The Nation back issues from May 2004:
WMD? Ha ha ha!(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 03, 2004; ... Louisville, Ky. * In "Laughing With Bush" [April 19], David Corn quotes GOP chairman Ed Gillespie, talking about George W. Bush's missing WMD jokes at a gathering of reporters, saying, "The people in the room obviously saw the humor ... and to play it back now in a different ...
You can help--I.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 03, 2004; ... Philadelphia * Thank you for Mariana Katzarova's "Letter From Juarez" [March 29]. Nation readers should urge their Representatives to co-sponsor HR 466, introduced by Hilda Solis of California: "Conveying the sympathy of the House of Representatives to the families of the young ...
It brought the war home.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 03, 2004; ... Burlington, Vt. * I thank Marianne Brown for her deeply touching letter about her son ["Letters," April 5]. This war and all the mess surrounding it have been so disturbing and infuriating, yet at a ...
You can help--II.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 03, 2004; ... Washington, DC * In response to Robert Musil's March 29 letter to the editor, Representative Lynn Woolsey recently introduced SMART security with Physicians for Social ...
Dubya & the science-whackers.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 03, 2004; ... Bronxville, NY * Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "The Junk Science of George W. Bush" [March 8] laid out very well that politics comes before science in this White House. The Bushwhacking of two leading scientists who disagree with him from the President's Bioethics Council, and the ...
The passion of Leni.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 03, 2004; ... Melrose Park, Pa. * Katha Pollitt calls The Passion of the Christ "a movie that could safely be shown at the Leni Riefenstahl Memorial Film Festival" ["Subject to Debate," March 29]. Funny she should mention Hitler's filmmaker. At the peak of the controversy, Riefenstahl was ...
Gop gang strikes by night.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 03, 2004; ... Springfield, Va. * I am astonished at what Wayne S. Smith reports in "Undemocratic Process" [March 15]. How could "a small group of leading Republicans" alter legislation that had been passed by both houses of Congress by removing a duly enacted amendment? This is indeed a ...
Whaling the wall.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 03, 2004; ... Bradford, Vt. * No doubt Hillel Schenker, in "Israel's Failing Wall" [March 8], is right when he says that Ariel Sharon opposed a wall along the Green Line, but readers should not imagine that the Prime Minister's enthusiasm for a wall inside the West Bank is recent. In an ...
Working hard to be homeless.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 03, 2004; ... Austin, Tex. * Beth Shulman's "Working and Poor in the USA" [Feb. 9] plainly depicts how poverty wages are attacking the very base of our socioeconomic structure. Of the 30 million impoverished workers she describes, 10 million are minimum-wage workers, and it is from this pool ...
Brown at 50.(Brown v. Board of Education (1954))
May 03, 2004; ... Prior to the landmark Supreme Court rulings in Brown v. Board of Education and Bolling v. Sharpe, the US government and the states were permitted to segregate students racially in primary and secondary public schools. The official rationale for this arrangement was that students--black as ...
Beyond black, white and brown.(A Forum)
May 03, 2004; ... Thanks to the civil rights revolution, de jure segregation is dead. But vast social, economic and educational inequalities continue to plague American society. Moreover, while the black-white paradigm has never fully described American race relations, we are far more aware today than in ...
It could have gone the other way: at the time, the justices had doubts that brown was rightly decided.
May 03, 2004; ... In the fifty years since it was decided, Brown v. Board of Education has become a legal icon. The rightness of this famous decision invalidating racial segregation in public schools is no longer open to debate. Conservative legal commentators and prospective judicial nominees still ...
The long road to equality: the product of Black legal skill and strategy, Brown has a Black copyright.
May 03, 2004; ... In the early 1930s the NAACP took on as its primary mission the elimination of segregation in public education, from primary school to the highest reaches of the state university system, including the graduate and professional schools. Charles Houston was hired as NAACP counsel to ...
The 'fifth circuit four': how four federal judges brought the rule of reason to the South.
May 03, 2004; ... As we commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, a major element in the American South's social revolution remains hidden in the shadows of history. I refer to the small band of federal judges in the South, mostly Republicans appointed by President Dwight ...
