Economist, Aug. 4 A report follows the money trail (oil, of course) to corruption in Alaska. The largest state in the Union is getting a reputation for its politicians’ “big legal trouble” and questionable ethics. Rep. Don Young’s faces investigation for his murky connections to a company whose executives bribed state legislators. People are talking about junior Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s shady financial disclosures, too. But the worst case is that of Alaska’s senator of 39 years, Ted Stevens, who is known affectionately as “Uncle Ted” and might have accepted an oil company’s offer to remodel his home. Employees of that same company, VECO, pleaded guilty to bribing state legislators. … A commentary lightheartedly speculates about Newt Gingrich’s presidential ambitions, in light of his comment that the current GOP candidates are “pathetic” and that he’d never be caught “standing like a trained seal, waiting for someone to throw me a fish,” as today’s hopefuls presumably are. As the piece concludes, “a Newt in the offing would certainly enliven the race.”— M.S.
Time, Aug. 13
As Hurricane Katrina’s two-year anniversary approaches, the cover story argues that the Army Corps of Engineers is botching the rebuilding effort. Corps leaders say they know New Orleans’ survival depends on restoring the wetlands with “surge-softening marches, cypress swamps, and barrier islands.” Still, most of the money is going to traditional engineering projects like massive levees that are “designed to control rather than preserve nature.” More frightening, the new levees don’t inspire confidence: They “are still too short and weak … and the new pumps repeatedly malfunctioned during testing.” In short, the Louisiana coast isn’t getting any safer. … An article explains why Bush still hasn’t tossed out the scandal-plagued Gonzales, even though senators on both sides of the aisle have called for his ouster. Without the fiercely loyal Gonzales, the Department of Justice would be more likely to approve investigations into potentially shady White House activities, like the misuse of pre-war intelligence. Also, Democrats would parade his resignation as a major victory going into the 2008 campaign. So, don’t expect the attorney general’s ever-more-ridiculous tenure to end any time soon.— J.L.
New York Times Magazine, Aug. 5 The cover story delves into the racial politics of Carpentersville, Ill., a small Chicago suburb with a large Hispanic population. Two “village trustees” are waging a campaign using the increasingly popular technique of “[passing] ordinances and legislation aimed at making life miserable for illegal immigrants.” It’s a pretty flimsy cover for latent racism, and fliers for the campaign scream of a raging cultural superiority complex. Locals claim that Hispanic immigrants refuse to assimilate. If that’s true, it might be to their credit: Studies show “as immigrant children become more like Americans … they spend less time on homework, their blood cholesterol rises, divorce rates go up and levels of incarceration increase.”… A pseudo-editorial about the failure of Iraq reads like a mashup of Machiavelli’s The Prince and Herbert’s Epigrams. The main point is that “good judgment in politics starts with knowing when to admit your mistakes,” a skill President Bush seems to have never acquired because he has “led a charmed life” without ever “knowing what it is to fail.” The final prescription for successful leaders is strangely morose: “They must be men of sorrow acquainted with grief.”— A.B.
Weekly Standard, Aug. 6 A profile can’t summon enough praise for the “idealistic and principled and visionary” South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. Sanford fights the good fight against South Carolina’s “good old boy” status quo politics—and against good old boys that happen to be members of his own Republican Party. … An article examines the Middle East Media Research Institute’s effort to purge American ISPs of jihadist Web sites. The piece reports that companies are usually willing to remove extremist pages. But there’s one problem: The sites are often written in foreign languages, so “ISPs don’t realize who they’re helping.”… A commentary censures the new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown for his attempts to distance himself from Bush prior to his diplomatic visit to Washington. According to the piece, Brown neglects his commitment to the “special relationship” between the United States and Britain when he persuades “the Brits that he has shaken loose from the old Bush-Blair relationship.”— M.S.
Harper’s, August 2007 A cover story examines Rudy Giuliani’s personality force in a post-ideological political world. Giuliani has been successful, the piece argues, because he has traded on a smartly packaged brand of strength. His mayoral campaign succeeded by playing up myths (that the city was on the brink of a race-induced implosion, that Giuliani alone was responsible for cleaning up Times Square), but his tenure was actually unproductive. Though his oversight of Sept. 11 rescue efforts was uncoordinated, Giuliani enters the presidential race embedded in many voters’ minds as a hero. Time will tell, though, if Giuliani will be able to trump ideological hard-liners in the Republican Party with the sheer power of his personality. … An opinion piece decries the private sector’s invasion of American public schools, arguing that corporate patronage in the form of school vouchers and direct ownership spells disaster for democratic education. At some public “enterprise” schools, “students were more often being trained for careers at supermarket checkout counters or for the bottom-level ‘service jobs’ at nursing homes.”— K.E.
New Republic, Aug. 6 Steven Pinker examines the concept of kinship in an article pegged to the genealogy tracking craze. While our actual biological ties to far-flung family members are pretty feeble, we still feel kinship toward anyone who is a perceived relative—not only distant ancestors, but also people involved in simulated family experiences, like tribes or coalitions. Pinker argues that these familylike ties have proven problematic in societies like Iraq, where there is a “connection between Iraqis’ strong family ties and their tribalism, corruption, and lack of commitment to an overarching nation.”… An editorial laments Americans’ inability to take a break: “Americans, to put it bluntly, suck at vacationing.” While our European counterparts get upward of 40 days off each year, Americans average less than two weeks of vacation days. And more than half of American workers don’t even bother to use up all their vacation days.—K.E.
The New Yorker, Aug. 6 You better let “Damn Spam” stay in your junk folder. The article presents an uninspired history of spam and reads like an encyclopedia entry from a decade ago. Did you know “[the] openness [of the Internet] has been among its greatest assets and its biggest flaws”? Or that “viruses are actually tiny software programs that exploit weaknesses in networks or computer operating systems”? There are, however, some ridiculous facts you might not know: Spammers usually need to send “a million e-mails to get fifteen positive responses.”… An article tells the story of the unsolved murder of former Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Wales. The principal suspect is James Anderson, whom Wales tried to indict for federal crimes connected to Anderson’s business remodeling military helicopters. The whole plot is a murky mix of state and federal politics, FBI funding, and gun control. It’s a compelling story, but the peg to the recent firings of U.S. attorneys is a weak and sensational hook meant to lure the John Grisham set.— A.B.
Newsweek, Aug. 6 Not-quite-breaking news graces Newsweek’s cover: The “pre-eminent threat” to many wild species isn’t habitat destruction, the story warns, but hunting. Logging and mining companies have built roads deep into previously untouched jungles, allowing hunters easy access to game from silverback mountain gorillas to pigmy hippos. An increasing demand in Europe for bushmeat, largely from primates, has also turned hunting into a lucrative industry. Some governments have set aside parks and conservation areas, but even those spots are emptying out. … With Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton trading barbs over their respective amounts of experience, a piece wonders how important a jam-packed résumé really is. The answer is necessarily unsatisfying: “It’s not at all clear that experience necessarily leads to good decisions, or that inexperience necessarily leads to bad ones.” Obama cites his early opposition to the Iraq war as evidence of superior judgment, while Hillary’s campaign emphasizes foreign-policy chops by mentioning her travels to more than 80 countries. But the dust-up, the author concludes, “reveals more about the character of the campaigns than the qualifications of the candidates.”— C.B.
