"The dirty little secret about affirmative action is that it doesn't work." So concluded ABC network reporter Bob Zelnick in his excellent book on the subject, titled "Backfire."An even dirtier secret is that virtually no one really cares whether or not affirmative...
Cant has become the norm in discussions of any issue involving race or ethnicity. However, a new book by Linda Chavez -- a memoir of her own remarkable life -- should make it inescapably clear what counterproductive and even vile things have been going on in the name...
Democrats have now lost two consecutive elections that, by all the usual standards, they should have won easily. Al Gore lost the 2000 election despite a usually unbeatable combination of peace, prosperity, a declining crime rate and the first budget surplus in...
Even in defeat, Democrats can console themselves that they still have a lock on minority votes in general and black votes in particular. Moreover, given the demographic realities, minority voters are going to be a growing percentage of all voters in the years ahead....
Now that Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi is becoming the Democrats' House minority leader, she is being celebrated as the first woman to hold such a high post. But she is also being described as a "San Francisco liberal" -- which she definitely is. What do San Francisco...
The oh-so-smug and oh-so-glib media "experts" have ended up with egg on their face for the second time in a few weeks. First their "profiles" of the Beltway sniper turned out to be completely wrong -- wrong car and wrong race, among other things -- and now their talk...
Former Vice President Walter Mondale made much of his "experience" during his televised debate with his rival for the Senate seat of the late Paul Wellstone, Republican Norm Coleman. The real question, however, is not just what quantity of experience each candidate...
"A Record Year for Academic Pork," said the headline on the front page of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the leading trade publication of the academic world. Whether representatives of farmers, corporate welfare recipients, and other beneficiaries of politicians'...
Random thoughts on the passing scene: People who cannot be bothered to learn both sides of the issues should not bother to vote. Considering that we all enter the world the same way and leave in the same condition, we spend an awful lot of time in between trying to...
One of the most common laments in letters from readers is a sense of helplessness to do anything about the negative trends in politics and society. Yet the people who make those laments have the ultimate power in the most powerful nation on earth. All they have to do...
Those of us who are optimists believe that someday sanity will return to our society. Our media, our officials -- perhaps even our schools and colleges -- will begin to talk sense. Those of you who are young may live to see it. But there is a downside to sanity. Once...
There are people who find sports exciting and people who find sports boring. Unfortunately, the latter seem to be the ones in charge of baseball telecasts. And they seem to be trying to make those telecasts boring for the rest of us. Somehow the people who televise...
During election years, people in the media seem to be forever lamenting the fact that millions of Americans who are eligible to vote do not in fact go to the polls. When speculating as to why those people don't vote, the media often assume that there is something...
It was perhaps inevitable that the recent sniper killings in the Washington area suburbs would be seized upon by advocates of gun control. Like so much in the agenda of the political left, gun control arguments would collapse like a house of cards if people just...
The politicization of prizes was never more blatantly revealed than in the comments of two of the members of the committee that awarded former president Jimmy Carter the Nobel Prize for peace. One member clearly implied that the prize was meant as a criticism of the...
Perhaps the massive bomb blast on the Indonesian island of Bali will cause some second thoughts -- or perhaps first thoughts -- by those who blamed the United States for having provoked the September 11th attacks by its actions and policies in the Middle East. Very...
Among the many commemorations of the September 11th anniversary, the one at Berkeley was unique. The American flag was banned because it might offend people from other countries. "The Star Spangled Banner" was banned because it was considered too militaristic, while...
I happened to run into Charles Murray in Dulles International Airport while he and Richard Herrnstein were writing "The Bell Curve." When I asked him what he was working on and he summarized what he was writing, he could tell that I was concerned about him, so I told...
Professor John McWhorter, a black faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley, has made a suggestion that is explosive in itself and directly the opposite of what is being said by those who are seeking to promote lower college admissions standards for...
You expect a corrupt politician to do corrupt things, so when Senator Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., withdrew as a candidate for re-election after ethics charges led to his falling behind in the polls, that was hardly surprising. Nor was it particularly surprising that...
President George W. Bush's speech on Iraq in effect reiterated what Edmund Burke said more than two centuries ago: "There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men." Today, in a nuclear age, those words apply more strongly than...
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