The heat of Summerton: racial tensions still simmer in the rural county where Brown was born.
May 03, 2004; ... America's most famous school desegregation cases didn't begin in Topeka, Kansas. The five cases that were consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas actually began in rural Clarendon County, South Carolina. The first case originated in a little town called ...
A dream deferred: after bloody battles for desegregation, blacks in Memphis are still behind.
May 03, 2004; ... Martin Luther King Jr., in a January 19, 1968, speech at Kansas State University titled "The Future of Integration," looked back at the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision on May 17, 1954, as "the psychological turning point, where people by the thousands began to act." ...
Not just a test: why we must rethink the paradigm we use for judging human ability.
May 03, 2004; ... In the summer of 1966 the Office of Education published the now famous "Coleman Report," which assessed the nation's progress in achieving the school integration mandated by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. The report was based on a survey conducted by the Educational Testing ...
What's good enough? advocates are demanding not just equal but decent schools for all children.
May 03, 2004; ... By now the list of a half-century of half-tried and discarded educational remedies seeking to honor the promise of Brown v. Board of Education fills volumes: attendance-zone redistricting, busing, magnet schools, compensatory education, bilingual education, ebonics, military schools, ...
Why Brown still matters.(Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality)(Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall the the Supreme Court, 1936-1961)(Book Review)
May 03, 2004; ... SIMPLE JUSTICE: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality. By Richard Kluger. Knopf. 865 pp. $45. MAKING CIVIL RIGHTS LAW: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, ...
No success like failure.(Book Review)
May 03, 2004; ... EUGENE McCARTHY: the Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism. By Dominic Sandbrook. Knopf. 397 pp. $25.95. Eugene McCarthy has always been a mysterious and frustrating figure. Nothing he did before 1968 hinted that he would become the liberals' antiwar leader and challenge ...
Wishful thinking.(Book Review)
May 03, 2004; ... SHOSTAKOVICH AND STALIN: The Extraordinary Relationship Between the Great Composer and the Brutal Dictator. By Solomon Volkov. Knopf. 313 pp. $30. In early 1966, Leonard Bernstein threw a birthday party for Dmitri Shostakovich in Lincoln Center's Philharmonic Hall. Although the ...
Why the bubble popped.(stock market crash)(Bibliography)
May 03, 2004; ... This clutch of books offers an excellent retrospective on the recent stock-market crash, which wiped out $8.5 trillion in market value. The value of individual retirement accounts dropped by one-third, and in just twelve months, 2 million Americans lost their jobs. But the ...
The two parties of empire.(John F. Kerry and George W. Bush)
May 03, 2004; ... As one who regards Gerry Ford as our greatest President (least time served, least damage done, husband of Betty, plus Stevens as his contribution to the Supreme Court), I'd always imagined the man from Grand Rapids would never be surpassed in sheer slowness of thought. When a reporter ...
Unimagined communities.(Diary Of A Mad Law Professor)
May 03, 2004; ... This year is the tenth anniversary of the end of apartheid in South Africa, the fortieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. This confluence was impressed upon me yesterday when I received an ...
The haunted archives.(Editorials)(United States National Archives)
May 03, 2004 ... Who should control access to the archives of the 9/11 Commission after it closes up shop in August? The commission's records will go to the National Archives. On April 8 the Bush Administration quietly pushed the current archivist, John Carlin, a Clinton appointee, to step down. To replace ...
Prime-time fables.(Editorials)(George W. Bush)(Editorial)
May 03, 2004 ... George W. Bush believes in the Easter Bunny--that is, those weapons of mass destruction. At his recent press conference, during which he appeared unable to connect to reality on this matter or the unfolding situation in Iraq, he declared, "I'm of the belief that we'll find out the truth on ...
Iraq as Vietnam.(Comment)
May 03, 2004; ... It is a pity the major news media have not convened a commission of inquiry to examine their own mistakes and derelictions concerning the war in Iraq. Wouldn't it be instructive to go back now and re-examine the "documents" the press and television provided Americans to understand why the ...
