IN 2004, IN A RURAL ELEMENTARY-SCHOOL CAFETERIA decorated with murals of dancing milk cartons, members of Pennsylvania’s Dover Area School Board shocked local constituents and the national scientific community with a small but significant change in its biology curriculum, requiring students to be made aware of “intelligent design.” At the time, I was a reporter […]

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IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO WATCH the November 14 meeting of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform without feeling some sympathy for the State Department’s Inspector General, Howard “Cookie” Krongard. A report prepared by the committee staff was the playbill for a Capitol Hill drama that would unfold in three acts, with intermissions for […]

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THE HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE INVESTIGATION into the political prosecution and conviction of former Alabama governor Don Siegelman, briefly discussed in the November 1 issue, leads inevitably to former senior White House aide Karl Rove. Although Rove has left the White House and is living in Texas, and would probably try to assert executive privilege were his […]

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Thompson v. Roe—Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson is packaged as the safe choice for secular conservatives who place economics above the “God, guns and gays” campaigns that animate the Christian right. But a careful reading of Thompson on reproductive rights suggests otherwise. On Meet the Press on November 4, Tim Russert quoted from the 2004 Republican Party […]

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Editor’s note: On October 4 Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute addressed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Smith drew on all the anathemas of the far right to attack a treaty the committee was considering. “Did anyone expect the Endangered Species Act to become a national land use planning act? Did anyone expect Superfund […]

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