Bombs over Baghdad – it’s a familiar refrain – but the latest American and British attacks on Iraq are drawing harsh criticism, both across the pond and in our own back yard.

The new President Bush says he’s set to take a tougher line against Saddam Hussein – perhaps he’ll even finish what his father started. But if Friday’s mission was a start, and a statement – where does it stop? While President Clinton’s regular responses to Iraq stayed below the radar screen – this premeditated and supposedly prophylactic attack is being seen by some as a stepping-up — in a war that ought to be over.

There’s little doubt that Iraq remains a danger to its neighbors and even its own ethnic minorities – but sanctions are slipping, the celebrated coalition is fraying – and Arab sentiment is with America’s enemy.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Peter Grier, Defense Correspondent with the Christian Science Monitor

and retired Marine Lt. General Bernard Trainor. Kate Sealy, NPR Middle East Correspondent

Tom Jackson, Independent Film Maker, spent two months in Basra experiencing life under sanctions.

The economy seems, to some, to be teetering on the edge of recession – and the favored solution of the Bush administration is a tax break tonic. One part income tax rollbacks – a nod to the sanctity of marriage — and a key component – the complete elimination of the estate tax.

The President and company call it a “death tax” – claiming it bankrupts family businesses and farms -they say its demise would boost investment in the economy. “A sop for the rich” say critics — So why are an increasing number of America’s wealthiest citizens lining up in support of keeping the tax?

The op-ed petition in yesterday’s New York Times from the group “Responsible Wealth” says “Repealing the estate tax would enrich the heirs of America’s millionaires and billionaires while hurting families who struggle to make ends meet.”
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Chuck Collins, Co-founder of Responsible Wealth

and Stephen Moore, President of Club for Growth. Jane Hilbert-Davis, Executive Director of the Cambridge Center for Creative Enterprise.

Sticks and stones may still break bones but name-calling gets a second chance. That after a Pennsylvania federal appeals court decided last week to overturn a local school district’s anti-harassment policy on the basis that it criminalizes free-speech.

It’s a decision that could affect every classroom, schoolyard, and bully across the country. Although rules against bullying, teasing and hate speech are nothing new; many school districts put together stronger anti-harassment policies to offset growing anxiety that resulted after Columbine.

Now, many Christian parents and others are crying foul – calling the rules “over-protection.” They say the protection of speech against everything from racial slurs to differing opinions on sexual orientation is not only overbroad but unconstitutional. So how do we protect our children and our constitutional rights at the same time?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Arthur Lipkin author of “Understanding Homosexuality – Changing Schools.” David Warren Saxe – Penn State Associate Professor and member of Pennsylvania Board of Education. Legal Guardian of two students against whom the case was filed. Larry Frankel, Executive Director of the Pennsylvania branch of the ACLU.

Lay, lie; fewer and less; affect and effect. These are the pits and pitfalls of the world’s most widely spoken and maybe the most abused language.

The Queen is indubitably not amused by the wanting references, modern malapropisms, and mixed-up metaphors that plague today’s English. Richard Lederer, the fastidious verbivore and the Grammar Gremlin is the new usage editor for the Random House Dictionary. Third edition. Unabridged, he’d remind you. He means to undangle your participles, unsplit your infinitives, unmangle your modifiers and unfloat your floating adverbs. Hopefully.

He wants to take on the third person pronoun. And cure you forever of ending a sentence, any sentence with a preposition. As in, why did you bri ng the book I didn’t want to be read to out of up for? That’s just the kind of thing up with which Richard Lederer won’t put.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Richard Lederer, author of “Crazy English.”

Disillusioned democrats, pouting progressives still have their president. Not Bill Clinton, of course. He’s out of office, steeping in a new swamp of scandals. Not Al Gore, either. He’s back in school.

It’s nobody in the wings like Ralph Nader or Joe Lieberman. It’s someone in the west wing already, and not George W. Bush. President Josiah Bartlett is the chieftain the good guys never got in real life: he’s a New England Catholic, a Democrat who’s principled and plenty tough enough to fight for gays in the military and reparations for the descendants of slavery.

The TV ratings success of “West Wing” on NBC Wednesday nights can be taken as proof that Democrats are better at drama than they are at politics. But Republicans can see it too as a better picture than journalism has ever given us of the staff passions, the fights for face-time and the president’s mind that are the eternal stuff of White House politics.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Bob Thompson, Professor of Media and Culture at Syracuse University

Chris Lehmann, senior editor of Washington Post Bookworld

and Larry O’Donnell, writer for “West Wing.”

It was an epochal sort of three-way love at first sight when Johannes Brahms first showed up on the doorstep, and then at the piano of Clara and Robert Schumann in 1853.

