When conservationists talk about "saving" this and "protecting" that, a logical question might be: Saving it from whom? Protecting it from whom? And why should the government force what you want on someone else who obviously wants something different, or there would...
The same newspapers and television news programs that are constantly reminding us that some people under indictment "are innocent until proven guilty" are nevertheless hyping the story of American troops accused of rape in Iraq, day in and day out, even though these...
There is nothing like returning home to recover from a vacation. They say traveling is broadening and that has certainly been my experience. My waistline broadens by about an inch a week when I am traveling. The most dangerous mode of travel is the automobile. Every...
A special issue of Time magazine celebrates the historic career of Theodore Roosevelt and the implications of his presidency for the development of American society. In the phony familiarity of our times, where you call people by their first names when you have never...
On the eve of a holiday that used to stir patriotic emotions -- the Fourth of July -- it has been painful to see examples of how little remains of that glue that holds a society together. Perhaps the worst of these signs of national disintegration was the New York...
Random thoughts on the passing scene: When you have 90 percent of what you want, think twice before insisting on the other 10 percent. I have never understood stuttering. Once I heard a well-known economist who stuttered spend 45 minutes singing humorous,...
Despite the warm glow of self-satisfaction that the liberal vision confers on liberals, ugly facts keep intruding to undermine that vision. Some liberals eventually jump ship and defect to conservatism when the facts keep piling up too high to ignore.* This takes...
The New York Times of May 21 featured estimates of how much revenue the federal government is losing as a result of tax cuts, more than $50 billion over a five-year period. Meanwhile, a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal reported the government as receiving...
In Shelby Steele's new book, "White Guilt," he mentions an encounter with a white liberal who fiercely defended the welfare state programs and policies of the 1960s. "Damn it, we saved this country!" he all but shouted. "This country was about to blow up. There were...
Conservatives who point out the declining audience for the big television network newscasts, and declining public trust of the media in general, often under-estimate how much clout the liberal media still have. For example, while the economy has had near-record highs...
The worst thing said in the case involving rape charges against Duke University students was not said by either the prosecutor or the defense attorneys, or even by any of the accusers or the accused. It was said by a student at North Carolina Central University, a...
If there is a smoking gun in the Duke University rape case, it is not about the stripper who made the charges or the lacrosse players who have been accused. The smoking gun is the decision of District Attorney Michael Nifong to postpone a trial until the spring of...
Amid all the hysteria among politicians and in the media over rising gasoline prices, and all the outraged indignation about oil company profits and their executives' high pay and lavish perks, has anybody bothered to even estimate how much effect any of this actually...
Whether Zacarias Moussaoui received the death penalty or life imprisonment was never a big issue for me. What was appalling, however, was the way the penalty phase of his trial was conducted. First, there was the parade of witnesses, including former New York Mayor...
Anyone who takes the trouble to read the Supreme Court opinions of Justice Clarence Thomas will see a very different, and much more intellectually formidable, mind at work than what they might expect from reading media attempts to denigrate Justice Thomas. A very...
Random thoughts on the passing scene: Some people think they have bad luck when the real problem is that they took bad chances. Parents who are both conscientious and realistic discover sooner or later that they cannot do the job to their own complete satisfaction,...
One of the beauties of an economy coordinated by price movements is that nobody has to understand it in order for it to work. If vast new iron ore deposits are discovered tomorrow in Timbuktu, 99 percent of the people on this planet may be wholly unaware of it -- and...
If there is anything worse than partisan demagoguery, it is bipartisan demagoguery. Republican leaders have now joined the Democrats in blaming the oil companies for the fact that prices rise when demand expands more than supply. Prices have been rising under these...
People who were not within 1,000 miles of Duke University have already taken sides in the case of a stripper who has accused Duke lacrosse players of rape. One TV talk show hostess went ballistic when a guest on her program raised questions about the stripper's...
What is more frightening than any particular policy or ideology is the widespread habit of disregarding facts. Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey put it this way: "Demagoguery beats data." People who urge us to rely on the United Nations, instead of acting...
Horrifying stories about the rapes and murders of children, and about judges who go easy on sex offenders who prey on the young, have prompted some state legislatures to tighten up the laws and restrict the sentencing discretion of judges. Few in the media or among...
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