Time for a quick pop quiz. Can you identify the speaker? “Today, and for generations to come, America will benefit from this law, which expresses our national commitment to quality education for all children.” President Bush, who just signed a highly...
POLITICS
The basic and crucial political issue of our age is: capitalism versus socialism, or freedom versus statism. For decades, this issue has been silenced, suppressed, evaded, and hidden under the foggy, undefined rubber-terms of “conservatism” and “liberalism” which had lost their original meaning and could be stretched to mean all things to all men. – AYN RAND
Pat Buchanan’s Quest for a Religious Dictatorship
“But when I am the stronger, I shall persecute you; for it is my duty to persecute error.” — Lord Macaulay A scoop from Pat Buchanan: America has an established religion. No, it’s not Christianity, to his excruciating frustration —...
Invasion of the Anarchists: The “Anti-Capitalist Convergence”
As if New Yorkers don’t already have enough to deal with, they must now brace for the arrival of pie-throwing, critter-liberating, bomb-building, arson-setting, spell-casting, utensil-stealing cop-haters wearing giant puppet heads. This disruptive freak show...
Journalists and Economics 101
Is deficit spending “a potent recession cure when administered properly”? A newspaper business writer made this assertion in an article entitled “The Budget Deficit Faced by Many States.” But is it true, that it’s a good thing when...
Alex Haley’s “Roots”: Fact or Fiction?
“Roots” was the only book I knew my teenage son to read, aside from assigned school books, computer manuals and chess books. He was thrilled to receive a copy autographed by Alex Haley, courtesy of George Haley, his brother, whom I had met. Alex Haley...
More Investing Lessons from Enron
When shares of Enron plunged from $84 earlier this year to practically zero, thousands of the company’s employees lost not just their jobs but also most of the value of their 401(k) retirement accounts. For the average employee, Enron stock represented...
Enron Ethics
Over the coming weeks, eight congressional subcommittees will hold at least 10 hearings on the collapse of Enron. Rarely has there been such a profligate and irresponsible distortion of congressional priorities during a time of national crisis. Even in peacetime,...
Fidel Castro: The Charmer and the Torturer
A gaggle of gullible women from Seattle flew to Havana last week to meet with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. They found him “charming” and “eloquent.” They were especially flattered that Castro — the head of one of the world’s most...
Invalid Abstractions
Most people have to deal with the reality that confronts them. They start with that reality and try to do the best they can within its limitations and within their own limitations. But there are large and growing numbers of people — especially among the...
Speaking Safely on Political Issues: A Guide for the “Modern” Politician
I offer the following guide for those Americans who may be asked to speak on political issues but are confused about what to say. Since issues can be annoyingly fickle — hot one day, dead the next — I’ve tried to keep the commentary confined to the...
Hate Speech from the Left
“It’s hard not to notice that political discussion over the last decade has increasingly degenerated into name-calling,” Brian Anderson wrote in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal last year. “The insults most often come from the left:...
South Africa After Apartheid: Black Rule Alone is No Guarantee for Black Freedom
Moral crusaders have the habit of heading off to their next crusade without bothering to see whether anything went wrong on their last one. During the ’80s, TransAfrica, NAACP, Black Congressional Caucus, Hollywood glitterati, college students, and other groups...
America’s “Pretend Friend” Saudi Arabia
Some of the world’s most offensive contemporary fiction is being produced by the government of Saudi Arabia. Consider the mainstream Saudi newspaper Al-Jazeera, which recently asserted that terrorism against the United States does not stem from Islamist...
Helen Thomas’s Grandmother Clause
Watch any presidential newscast, and UPI’s Helen Thomas generally asks the first question. But there’s one slight problem. Though Thomas spent more than 50 years as a UPI correspondent, she no longer works for the wire service. And even though she’s...
A Petty Tyrant’s Cover-up at Columbine
There are good cops and there are bad cops. Sept. 11 has not changed that fact. We saw the best of the best sacrifice their lives for their fellow citizens when the World Trade Center crumbled. But while we honor the memory of heroic police officers, we must not turn...
