|
 Founded in 1990 by three leading progressive intellectuals and policy experts – Robert Reich (later Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration), Robert Kuttner and Paul Starr – The American Prospect has evolved over its 15 years from liberalism’s most authoritative policy journal to a full-service liberal monthly, which has added in-depth political and social reporting and cultural commentary to its policy analyses. Recent Prospect articles widely cited in the press include Linda Hirshman’s reappraisal of feminism, Will Bunch’s expose of Republican Senator Rick Santorum’s dubious personal finances, and Mark Goldberg’s story on the butcher of Darfur who’s also a CIA asset. “Tapped,” the Prospect’s blog, is considered among the smartest and most liberal weblogs in the land, featuring such stellar young talents as Garance Franke-Ruta and Matt Yglesias.
In 2001, the magazine moved its editorial operations from Boston to Washington, DC, as Kuttner stepped down from day-to-day editing and Harold Meyerson, moving east from Los Angeles, took the reins. Today, the magazine is edited by former New York Magazine political editor Michael Tomasky, and Meyerson, as editor-at-large, authors a wide range of pieces. In the current April issue, he has a major piece on the problems of the economy in the era of outsourcing, which asks the question: Can America survive American capitalism?
|
Governing on Empty
December 21, 2011
Prospect.org
The Senate, having struck its compromise, has gone home. The House, controlled by delusional Republicans, has gone home. Payroll taxes are slated to rise, and unemployment insurance is set to expire before they return in January.
The compromise wasn’t just between the two parties in the Senate, apparently. According to Wednesday’s Washington Post, House Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor met with Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell on Friday and told him they’d get the votes to pass the two-month extension deal he’d worked out with Harry Reid. Boehner and Cantor now say they made no promises, but McConnell certainly thought they did, and, as the Post story notes, “McConnell, a 27-year member of the Senate … has no history of communication errors.”
Read More
There Goes the Last War Justification
December 20, 2011
Prospect.org
Well, that didn’t take long.
One day after the last U.S. troops left Iraq, the nation appears on the brink of reverting to sectarian conflict. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has ordered the arrest of Vice-President Tariq al-Hashemi for allegedly ordering and funding the assassinations of Shiite officials, and asked the parliament to pass a no-confidence vote that would enable him to dismiss Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlak. Both Hashemi and Mutlak are Sunni politicians aligned with the Iraquiya coalition, which is largely made of Sunnis and such secular Shiites as the coalition’s leader, Ayad Allawi. Maliki’s Dawa Party and its allies (including the backers of Moktada al-Sadr) consist largely of more religious Shiites.
Read More
Bottom Up
December 16, 2011
Prospect.org
In 1938, Congress passed, and FDR signed into law, the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established the first federal minimum wage and overtime protections. And that, to the extent that most Americans think about the minimum wage, was that. To be sure, Congress occasionally raises the minimum wage (though they’ve got a long way to go to make it a living wage), but the national law, covering all workers, has long since been established, right?
Not quite.
Read More
Legislative Legerdemain
December 15, 2011
Prospect.org
So you think congressional Republicans are the only right-wingers who like to append their pet (and sometimes, wedge) issues—like the Keystone pipeline—to must-pass legislation like the payroll tax-cut extension? Guess again—it looks to be a trans-Atlantic syndrome.
Turns out that David Cameron, Britain’s Tory prime minister, went to Brussels for the EU summit last week with exactly the same strategy.
Read More
No One Can Win the Republican Nomination
December 14, 2011
Prospect.org
With the air going out of the Newtster’s balloon—not surprisingly, as everyone who has ever worked with him (possibly, everyone who has ever met him) has declared him too unstable and egomaniacal to win—the latest smart-money bet in Iowa is Ron Paul, whose libertarian delusions render him unelectable as well. Mitt Romney, having entered that phase of the campaign where he has to campaign among actual people, is trending downward, too. That leaves Jon Huntsman, who can take votes from Romney but not likely from anyone else, and Rick Perry, who can still boast of impressive credentials but who’s still saddled with an unimpressive brain.
Read More
The Unanointed
December 13, 2011
Prospect.org
One law of politics (and I use that term loosely; the laws of politics are a lot more mutable than those of, say, thermodynamics or North Dakota) is that when a presidential primary process looks essentially decided, the party establishment steps in to endorse the presumptive nominee and pressures the other candidate, or candidates, to drop out of the race. It’s never in the party’s interest to drag the contest on, particularly when it means that said presumptive nominee will continue to be subjected to more criticism from his intraparty rival or rivals.
Read More
|
|
|
|
|
Page 20 of 36 |
In September, 2009 Atlantic Monthly named 
