Noted

THE ECONOMIST s Free Exchange blog questions BARRY LYNNS assertion (in How Detroit Went BottomUp) that monopolistic parts manufacturers were able to hold the automotive industry hostage: There's the notion that the big car firms were helpless to do anything about the situation once it arose. General Motors spun off Delphi in 1999; you're telling me that in the last decade GM completely lost the ability to develop its own partsproducing capacity or build a minor market player into a competing...

Harry, Louise, and Barack

According to a Commonwealth Fund study, there were 25 million underinsured Americans in 2007, meaning that high déductibles and co-pays and uncovered treatments or services left them nominally insured but often unable to get the care they needed. [...] the plan has reasonably good safeguards for the new subsidized policies for the currently uninsured, but it leaves intact the problems afflicting the rest of the system.

From the Executive Editor

[...] that Parker is known even to readers of The Washington Pout, Kerry Howley, a first-time contributor to the Prospect, looks back at many years' worth of Parker s columns to figure out just where this quasiconservative, provocative columnist fits in the current debate. [...] Paul WaId man. who writes a popular weekly column on our Web site, debuts in print with an examination of the peculiar economics of the op-ed columnist and the future of this odd literary form Elsewhere in this issue...

The Canadian Way of War

[...] around Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, the Cana- dians were essentially on their own until last year as they attempted to train new Afghan forces and conduct security patrols of the sur- rounding area but lacked the troops and direction to pursue a counterinsur- gency strategy of fighting to protect civilians. (Indeed, a decision by German military officers to attack suspected Taliban with missiles instead of troops led to over a hundred civilian casualties and a major public-relati...

The Question: What Is Your Best D.C. Pickup Line?

Term-Paper Trail

"Every level of government should statutorily and procedurally prefer married couples over cohabitators, homosexuals, or fornicators." -highlight from the 1989 graduate thesis of Virginia gubernatorial candidate Robert F. McDonnell Other highlights the Prospect has uncovered from the college papers of prominent political leaders: "Often unfairly depicted, Moriarty is primarily motivated by self-defense, which forces him to work the dark side, if you will." -

Who Will Be the Next Supreme Court Nominee?

Judge Diane Wood, who seemed to be high on the shortlist last time, would be easily confirmable but is acceptably liberal. Are you expecting a more explicit throw-down between liberal and conservative judicial philosophies this time? The political advantages of just restating a lot of drivel about mechanically applying the law are so obvious that doing so is almost irresistible.

Title Ix Dad

[...] that small gestures toward equality and fairness can have vast implications into the future. [...] many liberals have become wary of getting too far ahead of the culture.

The Polanski Paradox

While its goals seem hard to disagree with- protecting women and deterring assault and abusethe law remains controversial among conservatives who argue it is sexist against men (even though VAWA provides funding for services for men, too, despite the fact that women are five times more likely than men to be victims of domestic violence). An upper-middle-class white woman may conclude that involving the police (getting a restraining order, perhaps) against her abusive husband will make her sa...

The Obstacles to Real Health-Care Reform

Large and small businesses understand that reducing their health-care costs and making them predictable will be good for their bottom line, and the chief lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Bruce Josten, has said, "The reality with the business community is that we want reform." Baucus and his colleagues like Bill Nelson of Florida or Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas have never needed an excuse to avoid all political risk (even though they won their last elections with an average of 63 per...

Constant Comment

Where Parker is known, she is known as an acerbic, 50-something, right-leaning commentator- disparaging of political correctness, supportive of military engagement, derisive of what she takes to be an overly sensitive populace. For all her railing against our decadent times, Parker is a stalwart defender of the status quo, committed to the arbitrary prejudices of our age- recall her problem with men in jewelry- and skeptical of anyone whose ideology might challenge our present state of affai...

Twilight of the Op-Ed Columnist

According to the Newspa- per Association of America, print revenues at papers have plummeted, falling 17.7 per- cent in 2008 from the year before (classified-ad rev- enue declined 29.7 percent, thanks in part to Craigslist). If I had to bet money, says Rick Newcombe, the president of Creators Syndicate, home to such prominent columnists as Pat Buchanan and Mark Shields, I'd say the Internet will play out the way television is today with three tiers of news content: some free and supported by...

Our Two-Class System

A handful of universities such as Harvard have a big enough endowment- in Harvard's case, the current endowment is big- ger than the gross domestic product of Jamaica- to largely underwrite their operating expenses. Because the typical private college has an endowment of less than 1.5 percent of Harvard's, tuition is the main revenue source. [...] community colleges and universities have had to limit enrollment, turning away thousands of students for lack of space and marking an end to the ...

The Graduation Gap

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, young people in Australia, Britain, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Spain, and Scandinavia, where students and families do not bear such a large share of college costs, are now all more likely to earn a bachelor's degree than are young people in the United States. [...] the Census Bureau does not distinguish between those who earn a traditional high school diploma and those who drop out but subseq...