It was a “secret union of kindred spirits,” genius and love in many dimensions, and something more: Schumann, who was 43, saw a successor to Beethoven in the 20-year-old Brahms, but more than the “new eagle” of German music he saw “another John the Baptist,” a savior whose revelations would stymie the world for centuries. Clara, who was 33, saw a rare and beautiful character in Brahms, sent by God and transfigured by his own music.

In Robert Schumann, young Brahms saw a mentor on the way to madness; in Clara he saw the love of his life-a woman who didn’t promise heaven but revealed it to him. Together they lived the mysteries of romantic passion and wove them into every theme and variation of romantic music. Join us for A musical triangle for all time.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Veronica Jochum, pianist

Jan Swafford, author of “Johannes Braham, a Biography.”

Every city nowadays seems to have a plaza, a city hall fountain or a courthouse square that was supposed to be its answer to Rome’s Trevi Fountain or London’s Trafalgar Square.

Instead, these supposed gathering spaces turn into wind tunnels, sun scorched walkways or a blank acres of bricks. The wind is so strong at City Hall Plaza in Boston that once the Boston Pops had to quit a concert because the stands and scores of the musicians kept blowing away. Freedom Plaza on Pennsylvania Avenue in D.C. is so hot in the summer and so freezing in the winter, the only people who hang out there are the skateboarders.

City Hall Plaza in Albuquerque, New Mexico is a concrete wasteland where the sun would fry the hardiest flower. These wastelands might be more useful as drive-in movie theatres or carrier decks or soybean fields. Join us to discover how city dead zones come back to life.

Metropolis Magazine is about to celebrate its 20th anniversary with its coming March issue. There you can find an article by our guest Robert Campbell, and interviews with John Norquist and Jerry Brown. For more information about public spaces, see the March issue of Metropolis Magazine.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Robert Campbell, Boston Globe Architect Critic

John Norquist, Mayor of Milwaukee

and Jerry Brown, Mayor of Oakland.

And the nominees are: Best Picture: “Traffic,” “Erin Brokovich,” “Gladiator,” “Chocolat,” and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”

Best Actor: Javier Bardem in “Before Night Falls,” Russell Crowe in “Gladiator,” Tom Hanks in “Cast Away,” Ed Harris in “Pollack,” and Geoffrey Rush in “Quills.” Best Actress: Joan Allen in “The Contender,” Juliette Binoche in “Chocolat,” Ellen Burstyn in “Requiem for a Dream,” Laura Linney in “You Can Count on Me,” and Julia Roberts in “Erin Brokovich.”

The real news coming from the Academy this morning if the Stephen Soderburgh sweep. The director’s biggest threat this year is himself. He was nominated twice for best picture and twice for best director for “Traffic” and Erin Brokovich.” That’s a feat only Francis Ford Coppola pulled off.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Steve Vineberg, Professor of theater and film at Holy Cross College

and Steve Geller, Professor of film at Boston University.

First there was the Surgeon General’s warning that smoking was dangerous; then there was what amounted to a ban on broadcast advertising of cigarettes; but you could say the government war on tobacco didn’t really begin until 1990, when David Kessler came to run the Food and Drug Administration for George Bush the Elder.
At the time, tobacco was essentially unregulated, no matter that cigarettes had killed millions of people. The first step, which Kessler knew wouldn’t be easy, was to classify cigarettes as a drug. He had help from industry whistleblowers with code-names like “Deep Cough” and “Veritas”, later the stuff of Hollywood “Insider” fame.

We barely remember that the Supreme Court eventually denied the FDA jurisdiction, because we all know now that the tobacco companies knew and manipulated the addictive power of their product. Join us for David Kessler’s wins and losses against Big Tobacco.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

David Kessler, author of “A Question of Intent: A Great American Battle with a Deadly Industry.”

The story of the Irish in America has been about tenements, maids, romantic drunks, cops, nuns and priests, and it’s over. The story you haven’t heard and one lots of Irish don’t want to hear is that Irish Americans are educated, well-off and Liberal in their politics.

Old Irish is Father Coughlin, Senator Joe McCarthy, Eugene O’Neill, Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, Flannery O’Connor, and all the blushing Bridgets and sweet Colleens. New Irish is financier Peter Lynch, Pulitzer Prize winning columnists Maureen Dowd and Anna Quindlen, kinder, gentler Peggy Noonan, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and National Book Award winner Alice McDermott.

Old Irish is Spencer Tracy’s portrayal of saintly Father Flanagan in “Boys Town.” New Irish is “Good Will Hunting,” a movie set in the predominantly Irish neighborhood of South Boston with not a white-haired mother, do-gooder priest or happy drunk in sight.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Maureen Dezell. Her book is “Irish America Coming into Clover: The Evolution of a People and a Culture.”