Condoleezza ("Mushroom Cloud") rice explains her silver bullet theory to the 9/11 commission.(Brief Article)(Poem)
May 03, 2004; ... <Pre> CONDOLEEZZA ("MUSHROOM CLOUD") RICE EXPLAINS HER SILVER BULLET THEORY TO THE 9/11 COMMISSION Because no silver bullet could ...
Ashcroft attacks.(Comment)(John Ashcroft)
May 03, 2004; ... When faced with criticism, accuse. That seems to be Attorney General John Ashcroft's rule of political survival. When called before the 9/11 Commission to discuss the Justice Department's and the FBI's responses to the Al Qaeda threat before 9/11, he blasted away: at the Clinton ...
The UN oil 'scandal'.(United Nations Oil for Food Program)
May 03, 2004; ... The same political figures who engineered the current debacle in Iraq are now trying to blame the United Nations for more than $10.1 billion worth of oil revenue they claim Saddam Hussein diverted from the Oil for Food program. The issue prompted a hearing in the Senate Foreign Relations ...
Guantanamo, revisited.
May 03, 2004; ... When the Supreme Court hears oral argument April 20 on the cases challenging the legality of the detentions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, it will confront the most dramatic conflict between liberty and security it has considered since World War II. The Bush Administration claims that the "war ...
The GOP hunts its own.(Comment)
May 03, 2004; ... When George W. Bush asked Congress for the authority to attack Iraq, New York Congressman Amo Houghton voted no. He voted against several of Bush's tax cut schemes, too, and against the Administration's proposal to drill for oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Houghton has long ...
Educating Senator Frist.(Comment)
May 03, 2004; ... George W. Bush has declared that tort reform will be a major part of his forthcoming campaign. In the Senate, majority leader Bill Frist has said he will make it a "personal priority" in the present session of Congress to deal with what he calls "the current asbestos litigation crisis." ...
Out, out, damn outsourcing.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 10, 2004; ... We asked readers to comment on our March 22 forum, "Toward a Progressive View on Outsourcing," and we weren't disappointed. We heard from "one of the already marginalized medical transcriptionists," a "50-year-old progressive trying to hang on by the skin of my teeth to employment in the ...
Mother knows best.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 10, 2004; ... Wheeling, WV * I received my first issue of The Nation about three weeks ago, and two more since, and I haven't read one yet. Why? My mother can't put them ...
November song.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 10, 2004; ... Davis, Calif. <Pre> I do not love thee, Mr. Bush, For all the whoppers ...
The serpent that ate America's lunch.
May 10, 2004; ... The backstory for this election year lacks the urgency of war or of defeating George W. Bush but focuses on a most fateful question: When will this hemorrhaging debtor nation be compelled to pull back from profligate consumption and resign its role as "buyer of last resort" for the global ...
Neocon man: Daniel Pipes has made his name inveighing against an academy overrun by political extremists but he is nothing if not extreme in his own views.
May 10, 2004; ... Daniel Pipes was a busy man in the days following September 11, 2001. The Philadelphia-based foreign policy analyst and commentator on terrorism and Islam first learned that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center when a local television producer called to invite him to the station ...
The national insecurity state.(Rise of The Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet)(Book Review)
May 10, 2004; ... Rise of The Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet. By James Mann. Viking. 426 pp. $25.95. Keen to control the flow of information, the Bush political machine has labored day and night to obstruct public oversight of US foreign policy. But the basic ...
Human, all too human.("Humanism and Democratic Criticism," "Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said")(Book Review)
May 10, 2004; ... HUMANISM AND DEMOCRATIC CRITICISM. By Edward W. Said. Columbia. 154 pp. $19.95. Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said. Edited and with an introduction by Gauri Viswanathan. Vintage. 485 pp. Paper $16. Humanism, like ...
The descent into barbarism.("The Coming of the Third Reich: A History." )(Book Review)
May 10, 2004; ... The Coming of the Third Reich: A History. By Richard J. Evans. Penguin Press. 622 pp. $34.95. Few of those who followed the David Irving libel trial held in London three years ago could avoid being struck by the calm but towering presence of the British historian ...
