The Ritual Flaying of Jimmy Carter

But enemies can be transformed with time

Nobody with a functioning memory should be too quick to condemn Jimmy Carter for daring to speak with the leadership of Hamas, as nearly everyone along the American political spectrum suddenly has felt obliged to do.

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Dispatches from the Congo

The Milwaukee Zoological Society

Today we walk in the footsteps of elephants, their tracks deep, flat depressions in the leaf litter of the forest floor. With room to spare, I can place both my feet in their circular form. Bunda tells us that elephants passed here yesterday after the rain. The elephants are headed toward the Yenge River...

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Ecodriving Made Easy

Even if you don’t have an alt-fuel car, you can try “EcoDriving,” a term coined by gasstrapped Europeans that means “to drive a vehicle in the most fuel-efficient manner possible, to save fuel and to lower emissions.” In some EU countries, EcoDriving proficiency...

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It’s Happening Here

Immigration raids in homes, on the street

It sounds like something that happens in Baghdad or 1980s El Salvador— individuals being taken from their homes, never to return again. But it isn’t happening a world away in a war zone or under a brutal regime.

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Think You Know John McCain?

His eye-opening conservative record on reproductive issues

The maverick who claims to cross party lines is anything but moderate on the subject of reproductive rights. Sen. John McCain, the likely Republican nominee for president, wants to overturn Roe v. Wade and add a constitutional amendment that would ban abortion, doesn’t want to require insurance companies...

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McCain Turns His Back on Soldiers

Whose elitism is worse?

It is hard to blame John McCain for mocking Barack Obama as an “elitist” following that silly remark about bitter folks who cling to guns and religion. Rarely does the Arizona senator—one of the wealthiest members of Washington’s most exclusive club—

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Keeping the Waterways Clean

Fontarome case shows the power and limits of environmental regul

What’s the best way to ensure that local industries are not sending a harmful amount of chemicals into our sewerage system? If you’re a river-watchdog group, you want the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD) to force businesses to stay within the guidelines by levying fines and penalties on...

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Stalled Water Compact Progresses

Compromise is more like a few small tweaks

A new draft of the Great Lakes Basin Compact has been tentatively agreed to by Gov. Jim Doyle, Senate Democrats and once-reluctant Assembly Republicans. Heralded as a “compromise” when it was announced last week in New Berlin...

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Are We Closer to “Victory”?

McCain’s remedy is more destruction

Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the American forces in Iraq, is more candid than his publicity agents. Unlike the senators and editorial writers who claim that the glorious “surge” should be hailed as one of the most successful military campaigns in history, he warns that the escalation’s achievements are mixed at best—

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Politics and the Olympics

There are actually some cranks grousing that politics should be kept out of the Olympics. But how are you ever going to keep world politics out of world politics? Anyone who thinks the Olympics represent some kind of pure athletic competition that is above politics hasn’t been paying attention for, oh, an entire lifetime.

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