Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Inside Campaign Finance: Myths and Realities. Frank J. Sorauf. Yale, $27.50. Sorauf’s latest book shows once again how little social science can teach us about how to...
...Treasury...
...The political scientists’ numbers teach us that the spendinglimit proposals favored by Common Cause and congressional Democrats are based on a false premise...
...Few punks, and certainly not the Sex Pistols, would have denied being capitalists...
...and so on...
...He captures the outrage that most Americans feel toward drug pushers who are strangling an entire generation of urban poor...
...Chapter by 20-page chapter, Klaidman sketches chronologies of the public policy debates that have raged over AIDS, nuclear power, pesticides, the greenhouse effect, smoking, radon, and cholesterol...
...And how can we tell when the media is hyping a story...
...And then there are the poor and middle-class blacks-burdened with their own feelings of economic and social helplessness and fearful that the horrors of drugs and violence that have overtaken the black underclass will consume them...
...But Klaidman isn’t out to depress us...
...Take asbestos...
...Since punk rock’s demisearguably on January 14, 1978, when the Sex Pistols’ lead singer, Johnny Rotten, walked off stage for the last time in San Francisco muttering, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated...
...The latter is more properly the realm of the psychologist or, in extreme cases, the criminologist...
...The first-day media coverage of this report, even in The New York Times, left the impression that if xrays could endanger women with this rare gene, they might imperil other women as well...
...The fact is that the more an incumbent spends, the less likely he or she is to win...
...It’s a rich subject, and Savage tends to get carried away, but at least he gives it a shot...
...In one story, he tries to make fun of Gates by describing an incident in which the software wizard tries to “rap” with a group of young blacks on a street corner in Ann Arbor...
...Whose judgment should we accept when scientists disagree or change their views...
...we were just making records...
...Political scientists are in on the secret, too...
...While some early versions of the software contain the date function, it’s far from universal...
...But he falls short by leaving us bereft of advice where we most need it: How do we arrive at a conclusion-perhaps only a temporary one-in the midst of such confusion...
...Pammy is Cringely’s fictional girlfriend, and readers of the Cringely column get a generous dose of the ups and downs of their relationship sprinkled amid the industry gossip...
...Such pure public funding would help challengers most, which probably accounts for why so few incumbents favor it...
...To back the idea, Savage would also need to explain Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Bruce Springsteen-three superstars who arrived in the post-punk epoch and meant more to the world’s youth than Johnny Rotten ever did...
...punk has been analyzed by countless sociologically inclined pop critics...
...Suppose, for example, that your family pediatrician recommends that your 9-year-old daughter get a routine chest x-ray because her lungs have been congested ever since pneumonia was diagnosed among friends at school...
...Data is always going to be imperfect, and conclusions subject to change...
...Well, Bennett hasn’t changed much since leaving the public sector...
...This is nothing new to pop-think of Elvis...
...Punk was a living exemplar of the subcultural process: The dispossessed gain cultural access, but at a price...
...But he then goes off on an odd and unsupportable tangent, arguing that IBM will self-destruct on December 31, 1999...
...Rather, in his own words, he hopes this book will “help fund my retirement...
...Like every great pop movement before or since, punk would have its zenith and then fade, leaving society’s foundations intact...
...Turns out society might prefer to leave it in our kids’ schoolsBobby’s risk of being harmed by it is miniscule, says the new dogma, but woe to the construction worker who pulls it out...
...Is cholesterol good this week, or bad...
...Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces took an ambitious, if occasionally preposterous, stab at linking punk to every disruptive impulse since the sacking of Carthage...
...Savage says, for instance, that “the Sex Pistols can be seen as a last gasp of youth culture as a single, unifying force-that sixties,ideal which all those concerned with the group both hated and loved...
...the need for every child to have a real home and a real education-in a school building and a classroom environment that will not drive him into the streets...
...But having put the issues on the table, he discredits himself by pointing fingers, which only hampers any progress toward finding a middle ground...
...The managing director of the Clash’s record label at the time said, “I wasn’t interested in looking at the Clash as a social phenomenon...
...Outlawing their political activity has not spurred the millions of PAC contributors to even so much as a whimper of protest or self-defense,” he writes...
...Despite all that has happened-the Charles Keating affair, the disgrace of Jim Wright, the return of the $100,000 fat-cat contributor to presidential campaigns, the collapse of electoral competition in the House-Sorauf’s views remain pretty much what they were in 1988 when he published his very thorough textbook, Money in American Elections...
