POLITICS

This Friday, June 6, marks the 25th anniversary of one of the most important political/economic events in American history: Proposition 13. This initiative, which was approved by the voters of California on this date in 1978, sparked a “tax revolt” that...

A day after suicide bombers killed 29 people in Morocco in mid-May, that country’s interior minister noted that the five nearly simultaneous attacks “bear the hallmarks of international terrorism.” More strongly, the Moroccan justice minister...

After using America’s military to achieve a brilliant success in Iraq, President Bush is intent on using his new-found clout in the region to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. But the means he has chosen is renewed negotiations and a new diplomatic “road...

A hole was torn last month in the international “road map” to Israeli-Palestinian peace when Mahmoud Abbas insisted that Yasser Arafat remains the unchallenged ruler of the Palestinian Authority. “Arafat is at the top,” Abbas, the PA’s...

How many times have we applauded those who “made a difference in the lives of others” and been admonished to do the same? On the face of it, that has to be one of the more mindless generalities of our modern era. After all, didn’t Hitler, Stalin, Pol...

In the early hours of May 23, the House and Senate both approved H.R. 2, a bill that reduces tax rates on wages, dividends and capital gains, among other things. The following day, before the legislation had even been signed into law, The New York Times pronounced it...

Initial reports of the looting of the Iraqi National Museum sparked a frenzy of outrage. Denied their desert quagmire, their civilian massacres, their oil-fire eco-disaster, and their inflamed “Arab street,” leftists all but leaped at the opportunity to...

As if the government isn’t trying to control every aspect of your life, it has now launched a program to determine what and how much you eat. In her book, “Dependent on D.C.: The Rise of Federal Control Over the Lives of Ordinary Americans“, author...

Rarely do you see a Supreme Court opinion with as little intellectual merit as Tuesday’s judgment in Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs. Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s reputation as a conservative, “states’ rights” judge...

The Jayson Blair scandal at The New York Times has engendered more commentary than any similar press scandal I can recall. Although in substance, the scandals involving Janet Cooke at The Washington Post, Stephen Glass and Ruth Shalit at The New Republic, and Mike...

Dr. Mike S. Adams, an associate professor of criminal justice at University of North Carolina’s Wilmington campus, has given me an excellent idea for grading students, which appeared in his commentary in the web-based Agape Press newswire. For 35 years,...

If there’s one thing the open-source community is known for, it’s chutzpah. In a recent online petition, more than 1500 Linux users told the SCO Group, which owns intellectual property rights to key components of the Unix operating system, to sue them....

As U.S troops rushed into Baghdad last month, American politicians rushed toward a very different objective: Bailing out the ailing airline industry. Hard hit by a quartet of calamities — recession, terrorism, war and SARS — airline executives warned of...

It’s not often one can say France’s tax policy make more sense than ours. After all, in 2000, the average Frenchman paid 54 percent of his income in state and federal taxes, while the average American paid 42 percent. That, of course, is one reason why our...

It is often said that the legislation process is like watching sausage being made: disgusting. What is left off this analogy, however, is that sausage can be very tasty. We have just seen a good example of tasty sausage being made in the tax area. Although the process...

In a recent column, Judith Martin, otherwise known as “Miss Manners,” pondered “why a society composed of people angling to get on television to confess their disappointments or, now that we have reality television, demonstrate their shortcomings,...