POLITICS

With the war on terrorism now six months old, it’s time to review the bidding. How goes the war? Let’s grade four areas: * Military: The bulk of the war in Afghanistan was won in two months. Trouble was, to minimize casualties, U.S. troops avoided some of...

In response to last week’s DeadHijackerVisa-gate, the Immigration and Naturalization Service “reassigned” four managers to replace four other managers — whom the agency refuses to name — in order to “begin the process of...

In the late 1940s, a group of playwrights started a movement called the Theater of the Absurd, based on the Existentialist notion that life is rationally incomprehensible. According to one description, practitioners of the Theater of the Absurd sought “to convey...

To your average Howard Stern fan, the Philippines is nothing more than a carnival land of shoe-crazy, dog-eating jungle dwellers who are a perennial source of cheap jokes. Some Americans know better. Just ask the thousands of surviving U.S. soldiers who fought in the...

On Tax Day consider some basic facts. The wealthiest 1% of the taxpayers pay 34% of all federal income taxes. The top 50% pay 96% of the total bill. This means that the least wealthy 50% pay almost nothing. In short, the income tax system soaks the rich. In the name...

They did it again. In their alcohol-soaked delirium, students at the University of Maryland managed to make national fools of themselves and of the grown-ups who supposedly supervise their campus. These bright young scholars trashed the school grounds and surrounding...

Q: While it is clear that you think that being insane and being held criminally liable for one’s actions are not necessarily mutually exclusive, I am unsure of whether you think those two things are NEVER mutually exclusive. In other words, might there ever be a...

How many times have we heard people being applauded for “giving back”? People seem to believe that, if you’ve been successful and made a lot of money, you’re somehow obliged to give back by making donations to this or that cause, program or...

Q: In your recent article on motivation you conclude by stating that after doing the work to achieve one’s goals ” … most often the motivation you desire will start to follow.” Would you explain further why this is? Most of us usually think...

What is wrong with a people who choose to live under a terrorist organization, as opposed to a state that respects freedom of worship, democracy and — to a great extent — individual rights? Why do Palestinian Arabs pick a terrorist dictator over an...

Clinton-era sleaze is like a stubborn toe fungus. It just won’t go away. Fourteen months after the 42nd president of the United States left office, news is spreading of yet another unsightly scandal under his watch. And true to Clintonian form, it looks like...

1. Some time in the 1960s, I believe, the Library of Congress invited Ayn Rand to will the manuscripts of her novels to them. She replied that she was happy to do so. Subsequently, they sent her a form to fill out, in order to make her intention legally binding upon...

Most Americans were pleased with the legislative attack on cigarette smokers, not to mention confiscatory tobacco taxes. We reveled in the EPA’s dishonest study concluding that second-hand smoke causes cancer. And, by the way, I’d like to hear whether the...

I graduated from the University of Washington and am a board-certified Family Physician. I owned five family medicine-integrated medical clinics in the Seattle, Washington area, and as a consequence was very involved with all medical insurances–including...

The never-ending battle of the left to keep people from being held responsible for the consequences of their own actions is now in the Supreme Court of the United States, where the justices are being urged to exempt murderers from the death penalty if they score below...

Given the warmth that’s emanating from the North Pacific as George W. Bush visits Beijing this week, it’s hard to believe that the United States’ leading foreign-policy concerns before Sept. 11 were China’s downing of a U.S. military...

Patrick J. Buchanan calls it La Reconquista — the steady takeover of the American Southwest by the Mexican culture from which it was wrested in the first place. He marshalls his argument at length in a new book, *The Death of the West,* and in the the March...

In 1996, California’s voters passed Proposition 209, which outlawed racial quotas for college admission. That didn’t mean the end of the quest for racial quotas and the euphemisms for it: affirmative action, diversity and multiculturalism. The diversity...