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The article presents information related to political and social conditions in the U.S., during cold war. Sandy Weill, chairman of the Travelers Group, told on CNN in January 1997 that "I think as we look at this world that we are living in, there are opportunities for a lot of terrific things to happen." With the end of the cold war, a number of former KGBers have come forward to tell their spy stories. The most recent debut is that of retired KGB officer Aleksandr Semyonovich Feklisov, who says he was the Soviet intelligence agent who during World War II, personally received information from a member of a spy ring Julius Rosenberg. Feklisov's story highlights a problem that has bedeviled students of the U.S.'s cold war spy cases.

The article presents information on various social and political developments in the United States. The ban on intact dilation and extraction has been re-introduced in both houses of Congress in a tinny of right-wing rhetoric. In addition to the usual comments from the usual suspects the current conservative discourse features outrage that Ron Fitzsimmons, who represents a trade organization of abortion clinics, lied in an interview with Ted Koppel when he claimed that there were only 450 independent developmental evaluation's performed each year. Confirmation hearings for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) directors are often best judged by what is not mentioned. When Anthony Lake, President Bill Clinton's former National Security Adviser, came before the Senate Intelligence Committee as the nominee for chief spook, scalp-hungry Republican members were armed with questions regarding his opposition to an extensive ballistic missile defense; the Administration's actions in Haiti; the White House's decision not to block Iranian arms shipments to Bosnia; the National Security Council officers who did not pass to Lake Federal Bureau of Investigation information on suspected Chinese efforts to influence U.S. elections; and Lake's plans to bolster morale at the agency.

This article focuses on prevailing political conditions in the U.S. and around the world, as of February 10, 1997. Political leader Yasir Arafat landed here on January 19, 1997 amid clouds of celebratory smoke the colors of the Palestinian flag marking the pad where his helicopter was to touch down. Gazillionaire right-winger Richard Mellon Scaife gives uncentered individuals like journalist Christopher Ruddy lots of money to make up stories for his two primary media outlets, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and the Western Journalism Center.

At Texaco Inc., not one of the company's top 500 executives is African-American, and for years black employees have complained of assorted forms of discrimination and race-baiting. The Pentagon has often been presented evidence of systematic rape and sexual harassment in its ranks. It has been found that 11 percent of women vets at a V.A. hospital endured rape while in uniform and another 10 percent had resisted an attempted rape by superiors or colleagues. The Texaco and Pentagon cases may be products of specific institutional cultures regarding blacks and women.

This article presents information on several social and political events, in the U.S. The grand classical rotunda where a Columbia University president named Dwight Eisenhower once welcomed Princess Elizabeth rang with cheers on the night of October 3 as nearly 2,000 people participated in a giant rally for social change. The event, modeled on the anti-Vietnam War teach-ins of the 1960s, was intended to educate and encourage a new generation of students and to heal the division between intellectuals and unions created by that war. Urgent business kept John Deutch; Director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), from delivering the keynote address at the Venona Conference, held October 3-4 at the National War College in Washington, D.C. On the surface, the purpose of the conference, which was said by its sponsors to signify a "new openness" on the part of the intelligence community, was to give the participants, first crack at providing an understanding and a context for the 2,900 previously secret messages the Soviets allegedly sent to their U.S. spies in the 1940s.

This article presents information on various political developments in the U.S. The conservative U.S. Supreme Court majority, wrote right-wing legal advocate Clint Bolick recently, "is hanging on by the thread of a solitary appointment." U.S. President Bill Clinton nominees Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, now form a crucial dissenting bloc on matters of race and social equity. The Court's right is itself deeply divided, with a religious and libertarian minority, Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, increasingly isolated by the extremity of their rhetoric. Amid the hullabaloo over control of the presidency and the U.S. Congress, this election season brings three promising challenges to the increasingly moribund two-party system, Maine's voters appear ready to approve public financing of elections, the Supreme Court will consider eliminating all state bans against fusion, which would allow major-party candidates to accept the nomination of smaller parties.

This article presents the author's views on the political situation in the United States. Democrats made ready to party in Chicago in renewed spirits. The President still enjoys a lead over his rivals in the ever-shifting polls. A Democratic majority in Congress is conceivably within reach. In the presidential race, one candidate decries slow growth and falling wages, offering lower taxes and less government to get the economy going. Another rails against political corruption and false promises, pledging to clean up Washington, balance the budget and enact a trade policy that works for working people. Democrats are not likely to fare well as the complacent party of the status quo-particularly in a slow-growth economy of stagnant incomes and rising insecurity.