Love and theft.("Kill Bill Vol. 2," "The Saddest Music in the World," "The Twighlight Samurai," "The Clay Bird")(Movie Review)
May 10, 2004; ... Kill Bill Vol. 2 * The Saddest Music in the World The Twilight Samurai * The Clay Bird Antiquarian mishmash lathers the April screen. In Kill Bill Vol. 2, scenes recollected from thirty-year-old kung fu epics splash across images from spaghetti westerns and two-lane-blacktop ...
Down and out in Texas.(Texas antiabortion legislation, HB 15)
May 10, 2004; ... Did you know that since January 1, women in Texas have not been able to obtain abortions from the sixteenth week of pregnancy on? This blackout on women's rights and health is happening not because abortions after the fourth month were declared illegal--far from it: In theory, all that has ...
Woodward returns.(Bob Woodward's new book Plan of Attack)
May 10, 2004; ... Well, Bob Woodward has partially redeemed himself. His last book, Bush at War, read like a superhero comic book mistranslated from its original Serbo-Croatian. Everyone in the Bush Administration was portrayed as they might have wished: brave, steadfast, determined to protect America from ...
Take back our rights.(Editorials)
May 10, 2004 ... The Bush Administration may be mired in confusion and at cross-purposes on many fronts--Iraq, Afghanistan, the economy, education--but its assault on women's reproductive freedom has been a marvel of purpose and planning. It is hard to believe that during the last presidential election the ...
Buyer's remorse on Iraq.(changes in White House attitude toward Iraq)
May 10, 2004 ... In cautioning George W. Bush about rushing to war against Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell reportedly invoked the "you break it, you own it" rule of military action, according to Bob Woodward in his new book, Plan of Attack. "You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people," ...
Pastrami & champagne.(Comment)(Ariel Sharon's Palestinian settlement policy for Gaza strip and West Bank)
May 10, 2004; ... Three decades ago Winston Churchill's grandson asked Ariel Sharon how Israel should deal with the Palestinians. "We'll make a pastrami sandwich out of them," he replied. "We'll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements ...
We Were Ready.(Poem)
May 10, 2004; ... <Pre> We Were Ready (Sung to the 9/11 Commission by the Bush Boys' Choir, to the tune of "I Feel Pretty" from West Side Story) CHORUS We were ready--Oh, so ready.Sure, it happened, but those were the breaks.And rememberThat we never, ever make mistakes ....
Truth and politics.(Letter from Ground Zero)(John Kerry and his testimony about Vietnam)
May 10, 2004; ... Halfway through Tim Russert's hourlong interview with Democratic presidential nominee Senator John Kerry on April 18, there was an exchange that revealed in microcosm some of the fundamental unspoken rules of American politics in our day. Russert played a clip from Kerry's 1971 appearance ...
Bush's new Iraq viceroy.(Comment)(John D. Negroponte chosen to be first ambassador to post-Saddam Iraq)
May 10, 2004; ... Like dirty money, tainted reputations can be laundered, as the Administration fervently hopes in the case of John Negroponte. Now UN ambassador, Negroponte has been chosen by George W. Bush to be the first ambassador to post-Saddam Iraq. When Bush selected Negroponte to be his UN ...
'Bad guys'.(Comment)(detention of American citizens, Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla)
May 10, 2004; ... On April 20, Solicitor General Ted Olson told the Supreme Court that the federal courts could not question the indefinite detention of "enemy combatants" held at Guantanamo Bay because as foreigners outside our borders, the detainees have no constitutional rights and no access to courts. A ...
I pledge allegiance to ...?(Exchange)(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 17, 2004 ... We received volumes of impassioned mail on Elisabeth Sifton's April 5 "The Battle Over the Pledge," most dealing with the phrase "under God." A few hairsplitters wrote in to challenge Sifton's statement that there is no mention of God in the Constitution, because it contains the phrase "in ...
Can the FCC shut Howard up?(Cover Story)
May 17, 2004; ... Advertising Age says we are a nation not of red versus blue but of a "moral minority" versus an "edgy elite." And the moral minority is winning. Let us recite the litany of America's new official religion: "This mad race to the bottom," in the pronouncement of one member of the ...