...What was the size of the research study, and were the subjects animals or humans...
...Well, not quite...
...I finished the book with a sense that Cringely hadn’t found an insider’s view of anything...
...Is Cringely giving away why he wrote this book...
...There’s some merit to this idea...
...But it was a commodity that managed to threaten a large group of people who, as a matter of course, write off pop as frivolous, irrelevant, and inconsequential...
...The song was banned from radio by the government...
...There is not “too much” being spent on elections...
...As a result, even the most thoughtfully reported and composed stories . . . rarely, if ever, are able to provide the definitive answers the public is seeking...
...True enlightenment consists of knowing what to do in the absence of good data-and doing it...
...The author seems jealous of Gates, whose paper wealth at Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, is heftier than the gross national product of many countries...
...But he leaves it at that, never identifying which forces, whether corporate (global media conglomerates) or consumer (fragmented teenage audiences), came into play after punk to destroy this unity...
...Cringely, whose real name is Mark Stephens, a reporter and gossip columnist at Infoworld, a computer industry trade magazine, should know that...
...Like the movement itself, the best writing about punk has been intellectually audacious...
...Inevitably, though, Bennett takes his claims too far...
...The problem is that Klaidman’s argument should have been taken further...
...It is a shame that Bennett takes this approach, because despite his bullying attempts to discredit Democrats, liberals, and “intellectuals” as the rulers of a domestic Evil Empire, many of the views he lays out in this book are worthwhile...
...Hidden in the sea of health reports, he contends, are “generizable patterns” that can help the reader evaluate the significance of the reports...
...Similarly, Sorauf concedes that the dominance of special-interest money is at least seen as a problem by the public...
...Of course, punk music may have been just another commodity...
...Bennett is at his best when he articulates these concerns...
...Brooks Jackson England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, the Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond...
...An intriguing claim...
...This should be of no comfort: S&L regulation used to be one of those “less visible” issues...
...An example: Last December you may have read in your favorite newspaper about a scientific study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, which reported that women who carry a particular rare gene may be predisposed to breast cancer...
...Savage’s reading of punk’s politics is as literal as that of the people he scorns-the smug, insular British establishment that saw a bunch of black-leather-clad kids with spiked hair and safety-pin earrings and thought them a genuine menace...
...He compiles here his oft-stated agenda...
...Now, some researchers say, dioxin may be dangerous only after high levels of exposure...
...To get Democrats to go along, Sorauf would let PACs and wealthy individuals give more to parties...
...William J. Bennett...
...And perhaps he does...
...We want the consequences of public funding without the public funding itself...
...He refers to Apple whiz-kid Steven Jobs as a sociopath and describes Lotus development founder Mitchell Kapor as guilt-ridden by his success...
...Here, he implies that such things as a “clear and focused academic mission, instructional leadership, [and] high expectations” alone are enough to create effective schools -regardless of whether the school is in affluent Montgomery County or impoverished Bedford Stuyvesant...
...And concerning the drug war, he restates his belief in maintaining an expanded use of military intelligence, a tough attitude that leaves little room for examining the roots of drug use...
...Sorauf says he isn’t arguing against all reform, but it sometimes seems that he is...
...This is particularly shameful’to admit when there are thousands of schools that can’t afford to supply each child with a textbook, or even a desk and chair...
...Gigi Georges Health in the Headlines: The Stories Behind the Stories...
...As it became clear that the country had to make a choice,” he worries, “which side would the punks be on?’ There is rich irony here...
...And for those that have it, it’s a problem that can be patched with proper programming...
...People obliged...
...Is more data necessarily better...
...Like an anthropologist collecting recipes from a tribe of cannibals, Sorauf studies and describes but doesn’t condemn...
...That point is reached when the mass market and mass media take over, a necessary process if a movement is to become pop...
...Again, not quite...
...To be sure, such intangibles are extremely important, but so is adequate funding...
...But the Democrats’ failure to overcome tremendous social and economic hurdles does not, as Bennett implies, make them conspirators against society...
...Spending limits could hurt...
...A decade ago, Bill Bennett swept into Washington and swirled up a tornado of controversy...
...Moreover, the researchers found evidence that those AT-carriers who had undergone routine diagnostic x-rays during their lives were substantially more likely to have suffered breast cancer than those who had not...
...Even the last clause in the subtitle is nastyand wrong...
...It made you a moron A potential H-Bomb...
...Republicans have more party money and so already favor higher party limits...
...Essentially, yes...
