Ex-FEMA Director Michael Brown recently told a congressional committee that he wasn't an inexperienced manager who blew the federal response to Hurricane Katrina. Summing up the efforts of state and local officials in Louisiana as "dysfunctional," Brown scored his own...
Ralph R. Reiland
Ralph R. Reiland is the B. Kenneth Simon professor of free enterprise at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh.
“Public Servant” Pickpockets, Pennsylvania Style
"Harrisburg is one of the sleaziest state capitals in the country," said Jake Tapper, Washington correspondent for Salon, and that was before he saw the sleaze that oozed from under the closed doors of the state Legislature at 2 a.m. one recent night after the...
The Road From Live Aid: Paved With Socialist Intentions
The first time Bono and Madonna got together to save Africa, the unintended consequence was the death of perhaps as many as 100,000 people. That's aid expert David Rieff's conclusion in the July 2005 issue of the resolutely liberal American Prospect magazine regarding...
Class in America: The New York Marxist
It looks like The New York Times thinks we've strayed too far from paying proper respects to the central tenets of Marxism. The whole ball game, as Karl Marx painted it, was nothing more than a class brawl between the rich and the poor. Or as Frederick Engels and Marx...
Social Security’s Demographic Tsunami
"Santa Claus. The Tooth Fairy. Social Security. It's Time for E*Trade." That's the message on a San Francisco billboard. It's saying that stock trading on the Internet provides a better shot at a secure retirement than depending on the government. House Minority...
Healthcare To Die For in Britain?
In "Die in Britain, survive in U.S.," the cover article of the February 2005 issue of The Spectator, a British magazine, James Bartholomew details the downside of Britain's universal healthcare system. Among women with breast cancer, for example, there's a 46 percent...
Dishwasher Economics
With TV cameras in tow, Channel 11 stopped at our restaurant last Tuesday to ask the afternoon kitchen crew how it felt about the new $52 occupation tax. Not surprisingly, no one liked it. Also not surprisingly, not much of the half-hour of filming ended up on TV,...
Susan Sontag: Not So Judicious
Writer Susan Sontag, one of America's most "celebrated" intellectuals, died a few days after Christmas of leukemia. She was 71. "In my view," she once explained, "the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying." An yet, in her...
Watch Both Boots
Remember "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth"? Today, it's more like "Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the debt." The federal deficit this year will hit a record $422 billion, according to the latest projections from the Congressional...
America the Vulnerable: How Our Government Is Failing to Protect Us from Terrorism
He's filled with "a sense of dread that we continue to live on borrowed time," is "frustrated by the sense of denial that pervades so many corners of the federal government," and sees "a dangerous proclivity among U.S. officials to believe their own rhetoric about how...
Calling All Marxists! Life After Capitalism 2004 Conference
"The protests around the Republican National Convention are shaping up to be perhaps the largest this country has ever seen. Organizers are quietly discussing the possibility of having over 1 million people converging in the streets of New York City." That's the...
Drug War Crimes: The Consequences of Prohibition
"In the United States, there are now more than 318,000 people behind bars for violations of drug prohibition, more than the number of persons incarcerated for all crimes in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Spain combined," writes Jeffrey A. Miron,...
Egalitarianism vs. “Ladies Night”
The big news in town is that "Ladies Night" is illegal. Earlier this month, it had top billing on the marquee at La Costa, a seashore bar at the intersection where New York meets Philadelphia. But New Jersey's top civil rights official, J. Frank Vespa-Papaleo, has...
Why Democrats–and Conservatives–Fear Arnold
A Nazi groper, running the fifth-largest economy on the planet? I mean this time you gotta see why liberals are mad! Nixon was one thing, with the hiring of burglars and all to lift McGovern's secrets, and the bombing of Cambodia on the sly --- and goofy, like when...
“The Door of No Return” in Perspective
An Associated Press photo was flashed around the world last week showing President Bush standing in "The Door of No Return," the doorway of a slave warehouse on Goree Island, in Senegal, the place from which millions of able-bodied Africans, centuries ago, chained at...
Social Engineering, Educational Pluralism, and Holistic Racism
They say we wouldn't eat sausages if we ever visited a meat packing plant. For many of us, that's probably true of hamburgers too. It's one thing on a nice day to run into the supermarket and pick up some nice fresh-looking quarter-pounders for the grill and yet a...
Death to Dictators in Iran
"Happy colors became sinful, joy became a crime, and death was worshipped." That's how Reza Mahmoodshahi, writing last December in The Cornell Review, describes what happened in 1979 when Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile and assumed his post as Iran's supreme...
God, Buggery, and Mister Rogers
Here's what George Bernard Shaw said about religious fundamentalists: "There are scores of human insects who are ready at a moment's notice to reveal the will of God on every possible subject." A few carloads of those insects were swarming recently outside Heinz Hall...
Failure and Denial in the Arab World
It's hard to come off as more bizarre than Madonna (she works at it) but that's how Mohammed Saeed Sahaf, Iraq's information minister, looks on TV as I'm writing this. With U.S. jets controlling the air over his head and American soldiers just 100 yards or so from...
Justice for Mumia Abu-Jamal–Execute Him
Writing from death row, ex-Black Panther minister of information Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted murderer of 25-year-old Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, states that America's impending war in Iraq is simply a case of white capitalists killing for oil: "The...
War Chatter
The big news earlier this month was that a North Korean rocket can hit Hollywood. Two days before the chief of the CIA released that bit of newly declassified intelligence, Richard Gere was in Berlin saying there wasn't "any sort of basis" for America to be getting so...
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