Homophobia of all hues: the marriage-equality movement confronts antigay sentiment among blacks.(role of African American clergy)
May 17, 2004; ... In a matter of months, same-sex marriage has gone from being the utopian dream of a few wild-eyed gay activists to an imminent reality that has the religious right in a state of apoplexy. Lines are being drawn quickly, with the usual suspects taking their presumed places. On one side, ...
The archives and Allen Weinstein: critics see him as unfit to oversee records, noting his dubious ethical standards.(nomination of Allen Weinstein to National Archives and Records Administration)
May 17, 2004; ... The White House nomination of Allen Weinstein, a historian of Soviet espionage, as archivist of the United States has caused a storm of protest in the normally quiet world of archivists and historians. Nineteen organizations, including the Society of American Archivists and the ...
The unfinished revolution.(Beyond the Miracle: Inside the New South Africa; Unfinished Business: South Africa, Apartheid and Truth)(Book Review)
May 17, 2004; ... BEYOND THE MIRACLE: Inside the New South Africa. By Allister Sparks. Chicago. 370 pp. $32.50. UNFINISHED BUSINESS: South Africa, Apartheid and Truth. By Terry Bell, with Dumisa Ntsebeza. Verso. 385 pp. $26. PEOPLE WHO HAVE ...
Unforgettable.(Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life)(Book Review)
May 17, 2004; ... Sonata For Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life. By Geoffrey O'Brien. Counterpoint. 328 pp. $27.50. "This is a book written in the presence of music." So begins Geoffrey O'Brien's sprawling memoir-cum-critical essay, and the reader is tempted to ask: What ...
The kids are alright.
May 17, 2004; ... WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2004 Several of the recent Whitney Biennials have aspired to something more than a display of "the latest in American Art," to cite the phrase used to advertise the current show. They have advanced various theses on the state of American art, and of the American ...
Stupid leaders, useless spies, angry world.(Lakhdar Brahimi, United Nations)(George W. Bush, United States)
May 17, 2004; ... The stark fact that significant portions of our planet are under the supervision of exceptionally stupid and ill-informed people is provoking unwonted expressions of anger and alarm. It is hard to think of people more demure in rhetorical comportment than senior envoys of the UN or the ...
For their own good.("Babakiueria")(Movie Review)
May 17, 2004; ... One of my favorite little films is a satirical documentary titled Babakiueria. Only about thirty minutes long, it was made by the Australian Aboriginal community to commemorate the bicentennial of British rule. It's hard to find these days, so you'll have to trust my best recollection, but ...
Mutiny in Iraq.(United States)
May 17, 2004; ... Can we please stop calling it a quagmire? The United States isn't mired in a bog or a marsh in Iraq (quagmire's literal meaning); it is free-falling off a cliff. The only question now is: Who will follow the Bush clan off this precipice, and who will refuse to jump? More and ...
Give me your corporate big bucks ...(In Fact ...)(Brief Article)
May 17, 2004 ... * Recently, a nearly forgotten entity known as the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation emerged blinking into the sunlight of journalistic attention. News stories reported that the Senate Finance Committee is looking into the foundation's operations and the fat salaries drawn by its ...
Case not closed on 9/11.(In Fact ...)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
May 17, 2004 ... * Richard Falk writes: The 9/11 Commission hearings have focused entirely on whether our leaders acted with due urgency, given the existence of warnings and clues that a major Al Qaeda attack in this country was in the offing. But there are some deeper concerns that have not been touched ...
Victory for medical marijuana.(In Fact ...)(Brief Article)
May 17, 2004 ... * Having demonstrated its incompetence in preventing terrorism before 9/11, the Ashcroft Justice Department continues to terrorize distributors of marijuana for medical use. In California, however, where state law permits medical marijuana, the department has suffered a setback. On April ...
Mission unaccomplished.(George W. Bush on Iraq War, 2003)(Editorial)
May 17, 2004 ... When George W. Bush appeared aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln beneath a Mission Accomplished banner on May 1, 2003, to declare the end of "major combat operations," he was performing a PR stunt that embodied much that was--and is--wrong with his presidency. A year later, Bush is unable to ...