How an Elite-Engineered Moral Panic Led to the U.S. War on Iraq

Critics argue that the G.W. Bush administration deliberately misled the U.S. public about an Iraqi threat after 9/11 but empirical evidence that presidential deception influenced public support for war has been lacking. An examination of presidential rhetoric concerning Iraq in the U.S. media revealed that it changed in tone after 9/11, consistent with moral panic processes. Logistic regression analysis of public opinion leading up to the war revealed that shifts in support for invasion directly mirrored presidential rhetoric. The findings of this study suggest that the Bush administration engineered a moral panic over Iraq with the support of the media.     

The Iraq War,Partisanship, and Candidate Attributes: Variation in Partisan Swing in the 2006 U.S. House Elections

Although partisan swing is often assumed to be uniform across congressional districts, our analysis of the 2006 House elections demonstrates that systematic variation exists. In addition to incumbency status, partisanship, spending, and scandal, variation in the local salience of national issues across districts affects vote shifts in these districts. Notably, partisan swing in Republican districts proved highly sensitive to the number of Iraq war deaths from that district and, to a lesser degree, to the roll‐call vote of Republican House members on the war resolution. These findings have implications for theories of anticipatory representation, retrospective voting, and electoral accountability.     

Review of S. B. Chetverikov,Who Makes U.S. Policy and How

This book is devoted to current problems in the working of the organs of government and administration of the United States, the functioning of the mechanism for the development, adoption, and implementation of its political decisions, and the interrelation and coordination of the actions of various links in its governmental machinery. It is a thorough investigation of questions of public law in the United States. The author makes clear the distinguishing features of the development of the governmental mechanism in the USA during the present period, the internal processes occurring in the political system of the imperialist state, and the contradictions inherent in it. Chetverikov directs the reader's attention to a number of issues in the present development of the system of governmental administration in the USA that have been inadequately treated in the Soviet legal literature. They include the rising political role of the bureaucracy and the tendency for it to elude control by the higher authorities, including the president; the unique character of the present stage of the fusion of the government machinery and the monopolies; the formation of a "triple alliance" made up of permanent bureaucracy, monopolist "interest groups" (consisting of lobbying organizations exercising "influence" favorable to the monopolies on government bodies), and the working machinery of Congress; the inflation of the governmental machinery and its "monopolist degeneration."     

美国驰名商标法则、TRIPS协议与香烟平装立法

驰名商标法则缘自《巴黎公约》,其国际应用由来已久,但是它在美国的司法适用却在绵延不断的判例中摇摆不定,迟迟无法得到承认。21世纪著名的Grupo案、ITC案和Fiat案虽能对这一问题起到一定的导向性作用,但是鉴于美国的立法程序、司法体制和国内产业利益方面的考量,法则的适用仍会是一个悬而未决的问题。有关国际商标制度变迁的另一个热点话题是香烟平装立法,澳大利亚政府作为此项规定的积极推行者,其法律遭到了多方企业和国家的反对,香烟平装立法因与TRIPS协议第8条、第20条的相互关系而备受关注,而WTO专家小组在此项争议解决中的最终态度也将直接影响各国的有关立法。     

Cocaine,the contras,and the United States: How the U.S. government has augmented America's drug crisis

A study of Washington's connections to Honduran and other contra supporters in the illicit drug traffic shows that such gray alliances for covert operations are themselves a major part of this country's drug problem. It is true that the U.S. has arrested contra supporters on drug charges; but, time after time, these drug arrests have come after the U.S. has ceased to promote the contra faction which those arrested had been supporting. The new Bush drug strategy seems unlikely to affect the window of drug smuggling opportunity opened by Washington's relations with the corrupt Honduran military, and may well open new such windows by new grey alliances with the corrupt right-wing forces in the Andean countries of origin.

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War for the Floor: Partisan Theory and Agenda Control In the U.S. House of Representatives

This article extends recent research on partisan agenda control in the U.S. House of Representatives to the issue of procedural control of the legislative agenda via special rules. In particular, we draw out a facet of cartel and conditional party government theories that has not been addressed in prior analyses: the simultaneous interrelationship between positive and negative agenda control. Using roll‐call data on two procedural matters—votes to order the previous question on a special rule and votes to adopt a special rule—over the 1953–2002 period, we found that, in the area of procedural control of the floor agenda, the majority party's amount of agenda control depends to a significant degree upon the party's homogeneity and power.     

Lawyers,Justices, and Issue Salience: When and How Do Legal Arguments Affect the U.S. Supreme Court?

A good deal of scholarly evidence suggests that the decisionmaking of the U.S. Supreme Court is affected by legal argument. At the same time, it seems clear that in a great many cases the justices have enduring, strongly held views. In such cases, they should be impervious to the effects of advocacy. When are the justices apt to be influenced by the Court's legal community, and when will lawyers be less relevant? The answer, we think, has to do with the salience of the issue before the Court. We suspect that in nonsalient cases the justices have less‐intense preferences and therefore are open to the persuasion of lawyers. In salient cases, by contrast, the content of legal policy matters much more to the justices. As a result, they are less amenable to legal argument and adhere more strictly to their personal policy preferences. Our empirical tests support this orientation.     