...Punk seemed dangerous to some in Britain in 1977 for much the same reason rap seems dangerous to some in America today: Its “program” was radical, sometimes troubling, but more than that, it spoke in tongues that parents just didn’t understand...
...The Callaghan government seemed unable to govern...
...A colleague of mine at The Economist, Michael Elliott, went so far as to suggest that by unleashing a teeming generation of artists and street-bred entrepreneurs, punk did more to resurrect the British economy in the eighties than did Margaret Thatcher...
...Klaidman’s moral is simple: “There is room for improvement in coverage of health risks, even by America’s best news organizations...
...It doesn’t...
...Soft money is regulated only by varied and often permissive state laws, and Sorauf isn’t about to tamper with states’ rights: “The loophole is the result, at least in part, of American federalism...
...What we really need from Klaidman, or some equally politically uninflected author, is not more evidence that scientists routinely change their minds...
...In higher education, he lambastes the academic elite as narrowminded, misguided, self-serving, and unable to accept criticism...
...A few years ago Sorauf said, “There simply are no data . . . that would support the popular assertions about the ‘buying’ of the Congress...
...how to take action amid ignorance...
...Both sides of the political spectrum agree on the broad themes: the importance of a nurturing family and role models for our children...
...A journalist who spent 23 years with The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The International Herald Tribune, Klaidman earnestly recounts the histories of seven of society’s most difficult environmental and public health dilemmas...
...Jon Savage...
...Whichever it is, it can’t be both...
...That is the date when much of the world’s COBOL software, the de facto standard for large corporate accounting and finance programs, is supposed to stop working because the date function wasn’t designed to operate past the end of the century...
...Simon Frith and Howard Home’s Art Into Pop picked apart the naive myth that punk was an “eruption from the gutters of innercity recession” and showed instead that it was instigated mainly by middleclass art school students...
...Maybe you’ve noticed revisionism running rampant through the environmentalhazards community of late...
...It has its computer journalism roots back in the early eighties when Stewart Alsop, an editor at another trade newspaper, Computer Business News (and the son of the Washington columnist), was looking for a name to use to deflect public relations firms hawking “news releases...
...Rather, we need a “how to” book to guide us through in the meantime: how to make hard choices on public health issues in the absence of good data and scientific consensus...
...Unlike some pop critics, he knows that punk’s history only makes sense as part of a bigger story-the story of Britain, especially London, in the mid-seventies...
...Do elites drive the “subcultural process,” or do “the dispossessed...
...It is a conundrum, and a conundrum with no solution...
...But also warranted...
...Even more disturbing, some of the anecdotes Stephens presents as fact are modified and occasionally downright distorted...
...It shows that influence “tends to be strongest on the narrower, less visible issues before Congress...
...Although Alsop left Infoworld in 1984, Cringely stayed and became the alter-ego of Stephens, who brought his own brand of gossip mongering along...
...A member of the Labour Party (the left wing, remember) said, “If pop music is going to be used to destroy our established institutions, then it ought to be destroyed first...
...We know where the cleanest money in politics comes from: the US...
...Near the end of the book, he offers an intriguing analysis of IBM, describing in detail how Big Blue, the world’s largest computer maker, has sown fear, uncertainty, and doubt among its competitors and customers in order to control the computer industry...
...When he isn’t taking gratuitous swipes at Gates, Stephens takes aim at others who figured prominently in the creation of the personal computer industry...
...Strikes, race riots, rising street crime-a whiff of apocalypse was in the air...
...Klaidman’s measure of his own success would be the degree to which his reader becomes a more skeptical observer of scientific reports...
...His prescription for the nation’s failing public schools is essentially threefold: teaching a more “moral” curriculum, imposing greater school accountability, and implementing full public-private school parental choice...
...Purportedly written in the style of Barbarians at the Gate, it claims to offer an insider’s account of the personal computer industry, but it’s not even in the ballpark...
...The study specifically warned women carrying the AT gene not to undergo mammography...
...If nothing else, Bennett’s book serves as a stark reminder of the battle lines that have been drawn between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans...
...In pushing his agenda and calling for a renewed dialogue, Bennett claims to have an unflinching dedication to our children’s future...
...At the same time, the conservatives’ sudden recognition of the void between the liberals’ aims and accomplishments doesn’t make conservative policy the answer to underclass woes...
...But making the parties themselves even more beholden to special-interest money and rich donors is the very reverse of reform...
...Oxford, $24.95...
...For scientists, reappraising the evidence is as essential as the original research itself...
...the need for adequate health care...
