Recently Published

Can You Really Make Peace with Somebody Like Arafat?

by Judith Apter Klinghoffer

Can a leopard change its spots? That is the question confronting states under attack from radical forces seeking their demise. "No" has been the traditional answer. It's either you or the leopard. "Yes" has been the novel liberal one. The trick is to give the leopard reason enough to change, a stake in your coexistence. Hence the phenomenon called a peace process. Appeasement seeks to satiate the leopard; the peace process seeks to turn him into a herbivore. In the Middle

Homosexuality and Catholic Priests

by Vern L. Bullough

The widespread exposure of pedophilia within the Catholic clergy has led to a focus on homosexuality within the clergy as a source of the problem. It has to be emphasized, however, that pedophilia and homosexuality are not the same thing. In fact only a handful of priests technically are pedophiles (sexually involved with children under 10 or 11, although more might be inclined to ephebophilia, or an attraction to pubescent and post pubescent youth. One reason for this higher percentage is

Column: Close, but No Havana

by P.M. Carpenter

Congress has finally erected a floodgate to stem the torrent of legal bribery in politics euphemistically known as soft money. This engineering feat was hard won, long overdue, and relatively solid in accomplishment; thus it would be too jaded to dismiss the legislation as less than a historic watershed. On the other hand, it would be too optimistic to praise th

Column: Not in My Backyard

by William Thompson

For the last 70 years, Nevada has been neither a Democrat state nor a Republican state. It has consistently been the gambling state. The voters--only a handful of whom have been born in the state, have tolerated--and voted for--both very liberal and very conservative candidates for state and federal office. Taking their cues from a gambling industry which invests heavily in political campaigns,

The Hidden Costs of Campaign Finance Reform

by Andrew Schocket

The campaign finance reform bill passed by Congress will affect not only the influence of money on American politics. By weakening parties but effectively leaving interest groups alone, it will also promote the discussion of issues over party politics but make political compromise even more difficult than it is today.In 1787, when James Madison, the Constitution's greatest architect, was campaigning to get the Constitution ratified as the law of the land, he argued that competition among many in

The Scarlet Letter “P”

by HNN Staff

From Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Scarlet Letter"Goodwives," said a hard-featured dame of fifty,"I'll tell ye a piece of my mind. It would be greatly for the public behoof, if we women, being of mature age and church-members in good repute, should have the handling of such malefactresses as this Hester Prynne. What thin

Column: Dr. Strangelove Meets the Bush Administration

by P.M. Carpenter

"He went and did a silly thing." Thus spoke President Merkin Muffley in 1964 to the Soviet Premier in a delicate attempt to explain that Air Force General Jack D. Ripper had just ordered bombers to vaporize Moscow. Meanwhile, General Buck Turgidson assured the president that even though the reliability of"Plan R"--that is, the sure means to recall wayward bombers--was

Are We Following in the Footsteps of the British?

by Paul Janson

When a nation -- the United States -- begins to regard itself as"the sole superpower," capable of acting"with or without allies," it places itself at risk of being isolated on the world stage. The most likely result of unilateralist action is to invite lesser powers to combine to neutralize it. Therefore, the United States should consider the fate of the last world superpower: Britain. In the 19th century, Britain believed itself to be and acted as if it were the world's single great powe

Column: Two Things Nevada Can Be Proud Of

by William Thompson

This commentary concerns the new 25 cent coins celebrating events of each of the states of our union. I take what some might mistakenly consider a"parochial" perspective, as I discuss the portrayals I desire to see on the Nevada coin when it is minted. Each day we should celebrate, celebrate as if we just pushed Sisyphus's rock over the mountain, even if we only pushed it up a few fee

Scotching Plagiarism

by Robert V. Bruce

Having taken part in some widely reported plagiarism disputes and having chaired a standing committee on student academic conduct, I did not regard plagiarism as a very original sin. But I was not prepared for what I encountered in April 1998. A new book, Alexander Graham Bell: A Life, by a Scottish author, James Mackay, came to my attention that month. I myself had published Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude with Little Brown in 1973. I was the fir

