News at Home

Why People Ignore Poverty

by Joyce Appleby

Alabama's Gov. Bob Riley has astounded friend and foe alike by proposing a tax increase of $1.3 billion to lift the heavy tax burden from the state's poor. Admonishing critics that the New Testament teaches us "to help those who are the least among us," Riley is attacking an entrenched system of inequity in his state. Meanwhile, back in Washington, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has denounced a Senate bill to extend an increased tax credit for c

Why Can't We See the Declaration of Independence?

by Timothy Walch

On this Fourth of July, the Declaration of Independence is nowhere to be seen. Yet it's not missing and it hasn't been stolen. Since July 2001, the precious, much-loved document has been in seclusion for much needed repairs.

What Did Bush Mean by "Revisionist Historians"?

by Jonathan Rees

About two weeks ago, President Bush invoked the term "revisionist historians" twice in two days to describe critics who have attacked his original justification for war with Iraq. This phrase has been kicked around ever since in pundit circles because, although it is not a new construction, the president offered little explanation of it in this context."The term can be a compliment (to describe new research that challenges conventional wisdom),&quo

Gettysburg: A Battle Worth Remembering this July 4th

by Patrick W. Gavin

Last week, the issue of race resurfaced through the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action. And the past year and a half has made us all aware of terrorism and homeland security. But if you think that things are tense now, you should have been around in 1863. Seven score ago (that’s 140 years) this week, the United States found itself with a “severe” homeland security problem. Terrorism was a daily reality. Race relations were on edge. The occasion was the Civil War,

Are Trotskyites Running the Pentagon?

by Alan Wald

As a scholar researching for several decades the migration of United States intellectuals from Left to Right, I have been startled by the large number of journalistic articles making exaggerated claims about ex-Trotskyist influence on the Bush administration that have been circulating on the internet and appearing in a range of publications. I first noticed these in March 2003, around the time that the collapse of Partsian Review magazine was announced, although some may have ap

President Bush's Radical Break with a Generation of Middle East Diplomacy

by Daniel Pipes

"Our goal is two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side, in peace and security." So spoke President Bush at a Middle East summit on June 4. Then, despite the jump in violence over the next 10 days, leaving 63 dead, he reiterated on Sunday his belief in "a peaceful Palestinian state, living side by side with the Israelis," though now adding "we've got a lot of work to do." Bush's goal may appear to be just another diplomatic twist in the half

Did Bush Lie Us into War?

by John Dean

President George W. Bush has got a very serious problem. Before asking Congress for a Joint Resolution authorizing the use of American military forces in Iraq, he made a number of unequivocal statements about the reason the United States needed to pursue the most radical actions any nation can undertake -- acts of war against another nation. Now it is clear that many of his statements appear to be false. In the past, Bush's White House has been very good at sweeping ugly issues li

A Historian Remembers Her Father--And What United Them

by Ruth Rosen

MY FATHER always called himself a conservative Republican. "But I'm still for the little guy," he'd say, in an accent and manner that reminded everyone of Archie Bunker. For 40 years, he practiced law in an urban storefront office, typed his own briefs on a 1939 Royal, and helped poor people get their day in court. For 40 years, he voted for Republican candidates. The child of immigrants, he passionately loved this country, its Constitution and its rule of law. When I

Stop the Straussians Before They Lie Again

by William H. Leckie, Jr.

Back in the 1980s a conservative mantra was, "Ideas have consequences." It still is among the intellectual advisers to the administration of George W. Bush, for whom ancient history matters. They seem to want to take on what Atlantic correspondent Robert D. Kaplan calls a "warrior politics"-in a book of that title bearing an elegant, ancient Corinthian helmet on its cover--and assume the pagan ethic of Greece and Rome in our postmodern times, though most of them h

Column: Naked Buffoonery

by P.M. Carpenter

In this Orwellian age of elephantine strikes against mice that roar, broad coalitions consisting of two, universal tax relief that relieves the few, and receptive leadership that ignores the led, naming the blameworthy seems an easy task. They are, of course, the ones perpetrating the fraud. Yes? Yet history's indictment may produce a hung jury when deciding the culpable: the obvious -- those corrupt schemers who pulled the job; or the not so obvious -- those feckless invertebrates who