...He skillfully argues against decriminalization of drugs and makes the case for a strong criminal justice system as a force for change...
...Sorauf has a point, but goes too far in chastising the press for failing to applaud the leveling off of spending in House and Senate elections since 1986...
...About 50 pages into Accidental Empires, Stephens implores his readers to “finish this book...
...Ultimately, Sorauf gives up...
...But it’s precisely pop’s political ambivalence that makes it interesting...
...Gates, portrayed here as nerd supreme, reportedly has no trouble getting dates...
...This is not fireside reading...
...As rock critic Lester Bangs wrote, punk rockers were “authentic because their music came[d] such brutal conviction, not because they [were] Noble Savages...
...Elvis Presley...
...But rather than making the case for such reform, Sorauf dismisses public funding as politically unattainable...
...Sadly, Savage’s book isn’t...
...Preachy...
...Was Chuck Berry an “elite...
...Sorauf has little patience for journalistsespecially those in televisionwho persist in seeing cause-and-effect relationships between money and votes where political scientists see only correlations...
...As he points out, the Sex Pistols and other bands were often accused of harboring neoNazi sympathies...
...All pop movements have started with elites-and none, to that date, more self-consciously than punk-but there is always a point where the elite loses control...
...The music may have been made by the middle-class art students, but its nihilistic (or negationist, if you like) energy and revolutionary intimations were resonant nonetheless...
...Yet it often seems that his idea of a dialogue is standing before those who have differing views and bludgeoning them until they capitulate...
...In their heart of hearts many scholars of campaign finance would choose . . . public grants or subsidies without spending limits, the option they call ‘floors without ceilings,’ ” says Sorauf...
...Savage summons up these ghosts, describing a milieu in which punk’s appeal to the young-frustrated, angry, or simply bored-was natural...
...When considering education, for example, Bennett is on target when he emphasizes the need for greater commitment on the part of parents, teachers, and administrators to make schools work...
...God save the Queen She’s not a human being...
...Follow-up stories explained that only a tiny percentage of the population carries the gene...
...Sadly because it is clear Savage has at least some sense that these issues are the ones his colleagues have yet to sort out...
...When Alsop migrated to Infoworld in 1983, Cringely came along...
...it would tie candidates more tightly to their parties and correspondingly reduce their reliance on PACs and other special-interest donors...
...This is not to say that political science is entirely irrelevant on this subject...
...In the end, Accidental Empires is a grumpy, mean-spirited book...
...He proudly asserts that as secretary of education, he “never fought for raising the federal education budget...
...Stephen Klaidman...
...He eagerly admits that one of his telephone lines at Infoworld is dedicated to receiving bits of gossip from disgruntled engineers and others in the know...
...It’s an interesting thought, but highly dubious...
...He implies that this “stability” of the system shows that everything is all right...
...And how can we protect our lives in the process...
...But we can’t help but wonder why we bothered to pick it up in the first place...
...John Heilemann Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date...
...He says the search to find disinterested money for politics is “not unlike the stork theory of human reproduction...
...That many punkers displayed swastikas prominently on their clothing did nothing to dispel this notion...
...The name Cringely predates Stephens’ anival at Infoworld...
...That alone is enough to make a reader wary of contributing $19.95 to the effort...
...Many of his stories have already been told-and told better-in earlier accounts of the personal computer industry...
...He says the press suffers from a “neo-Progressive worldview,” fundamentally distrustful of money, and that reporters are constantly writing “a morality play, with one simple plot...
...Pop music is the site of this sale and the record companies are the auctioneers...
...It’s not that he shares the passion for technology and innovation that inspired so many of those he writes about...
...But for the layman, reappraisal leads to confusion...
...Martin’s, 27.95...
...In essence, this is just the difficulty facing the government in countless public health arenas...
...How can we hedge our bets so that we avoid massive overreactions that cost us far more in the long run than putting up with the perceived dangers...
...He sees a “grave risk” in the soft-money loophole that allowed $100,000 donations to pour into the 1988 presidential campaigns, but he would still allow party organizations to raise and spend such soft money so long as candidates didn’t solicit it...
...And in West of Eden, Frank Rose wove a compelling tale of Apple Computer’s growing pains in the mid-eighties...
...Punk was never going to destroy anyone’s established institutions...
...Sorauf’s latest book shows once again how little social science can teach us about how to revive our paralyzed, money-driven political system...
...Not only that: It had a better beat...
...In other words, when it comes to plumbing the legitimacy of this week’s health crisis, your guess is as good as mine...