Arabs Still Wish to Destroy Israel
Last June, Palestinian television broadcast a sermon in a Gaza mosque in which the imam, Ibrahim Madi, made the following statement: “God willing, this unjust state Israel will be erased; this unjust state the United States will be erased; this unjust state...
Enemies Within
Our war against terrorism is just a few months old, but already we have had two well-publicized young American traitors. One was captured fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan and the other deliberately flew a plane into a building in Florida, leaving behind a note...
Activism in Defense of Microsoft
For over four years, CMDC and its supporters have been outspoken advocates against antitrust and the current antitrust case against Microsoft. Before us today is the last chance to tell the government regulators that Microsoft should be lauded, instead of punished for...
Liberal Conspiracy Theories: Bush and Enron
The U.N., the Trilateral Commission, the international conspiracy of Jewish bankers — these are the conspiracy theories for which right-wing nuts are infamous. But what about the conspiracy theories of the left? I’m sure you have heard of them: the...
What To Do with Ralph Nader?
A few days ago, Bill Gates received a rather malicious piece of hate mail singed, “Ralph Nader.” It wasn’t his first. Presumably, the infamous “Consumer Advocate” left his return address off of the envelope, because someone at Microsoft...
Infallible Haters?
Anybody can be mistaken — except haters, apparently. Whenever others express their hatred of Americans, in words or deeds, the hand-wringers among us want us to ask: “Why do they hate us?” Apparently we should automatically go in quest of those...
Blame America First
I was in the university section of Pittsburgh for a meeting right after the attacks of September 11, just an hour after thousands of people had been burned alive or crushed to death or jumped to their deaths from the top of the inferno that had been the World Trade...
The New Math: Why Students Can’t Add or Subtract
Imagine that your child comes home from school one day and announces that in his math course there are no textbooks, no teaching — and no right answers. Instead, students form groups to construct their own math “strategies.” They add fractions by...
Does Poverty Cause Militant Islam?
The events of September 11 have intensified a long-standing debate: What causes Muslims to turn to militant Islam? Some analysts have noted the poverty of Afghanistan and concluded that herein lay the problem. Jessica Stern of Harvard University wrote that the United...
Guns in the Hands of Private Citizens Make Us All Safer
For the gun controllers, the year gone by was bleak. As 2001 began, their lawsuits against gun manufacturers were being dismissed in one city after another. An attorney general nominee they bitterly opposed was confirmed. Soon after, he wrote to the National Rifle...
The Daschle-Harkin Proposal: Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle’s Scam to Help Swindle Taxpayers
Basketball star Scottie Pippen played for some great Chicago Bulls teams and won multiple NBA championships. Then, as now, he also pulled down some hefty paychecks. This year, for instance, Pippen will make $18.1 million playing pro hoops for the Portland Trail...
“Islamic Americans” vs. America
An odd controversy briefly dominated the sports pages in March 1996. A player in the National Basketball Association, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, refused to follow the league’s rule requiring that players stand in a “dignified posture” during the national...
Interview of Wade Dokken: The Social Security Crisis and What to Do About It
“By creating private accounts, you’d create private assets and private assets could be passed onto another generation as capital. And I think that would change the lives of millions of people,” says Wade Dokken. And Wade would know. A former advisor...
Protect National Security and Individual Rights with Military Tribunals
On September 11th, Americans found their nation under attack. Terrorists hijacked civilian airliners, turned them into missiles, and used them to kill thousands of innocent Americans–men, women and children–as well as people from dozens of nations. Today,...
Kick This Baby Killer Out
If homeland defense means anything, it means being able to dictate who can and cannot call our country home. The case of Melanie Jeanbeaucejour shows that America does not yet have the guts or willpower to swiftly throw out unwelcome guests. This story is sure to...
Fading Shock and Fading Resolve
Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett’s famous fictional detective, tells a story about one of his early cases: An accountant, he says, was walking down the street when a steel beam fell from a construction site and smashed into the ground, narrowly missing him. After his...
Early Warning Signals: Bin Laden Before Sept. 11th
This article was first published as “Bin Laden and Herndon, Virginia” in the The Jerusalem Post (June 20, 2001). Unfortunately, no one listened to its dire warning until after September 11th.–Editor Islamist terrorism has afflicted nearly every...
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