Heather Rogers examines the hidden threat to climate change posed by greenhouse-gas generating landfills, Jeremy Scahill probes the motives behind George W. Bush's war on Al Jazeera and Jonathan Kozol pens a stirring challenge to apartheid education in America.
Christopher Hayes : Progressive groups that mobilized for the 2004 elections are now dismissed as failures. But though they were unable to defeat Bush, grassroots activists are creating waves across the country. They may be the ticket to Republican defeat and the creation of a new movement.
Heather Rogers : Gas-guzzling SUVs take a lot of blame, but landfills make stealthy stealthy contributions to climate change. While they should be developing innovative waste disposal strategies, corporate-owned landfills use techniques that generate heat-trapping methane that accelerate global warming.
John S. Friedman : The tragedy that is Iraq can never be told in numbers alone, but the hard facts--every loss, every life, every dollar--only strengthen the arguments against this brutal war.
Jonathan Kozol : Apartheid education is alive in America and rapidly increasing in hyper-segregated inner-city schools. And though it's now fashionable for policy-makers to declare integration a failure, effective programs across the country still survive--and deserve to thrive.
: George W. Bush's plan to privatize Social Security is dead, thanks to a remarkable mobilization by progressive groups. Much can be learned from the way The Campaign for America's Future, labor unions, MoveOn.org and others worked together to inform citizens and arouse opposition to the plan.
John Nichols
:
The controversy surrounding conservative lobbyist Jack Abramoff is
creating headaches for red-state and swing-state Republicans and
opportunities for Democrats to turn a national bribery and
influence-peddling scandal into political paydirt.
Jeremy Scahill : A top-secret memo detailing George W. Bush's proposal to bomb Al Jazeera is not "outlandish," as the White House claims. The Bush Administration had been threatening, insulting and imprisoning Al Jazeera staffers and other unembedded journalists long before Bush reportedly floated the idea to Tony Blair.
David Cole : To this day, no explanation has been offered as to why José Padilla spent years bandied around in US courts and detention centers. Now that Padilla faces reduced criminal charges, the government will never have to explain its actions, and never will.
Daniel Lazare : The Jewish Century defies the conventional view of Jews as outsiders and traces their symbiotic relationship with Christians. A History of the Jews in the Modern World follows the impact the multitude of journeys that Diaspora Jews have taken on countries in the modern era.
Jack Rakove
:
America's Constitution: A Biography examines
America's obsession with the Constitution--its origins, evolution and
interpretation.
Brenda Wineapple : Nancy Drew has been a fixture in young girls' lives since 1930. But the continuing appeal of this spunky American icon--never sad, wrinkled or misunderstood--is both heartwarming and a little scary.
Still going strong at 93, Studs Terkel has produced yet another oral history, And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey.
Calvin Trillin
:
Dick Cheney channels Nat King Cole in an unforgettable rendition of the
meaning of the word "reprehensible."
Patricia J. Williams
:
It's one thing for our State Department to plant phony stories in the
media or jam broadcasts in Cuba. It's quite another for conservative
policy analyst Frank Gaffney bolster's George Bush's grudge against Al
Jazeera by arguing that it was "imperative that enemy media be taken
down."
Eric Alterman : With professionals at the top forced out and replaced by GOP fundraisers, the right-wing takeover of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is now plain to see. Though CPB's Inspector General has exposed former chair Kenneth Tomlinson's ethical transgressions, what else are they hiding?
Nicholas von Hoffman : General Motors is dimming the headlights on its industrial utopia in Spring Hill, Tennessee. The cutback at the visionary Saturn plant, where workers and managers once shared decision-making and cooperated as equals, is the latest affront to US autoworkers and American self-esteem.
Dave Zirin : The New York Mets' squelching of first baseman Carlos Delgado's longstanding protest of the war in Iraq during the seventh-inning stretch speaks volumes about how the rules of the game have changed on political dissent.
Robert Scheer : A trove of new documents detailing the corruption and influence-peddling by Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed and Tom DeLay is sweeping the high-minded prophets of the Republican revolution off their pedestals.
Nicholas von Hoffman : Under pressure from Wall Street, newspaper journalism is being frog-marched out of the media marketplace. And once it's gone, how will we know anything?
Jeremy Brecher & Brendan Smith : A showdown looms in Congress this week over two competing measures involving bedrock human and legal rights: John McCain's legislation to ban all forms of torture and Lindsey Graham's proposal to strip federal courts of the power to hear habeas corpus appeals by terror suspects.
Cover by Gene Case & Stephen Kling/Avenging Angels