...Of course, Cringely could never be found...
...Democrats-who for decades have styled themselves as the party of social change and domestic progress-have found themselves largely out of step with many poor and middle-class whites-people who have become frustrated by a stagnant economy and expensive social programs that seem to yield few benefits for anyone...
...Perhaps it is just that Bennett’s definition of a “good school” is based on a double standard-ne that is less materially demanding for inner city kids than it is for rich suburbanites...
...When rock musicians become responsible, worthy spokesmen for right-on causes, churning out PC lyrics and performing in endless charity benefits, they become impossibly boring-just look at Sting...
...Addison- Wesley, $19.95...
...Moreover, researchers warned that skipping mammograms and other diagnostic x-rays poses a greater peril than the possibility of triggering the AT gene...
...But despite a number of low blows, and contrary to its title, the book never suggests there is anything accidental about Gates’ accomplishments since he set out to start a software company while a student at Harvard in 1975...
...I say sadly because in its best moments, England’s Dreaming hints briefly, frustratingly, at answers to the hard questions about punk and the sociallpolitical circumstances that gave the movement its force-circumstances that, in some ways, called punk into being...
...If these kinds of questions bother you, Klaidman offers some answers...
...In his account of a decade of public service for Reagan and Bush, he defends his rocky career as a conservative standardbearer in the nation’s domestic policy debates...
...He seems genuinely puzcy...
...These are assertions, not arguments-and predictable, incoherent assertions at that...
...It teaches a useful lesson about the effect of spending on elections, a lesson that the news media and would-be reformers would do well to absorb...
...And a grim story it is: unemployment at record postwar levels, double-digit inflation, a toppling currency, and plummeting living standards...
...But the Infoworld reporter who was accompanying Gates at that time has told her friends that the incident was a minor one and Stephens has blown it far out of proportion...
...And if such insinuations were ambiguous-the swastika more a shock-tactic symbol of defiance than a coherent political statementSavage, a good liberal, still frets over a latent right-wing, even Thatcherite, subtext in punk’s libertarian, do-ityourself rhetoric...
...Robert X. Cringely...
...And sadly because England’s Dreaming is so obviously a labor of love, a devoted fan’s failed attempt to make sense of the passion that has fueled his life’s work...
...The title itself is a bit of false advertising...
...But the fact that pop music can continue periodically to make so many so nervous says more about us than than it does about the music...
...In establishing a national policy on global warming or AIDS or radon, it can be as skeptical as it likes about the data, but it still ought to be doing something, even if only hedging its bets...
...But thatTs only a half step to full citizenry...
...Although his view hasn’t changed much, he does grudgingly concede that academic research on political action committees is turning up “a consensus about PAC influence...
...Ataxiatelangiectasia is the gene’s excruciating moniker, but it is popularly referred to as the AT gene...
...zled as to why these donors don’t fight against the movement to ban PACs...
...Like most academics, he remains less than convinced that campaign money influences public policy to any alarming degree and is skeptical of all reform efforts, which he sees as either wrong-headed or doomed to disappointment...
...But little of what he writes is fresh...
...Summit, $20...
...The Pistols were attacked by the police and by citizens with razor blades...
...But there may be even more room for improvement in the way Americans interpret and understand news...
...Looking back, all this seems hysterical...
...This is a basic point that Savage never quite comes to grips with...
...there is too little being raised and spent by challengers...
...The man who is undoubtedly the most influential person in computing today holds that position for a reason...
...He says that banning PACs, as proposed by President Bush, would be “probably the worst reform idea” since those enacted immediately after Watergate and “bad public poliIn fact, Sorauf sees donations to PACs as evidence of a healthy political system...
...When one would call to pitch an unwanted story, the standard response would be, “Oh, that’s Cringely’s beat...
...His phone rings constantly, he boasts to the reader, and his access to the dirt in the personal computer industry is unmatched...
...Regardless of your level of skepticism, are you still comfortable about having her take the routine x-ray...
...thus one could easily make the connection that women with predisposition to breast or other forms of cancer whose triggering genes had yet to be identified would be better off avoiding all diagnostic x-rays...
...There is no future In England’s dream...
...And one way or another, he got a lot of other people talking...
...We can call it Health in Tomorrow’s Headlines: How to Gamble on Your Future...
...how to go beyond skepticism...
...As Ronald Reagan’s chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, then during his stint as secretary of education, and finally as drug “czar” in the Bush administration, Bennett never hesitated to speak his mind...
