“Fixing” Social Security

As Congress debates “fixing” the Ponzi scheme we call Social Security, consider a few things: Congress established Social Security with a little-known loophole, allowing states and municipalities to exempt their public employees from Social Security. In...

Inside the Crime: Why is Chandra Levy Missing?

One of the clues in the Chandra Levy case that may have been dismissed too quickly was a call to the police on the morning of her disappearance, reporting a woman’s scream heard in the building where she lived. This seems to have been disregarded as an unrelated...

Is Al Gore Manning the Bush EPA?

When the Bush administration lands on the same side of an issue as The New York Times editorial board, Sen. Hillary Clinton and the Sierra Club, it’s time to clear out the cockpit. The administration’s latest junk science decision should cause Bush...

Modern Eminent Domain

This use of eminent domain flatly contradicts the fundamental principles of this country, which declare that all men are created equal, that every man is an end in himself endowed with inalienable rights, including property rights, that each man be accorded equal protection by the law and that no man be deprived of due process under the law.

President Bush’s Biotechnology Blinders

The president’s recent decision on embryonic stem cell research has been described in most reports as a compromise that balances the views of scientists, who want to move forward unrestrictedly, against the views of the religious right, who call for a total ban...

Make Welfare Mothers Work

In the spring of 1994, the last full year of welfare as we knew it, 112,000 Massachusetts families were on the dole. In the spring of 2001, the caseload stands at 41,500 — a reduction of 63 percent. So spectacular has the success of welfare reform been that it...

Barbarians at the G8

The leaders of the world’s most advanced nations, plus Russia, met recently at the G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, to discuss ways to increase trade and international cooperation — about the most peaceful and civilized thing that the world’s leaders could...