Exporting Gender Injustice: The Impact of the U.S. War on Drugs on Ecuadorian Women

Numerous researchers have documented the gendered impact of the United States’ domestic war against drugs. Women incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses are the fastest growing segment of America’s prison population because of the harsh penalties for using, selling and transporting illegal substances. The impact of U.S. drug policy on women in other countries, in contrast, has been overlooked. This paper argues that the greatly increased imprisonment of women in Ecuador for drug-related offenses is collateral damage of the U.S. war on drugs. The impact of the expansion of women’s imprisonment in Ecuador appears to be particularly damaging to the inmate’s children who frequently join their mother in prison. U.S. policy should not be exported to other countries before having a clear picture of the unintended negative consequences.     

Long-range U.S. Manpower forecasts in retrospect: How accurate were we?

This paper compares and evaluates the accuracy of long-range occupational manpower forecasts made for 1980 in the early 1970s by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and by the author. The different assumptions and forecasting methodologies utilized are discussed, and the occupational forecasts are then compared to the actual 1980 employment data. The relative accuracy of the different sets of forecasts is assessed according to several different criteria, and the larger question of the usefulness of either set of forecasts is addressed. It is found that neither set of forecasts was clearly superior, that the accuracy of both sets of forecasts was generally poor, and that the projections for individual occupations were often so wide of the mark as to be of questionable usefulness for manpower planning and vocational guidance. The implications of these findings for manpower forecasting are discussed.     

Measuring U.S. innovative activity: business data at the U.S. Census Bureau

Innovation is seen as a source of strength and vitality in the U.S. economy. Better measures of innovative activity—including but not limited to innovation alone—could improve what we know about the sources of productivity and economic growth. The U.S. Census Bureau collects data on some measures of innovative activity that research shows affect economic performance. But understanding how the effects work requires more than just measures of innovative activity. It also requires solid statistical information about core measures of the economy so we can rule out the possibility that a measure of innovative activity merely proxies for something omitted from or measured poorly in the core data. Gaps in core measures can be filled by better integrating existing data and by more structured collections of new data. Versions of this paper were presented at the NSF/SRS Workshop, Advancing Measures of Innovation: Knowledge Flows, Business Metrics, and Measurement Strategies, Arlington VA, June 6–7, 2006, and circulated to the Advisory Committee on Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century Economy, Economics and Statistics Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce. This paper is unofficial and thus has not undergone the review accorded to official Census Bureau publications. Lucia Foster, Ron Jarmin, Jeffrey Mayer, Thomas Mesenbourg, and Daniel Weinberg, and the editors made valuable comments. However, the views expressed in the paper are those of the author and not necessarily those of the U.S. Census Bureau.     

Women in the U.S. Armed Services:

No abstract available for this article.     

Generating a Vertebrae‐based Method to Discriminate between Korean and U.S. White Male Casualties from the Korean War,

Low recovery rate of intact crania in conflict‐related contexts necessitates the use of postcranial elements for ancestry estimation. This study aimed to develop a new method to discriminate between Korean and U.S. White casualties from the Korean War using vertebrae. Maximum body heights of C2 through L5 were measured from 75 Korean and 51 U.S. males to generate discriminant functions. U.S. vertebral heights were statistically greater than Koreans in 18 out of 23 vertebrae (C2, C4‐6, T3‐6, and T8‐L5). The functions with lumbar vertebrae tended to yield higher correct classification ratios (CCR) than those with cervical or thoracic vertebrae. Inclusion of the femur and tibia lengths in the vertebrae‐involved functions enhanced the CCR's. Discriminant functions using the femur and tibia length were also presented. The results of this study are expected to complement the current practices of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency and the Ministry of National Defense Agency for KIA Recovery and Identification, which are primarily based on cranial and dental morphology.     

U.S. experiences with racial and ethnic profiling: history, current issues, and the future

The issue of racial and ethnic bias in policing has been the focus of legal and criminal justice scholarship, court action, and public debate in the U.S. for a number of years. The issue has also been prominent in criminal justice scholarship, public discussion, and policy making in other countries, particularly the U.K., for an even longer period. This article surveys the history of the issue in the U.S. and attempts to give scholars and policy makers the benefit of the insights gained through the U.S. experience in handling the issue. Among these are the importance of the empirical question of the “hit rate” and how police use of race or ethnicity as a criterion changes it, and the difficulties of dealing with the thorny benchmarking issue. The article also discusses how advocates in the U.S. have attempted to meet and overcome arguments that police and their supporters have made in an attempt to minimize the problem or justify doing little or nothing about it.     

美国、欧盟、亚洲各国专利代理制度现状及发展研究

专利制度是激励社会创新、鼓励社会成员发明创造的最有效制度之一。随着国家和企业知识产权战略的发展完善,提供知识产权中介服务的专利律师和专利代理人的数量将会增加。本文着眼于世界发达国家的现行专利中介服务体系,通过比较研究,找准差距,看清问题,在充分借鉴外国经验的基础上,立足本国现实,提出可行的改进措施,提高我国专利中介服务的水平和能力,建立我国高效、协调的专利中介服务体系。