Media Watch: The Six-Month Anniversary

by Sean Patrick Farrell

It happened. Six months later, we still can't get over it. And so we talked about it and talked about it. President Bush spoke at one of many ceremonies held to remember 9-11. He used the opportunity to bolster support for the war."Against such an enemy," he said,"there is no immunity, and there can be no neutrality." New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg weighed in, calling September 11 the day,"America was changed forever." The New York Times ran stories about the survivors,

The ABM Treaty: Dead or Alive?

by Dr. Robert M. Bowman

On December 13, 2001, President George W. Bush gave notice that the United States was going to withdraw from the ABM Treaty in six months. Is this a correct decision which should go unchallenged? I'm proposing here a decision tree. President Bush should have gone through a decision-making process like this before announcing withdrawal, but obviously, he didn't. There are ten questions, to be answered in order. If the answer to any question is"no," then the process halts and withdrawal

Column: You’re Shocked W Flip-Flopped on Free Trade?

by P.M. Carpenter

I can't for the life of me understand why so many pundits are expressing shocked disgust over George W.'s about-face on the marvels of free trade and the evils of protectionism. Journalistic minds from the left to far-right of center are heaving forth reams of outraged verbiage on the president's befouling hypocrisy and indefensible transgression against his campai

Column: Bush in the Bunker

by Thomas M. Spencer

Boy, what a week for the Bush administration! On February 28th, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle asked a few fairly obvious questions about the ongoing war on terrorism and was verbally assaulted by congressional Republicans as if he had committed treason or, at the very least, advocated normalizing relations with Cuba or some other crazy or outrageous thing. Amazingly, when Tom Delay and Trent Lott were confronted with their own seemingly"unpatriotic" statements about U.S. policy

The Color Line: The Past and Mr. Pickering

by Joshua M. Zeitz

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee will vote early in March on the Bush administration's effort to elevate Federal District Judge Charles W. Pickering Sr. to the 5th Circuit of Appeals, based in New Orleans. The committee should stop this nomination in its tracks. Why is that? Because Judge Pickering once enjoyed connections with the now-defunct Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a state-sponsored police outfit that fought tooth-and-nail for almost 20 years to block the enforcement o

Are War Crimes Trials Really a Sign of Progress?

by Peter Maguire

Now that the trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has begun, some have heralded his prosecution as the dawning of"a new era of international accountability," further evidence of"the globalization of justice." During the first week of the trial, prosecutor Carla del Ponte insisted that his was not a political trial. Milosevic countered with a challenge to the International Criminal Tribunal's legal legitimacy.Bubbling beneath the surface of this dispute is a fundament

When the Axis Was Truly Evil

by Norman Markowitz

President Bush's widely publicized reference in his State of the Union address to an"axis of evil" has frightened and confused people throughout the world. To many, Bush's phrase appears to be a trial balloon for a much bigger war in the name of fighting international terrorism. If that is true, Americans must examine his intentions very carefully.The president's contention that Iran, Iraq and North Korea constitute an"axis of evil" because they are"producing weapons of mass destruct

War and Strategy in the 21st Century

by Jeremy Black

Current debates over America's place in the world often move uneasily between military and diplomatic factors. It is misleading, however, to abstract security issues from the wider context of foreign policy. Events in the twenty-first century will test the limits to American strength but not its fundamentals. These tests will underscore, however, the inability of technology to overcome all challenges and the risk that excess militarization of foreign policy would

Military: It's an Axis and It's Evil

by Mark Safranski

"The international coalition against terror is not the basis to take action against someone - least of all unilaterally. All European foreign ministers see it that way. That is why the phrase 'axis of evil' leads nowhere."-German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, Die Welt"Saddam is very proud of his nuclear team.... He will never give up his dream of being the first Arab leader to have a

Maybe Now We Should Start Outing All Writers

by Nikki Keddie

Current discussions on Stephen Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Bellesiles remind me that the public is so far willing to accept far worse misrepresentations in authorship than these. Ambrose and, to a lesser extent, Goodwin, apparently failed to put in quotation marks or put adequate references to books that they did state they had used. While they may be faulted for trying to write too much too quickly and relying too much on secondary sources, I doubt their books would have been substan