The article gives information about the U.S. activities regarding various social and political issues. Despite the encouraging normalcy of the first round of voting, a cloud of profound disbelief still hovers over post-Soviet Russia's first presidential election. For the first time in many years, Pentagon officials are talking openly about using nuclear weapons in a pre-emptive strike against a nonnuclear power. The intended target is Libya, which is reported by the U.S. intelligence to be completing work on an underground chemical weapons production facility at Tarhunah, some forty miles south of Tripoli.

This article presents information on world politics. There is a minority group that "enjoys enormous influence in American media" even while "composing no more than 4 percent of the population." This same group wields "disproportionate political power" and is protected by an exclusive elite "like the Knights Templars." That could be U.S. politician Louis Farrakhan inveighing against the you-know-whos. In a rather fantastic vision, the employee-employer relationship is much more attenuated. Workers face employers and one another as autonomous individuals--and as respectful equals. In a fast-changing and flexible economy, employers freely expand and contract in response to market signals.

The article discusses matters related to social and political issues of the U.S. It states that on September 6, 1956, the Textile Workers Union of America narrowly won an election to represent workers at a Milliken mill in Darlington, South Carolina. Six days later Milliken moved to shut it down. The union filed charges with the U.S. National Labor Relations Board. The board ordered businessman Roger Milliken to give the displaced Darlington workers back pay. It states that as the U.S.-Cuban relations plunge, once again, into the abyss of election-year politics, opportunities for ending the cold war in the Caribbean have disappeared as suddenly and violently as the two Cessnas shot down by Cuba on February 24.

The article presents information about several political events in the United States. Violence in retail establishments and workplaces is on the rise even as other crime declines. The periodical "American Family Physician" reports that since 1985 "murderous sprees" by workers, former employees and customers have increased by 200 to 300 percent. Republican governors from New Jersey to California supposedly the "safe streets" crowd have been similarly going postal, deregulating, defunding and privatizing psychiatric care for the indigent. In addition to being a politician Republican majority whip Tom DeLay is a talented man. In addition to being a politician, a former exterminator and a first rate vote counter, DeLay is also, apparently, a world-class chemist and climatologist.

Political economists, unlike their colleagues in the dismal science, haven't yet invented an index to measure a country's annual Gross Political Product (G.P.P.); but if such a measure could be imagined for the year now ending, its trend lines would be grim indeed. Washington is not the only place shaping G.P.P but it is still the focus for most of when one thinks of changing the direction of the country. Neither party has much to brag about in this respect. Democrats, retreat since the mid-term election, have embarked on major initiatives only in foreign affairs.

The article presents information on welfare reform plans of Congressional Republicans. While Congressional Republicans were completing their welfare reform plan, Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala appeared before a gathering of educators and slammed the GOP measure for placing "special interests ahead of the children's interests." Her speech was read as a sign that the White House was moving toward confrontation with the Republicans on this front. Shalala, whose disgust with the welfare bill has been no secret within her department, has not done much to rouse public sentiment against it.

The article focuses on the life and political participation of the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by a right-wing zealot after attending a peace rally in Tel Aviv's main square in November 1994. That Rabin was even addressing a rally that was virtually a Peace Now event was itself extraordinary-not so much for Peace Now's support for Palestinian statehood, a principle Rabin had not yet endorsed, but for what it said about how far the Prime Minister had traveled politically in his lifetime. During the 1948 war Rabin personally expelled some 50,000 Palestinian Arabs from the towns of Lydda and Ramleh.

This article focuses on racism in the United States. The acquittal of the black American O.J. Simpson has underscored, the chasm that separates black and white Americans. With nationalist sentiment on the rise in the black community, a conservative politics indifferent to racial inequality ascendant among whites and many on the left entranced by their own group causes, the ideal of an integrated society seems more remote than ever. America's residential apartheid results from a long history of government policy, individual choices and the inequitable operation of a putatively free market.

The late John Rawls was, by all accounts, a remarkably modest and generous person, much beloved by his friends and students, and profoundly uninterested in the kinds of fame and [...]

One big problem with liberal and leftist debate about Al Qaeda or Iraq is that it rarely seems to have much to do with Al Qaeda or Iraq. Too often [...]

The more things change ... Roughly ten years ago, I celebrated the criminal indictment of Elliott Abrams for lying to Congress by writing an Op-Ed in the New York Times [...]

In a weapons producing nation under Jesus In the fabled crucible of the free world Camera crews search for clues amid the detritus And entertainment shapes the land The way [...]

Something about Al Gore brings out the worst in people, and nowhere is this truer than in the so-called 'liberal media.' Journalists' 'default' position on Gore, Joe Klein notes, is [...]