...But the reports were overblown...
...The dominant symbols of the time were shabby grey council estates-tenementsand ever-lengthening dole queues...
...It’s often these second or third looks that truly zero in on an issue...
...More puzzling is Bennett’s contention that “good schools for poor kids in the inner city have the same general features as good schools for rich kids in the suburbs...
...That’s a reasonable question to ask of the author of a book with a title like this...
...This, he claims, represents Gates’-and thereby the personal computer industry’s-adolescence and arrogance...
...Who is Robert X. Cringely and what’s his gripe with William H. Gates, the cofounder of Microsoft Corporation...
...With that promise, one might look forward to 336 pages of uninterrupted juice...
...Incumbents spend more when they are in trouble, but the spending does little to change voters’ minds...
...And has a health or environmental risk been openly weighed against other risks...
...Sure, Klaidman’s Rules for Readers provide, on the surface, all the ammunition needed to retain a correctly skeptical posture on the AT study...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Inside Campaign Finance: Myths and Realities...
...Examining how the authorities behaved as each worry surfaced, how the press reported each story, and how the public reacted, Klaidman issues his frustrating verdict: Reporters and editors must grapple with uncertain scientific results that resist interpretation, fundamental assumptions that are hidden and untested, undisclosed values that underlie important regulatory decisions, and the clandestine substitution of illegitimate economic or political goals for the public interest...
...What is the likelihood that a particular scientist or public official may be tilting news coverage in a direction not warranted by the data...
...In it were the lyrics: God save the Queen The fascist regime...
...Sorauf says, “The harm to challengers will increase the lower the spending limits are set...
...Sorauf writes not from inside Washington’s money machine but from his academic outpost at the University of Minnesota...
...To counterbalance this, he favors raising limits on the amounts parties may spend on behalf of their candidates...
...Challengers, on the other hand, always lose when they spend too little to publicize their name and campaign message...
...Instead, he wrings his hands over the potential implications of punk’s politics, which were always more than a little opaque...
...But while political scientists are successful in linking spending and election results, they fail when they attempt to measure the effect of money on the hearts and minds of lawmakers...
...A solution could be brought closer to hand if political scientists would concede the limitations of their craft...
...Eliminate from the rich suburban schools the wide range of courses, science labs, classroom supplies, athletic facilities, and low student-to-teacher ratios that come with significantly higher per-pupil spending, and even the most inspired teaching won’t keep the quality of education from deteriorating...
...But recall: In May 1977, in the midst of the rather desperate national celebration of Elizabeth 11’s Silver Jubilee as Queen of England, the Sex Pistols released a single called “God Save the Queen...
...It’s easy to forget just how unnerving punk was to that group-the British establishment-which was trying desperately to hold together a society on the verge of disintegration...
...Then there’s “Deadly Dioxin,” the Agent Orange stepchild that was once candidate for the Most Pernicious Carcinogen Award...
...He scolds reporters and reformers for “tendentious rhetoric” about money and for “a disposition to attribute much, even too much, that happens in American politics to it...
...We really seem to prefer private to public funding, but we reject the consequences of private funding...
...Given the book’s many problems, one can’t help but be intrigued by Stephens’ dedication: “For Pammy, who knows we need the money...
...Moreover, because doctors cannot yet test for the presence of the AT gene, women cannot even determine if they have reason to worry...
...John Markoff The De-Valuing of America: The Fight for Our Culture and Our Children...
...A capsized catamaran is stable, but upside down nonetheless...
...He’s been around for a while, in various incarnations...
...Within days, the tabloid press had headlines reading “Punish the Punks...
...Ellis Rubinstein...
...Indubitably...
...Stephens does a reasonable job, however, of explaining personal computer technology, describing its origins, and placing it in context...
...These include Fire in the Valley, the first history of the industry, written by two former Infoworld reporters, Paul Freiberger and Mike Swaine, and The Big Score, a wellreported tale of Silicon Valley by former Sun Jose Mercury-News reporter Michael Malone...
...Often, what bits of analysis there are in England’s Dreaming consist of little more than a few declarative sentences lined up in a row...
...A 1975 editorial on the state of the nation in England’s most popular tabloid, The Sun, opened with the words, “Already the vultures are darkening the skies.’’ Britain in the mid-seventies was, in Christopher Hitchens’ phrase, “like Weimar without the nightclubs...
...Nevertheless, Sorauf clings to the view that PACs are legitimate heirs to moribund political parties...
Vol. 24 • April 1992 • No. 4
