POLITICS

Yesterday the Supreme court released its decision in Atkins v. Virginia, regarding the propriety of executing the mentally retarded. The court reversed the death sentence of a retarded murderer, arguing that his diminished mental precluded him from acting with the...

Today I watched a bizarre spectacle. Attending a hearing of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on transportation, I bore witness as, one-by-one, five United States senators of both political parties made the case for subsidizing perpetual failure. I saw them...

California’s Governor Gray Davis is in hot water over his acceptance of $25,000 from Oracle Corporation following the state’s no-bid $95 million dollar e-government deal with the company. And while the governor probably wishes he had never heard of...

Today, the Senate Committee on Finance will vote on a bill introduced by Sen, Charles Grassley of Iowa that would make it illegal for a US firms to re-incorporate overseas to avoid the tax bias against corporate overseas income. CMDC considers this and similar...

Today, more than a million people in Zimbabwe are starving, and up to three million face the imminent prospect of starvation. This has not yet excited much attention in the West. Zimbabwe, after all, is far away from the centers of American interest; all of our top...

Remember those public-service ads with the politically correct cast of actors staring into the camera and stating, “I am an American”? Something always bothered me about that campaign. It was the snarly attitude that many of the cast members had while...

The next time you see a picture of Yasser Arafat, take a look at his keffiyeh, the black-and-white headdress he never appears without. He wears it in an unusual style, carefully folded so that it comes to a peak at the top, drapes down over his left shoulder, then...

Imagine it’s June 1942 – just a few months after Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States. At Harvard University, a faculty committee has chosen a German-American to give one of three student orations at the festive commencement ceremony. He titles...

When North American stock markets raced upward from 1995 to 1999, their rise was ridiculed — by people like Yale’s Robert Shiller and the U.S. Federal Reserve’s Alan Greenspan — as a mere “irrational exuberance.” No facts, they...

The War on Terrorism is over. It ended when President Bush pushed to the top of his agenda the creation of a Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. This is the climax of a trend that has been building for the past month: the only action the U.S. government is...

Next week in Toronto, the annual meeting of the Biotechnology Industry Organization will take place, amid protests by environmentalists who want to prohibit genetic engineering. This is a conflict between the creators of a technology that has saved countless lives and...

If George W. Bush learned only one thing from his father’s presidency, it was that high marks in the opinion polls are no guarantee of future triumph in the other kind of poll. During the Gulf War in early 1991, the first President Bush’s approval ratings...

Move out of the way, Ozzy Osbourne. There’s another foul-mouthed celebrity who’s vying for the bleeding-heart pop critics’ Father of the Year award. Eminem, the Detroit rapper whose third album skyrocketed to the top of the charts, wants everyone to...