familiar?…
THE SENATE'S COLD WAR over judicial nominations is at a crossroads. With a newly minted chamber taking office January 4, and a new minority leader already designated, the time seems ripe for a fresh start. The Republican majority wants an end to all active Democratic filibusters of appellate court…
Coral Gables, Florida
AT FIRST GLANCE, Colorado looks like a trusty slice of "red" America. It has a Republican governor, two Republican senators, and about 19 percent more registered Republicans than Democrats. Its congressional lineup tilts 5-2 in the GOP's favor, and Republicans control both houses of the state…
IF JESSE HELMS taught North Carolina Democrats one thing, it's this: "Jessecrats" matter. The Democratic supporters of the retired GOP senator are the kind of folks Howard Dean pigeonholed as "guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks." They're also the guys who were the bane of a…
THE BOSTON RED SOX WERE TOAST. At least everyone thought so. The California Angels held a 3-1 edge in the best-of-seven ALCS. It was the 9th inning of Game 5 in Anaheim, and, with two men out, the Sox trailed by a run.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD would have us believe there are no second acts in American lives. But then, he never met Rodney Dangerfield.
OCTOBER 9 will be a big day for the war on terror. In Afghanistan, voters will choose a president. Across the globe, Australians will decide the fate of Prime Minister John Howard. A smooth Afghan election is crucial. But the result Down Under is also important: It may determine whether the United…
ANOTHER CONGRESSIONAL CUBA DEBATE. Another mini-breach among House Republicans. It's nothing new, but the latest flare-up comes at an inopportune moment for George W. Bush.
AMONG DEMOCRATS, it is fashionable to remember the Cold War as a bipartisan effort. "Until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989," former senator Bill Bradley has said, "we were sure about one thing: We knew where we stood on foreign policy." The world was simple, according to President Clinton's…
PHOTOJOURNALIST Eddie Adams died last Sunday at age 71, but his place in history is secure. Indeed, Adams made history with his famous picture of South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. Taken in Saigon on February 1, 1968, the picture showed Gen. Loan's point-blank execution of a Viet Cong…
LAST THURSDAY, Secretary of State Colin Powell finally called a spade a spade. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he said the atrocities--including murder, rape, and village razing--committed in the remote Darfur region of western Sudan qualified as genocide.
IT'S HARD TO IMAGINE how the Senate could become more partisan than it is today. But that's what Democrats vow will happen if Republicans attempt a rare parliamentary maneuver to break the stalemate over President Bush's judicial nominees.
THE LATE SEN. HENRY "SCOOP" JACKSON used to say, "I'm a liberal but not a damn fool." On domestic policy, he was indeed a liberal: a lifelong Democrat who enthusiastically backed the New Deal-Fair Deal economic agenda of Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. But in foreign affairs,…
IT IS NO EXAGGERATION to say the future of national missile defense (NMD) hinges on November's presidential election. This past July, Boeing engineers loaded the first ground-based missile interceptor into a silo at Fort Greely, Alaska; and according to the Washington Post, "five more are due for…
ACCORDING TO A RECENT POLL, new voters are trending pro-life on abortion. The nonpartisan Pace University/Rock the Vote survey, conducted by the Pace Poll in mid July, is the first in a three-part nationwide study of first-time voters, defined as "voters who registered after the 2000 presidential…
LAST SUMMER, as Americans prepared to celebrate their independence, four refugees half a world away were dreaming of their own American freedom. On July 4, 2003, the North Korean defectors, aged between 16 and 19, entered the British consulate in Shanghai, China. Each carried a personal letter to…
EVERY Caddyshack fan has a favorite line from the 1980 movie and for sheer kitsch, it's hard to trump the exclamation by millionaire loudmouth Al Czervik following the climactic scene: "Hey, everybody! We're all gonna get laid!" In and of itself, it's not that funny; it's not even a joke, really.…
MANY DEMOCRATS seem convinced that George W. Bush is losing traction with his Cuban-American base in South Florida. Press coverage of the administration's new anti-Castro measures--which tighten restrictions on family travel to Cuba, limit personal gift packages to the island, and reduce the…
"HARVARD HATES AMERICA." That's how John LeBoutillier titled his 1978 bestseller about life at the country's most prestigious university. LeBoutillier's story was one of ivory-tower elitism run amok. Its central theme--that Harvard students and professors are mostly knee-jerk radicals--is by now an…