Shortly after September 11, Dan Rather--or 'El Diablo' as he is known to conservatives--appeared on Letterman and announced, 'George Bush is the President, he makes the decisions, and, you know, [...]

'My only regret with Osama bin Laden is that he did not manage to kill every member of the Wall Street Journal editorial staff.' 'In this recurring nightmare of a [...]

It's only August, but I'll go out on a limb and congratulate the Village Voice's Keith Harris for what I feel confident will stand the test of time as the [...]

Speaking on NPR recently, Cokie Roberts, the soon-to-retire co-host of ABC's This Week, falsely informed her listeners that 'the President was exonerated by the Securities and Exchange Commission.' In fact, [...]

Writing in a forthcoming issue of The Journal of Israeli History about Israeli revisionism, Mark Lilla of the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought makes the observation that while [...]

Affirmative action, while generally a good and necessary thing, has always been more complicated than its supporters admit. It inspires a backlash; it often promotes people who are underprepared for [...]

Did you know that the mere act of asking what kind of warning members of the Bush Administration may have received about a 9/11-like attack is just clever hype by [...]

The essential mystery of the 2000 election has always been this: How in the world did George W. Bush ever get close enough to invite the Republican-appointed majority on the [...]

Howard Gardner, the noted education/cognition specialist, recently undertook, with two colleagues, an in-depth study of the work-related happiness of two groups of people, geneticists and journalists, for a book called [...]

To immerse oneself in Robert Caro's heroic biographies is to come face to face with a shocking but unavoidable realization: Much of what we think we know about money, power [...]

How cool is Jennifer Harbury? She is currently arguing her own case before the Supreme Court, demanding the right to sue the government because, she maintains, its leaders deliberately misled [...]

Andrew Sullivan cannot have an easy life. A Catholic gay man who is also HIV positive, his political views have led him to attach himself to a party, a movement [...]

Nation pay rates, you may have heard from brother Trillin, are not those of Conde Nast. Every once in a while I don't mind this, because the job just kind [...]

The McLaughlin Group is about to 'celebrate' its twentieth anniversary. We might as well 'celebrate' the discovery of anthrax. The show flatters itself--and its corporate sponsor, GE--that it is providing [...]

George W. Bush's State of the Union address has laid bare his Administration's political strategy. It is to manipulate the grief, anger and patriotism inspired by September 11 to fit [...]

The New York Times's Martin Arnold calls the success of Bernard Goldberg's Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News 'perhaps the most astonishing publishing event in [...]

It's that time of the decade again; time to ask the time-honored question, 'Whither the Public Intellectual?' We did it in the 1980s when Russell Jacoby first published his still-well-regarded [...]

The New Republic's advertising copy promises 'vital intelligence in the war against terrorism.' Inside the magazine, its editors publish an 'Idiocy Watch' devoted to allegedly dumb things that have been [...]

Something quite odd is going on with media coverage of this war. Critics on all sides of the political equation have historically attacked the media for bias in one direction [...]

Now that we know that Al Gore not only beat George Bush by roughly 537,000 votes nationally, but also handily defeated him among legally cast votes in Florida, I suppose [...]

The New York mayor's race was weird and depressing in virtually every imaginable way. Yes, Mark Green ran a lackluster, quasi-incumbent's campaign for much of it and yes, I wish [...]

The story of what historians call the second cold war often begins with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, which shocked Americans into their own overreaction in Central [...]

Patriotism requires no apologies. Like anti-Communism and anti-Fascism, it is an admirable and thoroughly sensible a priori assumption from which to begin making more nuanced judgments. Nor does patriotism need [...]

Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head; And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds [...]

I thought I was alone in being unable to hear the words 'liberalmedia' without thinking of Antonio Gramsci. But it turns out I have a comrade in Rush Limbaugh. Writing [...]

Last night I had the strangest dream... All of America's wealthy, conservative and safely belligerent pundits had been delivered by a just and beneficent Almighty Power to a Palestinian refugee [...]

The problem of punditocracy ignorance does not usually constitute a national security threat. If most Americans walk around misinformed about Gary Condit's sexual escapades or Elian Gonzalez's emotional state, the [...]

WILLIAM KRISTOL KIDNAPPED BY ALIENS--REPLACED BY SILLY, DISHONEST IMPOSTER 'I admit it. The liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by [...]

Christ killing has been back in the news. It seems that my ancestors are once again catching hell for their alleged betrayal of God's son, this time from fundamentalist Christian [...]

Wonder why it took ex-Republican Jim Jeffords to alert the national media to the fact that the Bush Administration is run out of the extremist end of the GOP? Writing [...]