Column: LooneyTuneLand

by P. M. Carpenter

Our nation's fiscal planners -- and I use "planners" with utmost liberality -- want you to think they are sober-minded Dudley DoRights on mounted steed, peering far ahead and guarding against economic insecurity. More accurate, however, is the metaphor of a fantasizing Snoopy atop an airborne doghouse, sooty goggles fixed and scarf flapping, sneering at impending disasters of flak and enemy fire all about. If you find the comparison an insult to lovable Snoopy, picture in

Fakery in American Journalism

by Thomas Fleming

The uproar over Jayson Blair, the New York Times reporter who was exposed as a man who made up details and descriptions and embellished stories with false quotes, has omitted one salient fact. The journalists of the 19th and early 20th centuries would have shrugged off Mr. Blair's inventions with a goodnatured wink. "Faking it" -- the tradition of manufacturing facts to enliven stories -- or even describing things that never happened -- has a long tradition in American

The Looting of America

by P.M. Carpenter

Any American who thinks that only other nations -- especially those of Third World nether regions -- are susceptible to tawdry power grabs should think again, for it seems we're in the 3rd year of an ugly coup d'etat as real as any in history. Because ours is directed by invisible hands of stalking Karl Roves of the under-your-bed spook variety, it is infinitely slicker than palace-storming revolutions. You'll see no scraggly bearded general encircled by cutthroat gangs firing .45s fro

Isn't It Time We Rejoin the World Court? (We Left in 1986)

by Howard N. Meyer

George W. Bush drew fire from law and order advocates when in 2002 he "unsigned" (that is withdrew America from) the Treaty of Rome of 1998 that created an international criminal court. American scholars and humanists had led for many years in advocating establishment of such a court. That Court has only recently begun to function. It can try and punish persons allegedly guilty of crimes of international concern that their own nation has failed to prosecute. This self-mad

Memorial Day 2003: Through a Vietnam Lens

by Christian G. Appy

A few weeks ago I picked up the morning paper and, for the first time in months, there was no front-page story on Iraq. My response? I went right to the sports section. I knew I was indulging a delusion. Real peace had not arrived. Events in Iraq were as chaotic and distressing as ever. Even the killing hadn't stopped. American troops were firing on crowds of demonstrators; armed looters were still rampaging; children accidentally detonating unexploded ordnance; shoot-outs over gas eviden

Why Radicals Need Not Lose Hope

by Rebecca Solnit

On January 18, 1915, six months into the first world war, the first terrible war in the modern sense -- slaughter by the hundreds of thousands, poison gas, men living and dying in the open graves of trench warfare, tanks, barbed wire, machine guns, airplanes -- Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal, "The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think." Dark, she seems to say, as in inscrutable, not as in terrible. We often mistake

Are There No More Wayne Morses?

by George Beres

No Senate voice is in greater need of being heard today than that of Wayne Morse of Oregon. Unfortunately for the country, Morse-- known as the "Tiger of the Senate"-- has been dead more than a quarter century. He still is remembered and honored in his home state, where The Morse Award for Integrity in Politics is given by the Morse Corporation Board in Eugene. (Disclosure: I'm a member of the board.) It keeps alive the ringing words of the man who gave Or

The Biggest Foreign Policy Whopper Ever

by P. M. Carpenter

As I sit to reflect on the greatest scam in American foreign affairs history, in the background one of conservatism's more accomplished scammers is yapping away on MSNBC like a rabid chihauhau -- and as a host, no less. For several days now and in so many words, bit by agonizing bit the Bush administration has been forced to concede that the Iraq war, as a WMD threat-stopper, was a hoax. Thousand of lost lives and unaffordable billions later, Bush II's deceit is exposed -- drip, drip

President Bush's Woodrow Wilson Problem

by Thomas Fleming

Not many Americans outside the historical fraternity have heard of Philip Dru. Even among that well-informed group, not many are willing to admit the powerful role Philip Dru played in shaping the history of the twentieth century. You may be nonplused to discover that Philip Dru is a character in a novel, Philip Dru, Administrator. It is not a very good novel. But its main character and his message acquired enormous significance when the author, Colonel Ed

An Empire for Liberty?

by James Banner, Jr.

Not since the Spanish and British empires has a nation so bestrode the world as the United States does today. The collapse of the Soviet system, the superiority of American arms and the strength of the American economy have created a new American imperium. But empires, like trees, have many roots, some of them ancient and deep. And the taproot of American worldwide dominance sprouted two centuries ago when the administration of Thomas Jefferson sealed with France the agreement