Rationing College Opportunity

Between the high point in 1974 and the low point in 1984, college attainment slumped back to 27 percent before rebounding to 32 percent by 1994. [...] higher education in the U.S. has settled into a steady state, at about 32 percent college attainment, one that is too low for the good of young people or the nation. [...] public university tuition and fees have risen at exactly the same pace as soaring private tuition, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Saying Yes in Syracuse

A nattily dressed lawyer is at the school, which houses a legal clinic where parents can get free legal advice, drawing on pro bono time from six law firms in the city. All these services work in tandem with a big push to strengthen academics through professional development for teachers and principals, more intensive coaching of students, after-school programs, and an extended school calendar. [...] the Say Yes program doesn't just offer a college scholarship to every child- in collaborati...

Grand Solution or Grab Bag?

Whereas our neighborhoods, communities, and schools are segregated by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, the nation's community colleges enroll a spectrum of learners whose demographics cut across many of these dividing lines. Since their founding in 1901, community colleges have consistently been overshadowed and snubbed by the nation's prestigious baccalaureate and graduate institutions, whose contemporary raison d'être is best captured by competition for the top spot in U.S. News ...

Ideas From the Other Washington

Washington state's reforms -which include the Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training initiative, or l-BEST, Opportunity Grants, and the Student Achievement Initiative- began to address three principal reasons why low-income, two-year college students often fail to complete credentials: underpreporotion, specifically inadequate reading, writing, math, or English-language skills; cosí, especially the cost of supporting themselves and their families while in school; and, fear, a lack of ...

Can Community Colleges Rise to the Occasion?

[...] improving outcomes for community college students will have a disproportionate positive effect on minority and low-income students. In Michigan, the entire state appropriation to all 28 community colleges is about equal to the state support for Michigan State University. [...] community colleges seem well positioned to address a series of social problems by offering increased degree completion, greater equity in higher education, enhanced economic development, and effective work-force...

The High Cost of Working Hard

In 2007, nearly 4 million young adults- 43 percent of all young students enrolled at public colleges and universities- attended a community college.\n Yet nearly 80 percent of young community college students work more than 15 hours per week, and financial barriers are leading increased numbers of young students to enroll only part time. Today's young adults are highly motivated to seek a postsecondary education because they know it is critical to their economic future, yet too many of them ...

It's Not Just Education

The most recent projections (developed in late 2007, before the current economic collapse) were that by 2016, 21.7 percent of jobs would require a bachelor's degree or more; another 19.2 percent would require a community college degree, other postsecondary training, or comparable work experience; while 59.2 percent would require only a high school diploma or less, as well as on-the-job training, most of it very short-term. [...] in great demand are retail salespersons (requiring short-term o...

The Myth of Too Big to Fail

( While the FDIC can liquidate a commercial bank like Wachovia, the Fed doesn't have the tools to shut down financial institutions, only the ability to prop them up with loans.) Geithner, now the Treasury secretary, made the right decision at the time, but it was a terrible precedent to set. In theory, this will make large institutions less likely to fail and also encourage them to shrink themselves, because higher regulatory standards wil! hurt their bottom lines by putting a price on the p...

The Innovation Administration

In the 1990s, business schools promoted the idea of "corporate social responsibility," which held that government regulation wasn't needed in order for companies to do the right thing for the environment or public health. [...] the administrations social-innovation push maybe most useful for its signaling effect. The administration's concept of social innovation injects government into the philanthropic sector as a sort of tastemaker, hopefully influencing charities to advance progressive p...

Girls Just Wanna Have Fangs

In this decade, teen girls have backed the success of Taylor Swift (who ranks above every artist on the pop charts except for Michael Jackson), Miley Cyrus (responsible for multiple best-selling albums, a television series, a concert film, a movie, and various merchandise including a best-selling book), and the blockbuster movie franchise High School Musical. Even though it will not hit theaters until June 2010, it is already being touted as "darker," more action-packed, and more "guy friend...

He Kept the Flame

Kennedy was even more upset as Carter responded to rising inflation by cutting federal employment programs and installing a Federal Reserve chief (Paul Volcker) whose strategy for reducing inflation was to increase unemployment. Kennedy's 1980 presidential campaign was legendarily a mess in its early months, but once it got on track and he began winning primaries (too late, alas, for him to amass enough delegates to win the nomination), he became the nation's great liberal tribune, the role ...

Beyond No-Fault Finance

Since she finished her book, it's come to look like the BernankeGeithner-Paulson policies have, in fact, stabilized the financial system and set the conditions for a return to economic growth. A Ph.D. in social anthropology who became a Financial Times reporter, she benefited, as the promotional material for her book explains, from "exclusive access to J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and a tightly bonded team of bankers known on Wall Street as the 'Morgan Mafia.'" Both strengths and weakne...

Will the Color Line Fade?

THE NEW CHANCE FOR A MORE INTEGRATED AMERICA BY RICHARD ALBA, Harvard University Press, 306 pages, $29.95 You mean there are no white males qualified? the conservative commentator Pat Buchanan exclaimed in disbelief in one of his many cable TV appearances at the time the president nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. According to Alba, although zero-sum mobility provokes resistance by the privileged majority, non-zero-sum mobility creates a more favorable environment for minoritie...

Lessons Overlearned

[...] Clinton made a deal with Alan Greenspan to slash the budget deficit and thereby jettison much of his ambitious campaign agendaGreenspan's precondition for lowering interest rates and causing an economic boom in time for the reelection- and then took direction from Dick Morris, who told Clinton to move to the right. While health reform, if done right, can help American families stay afloat in the economy, most Americans will not see any appreciable decline in the cost of health insuranc...