While the most immediate effect of the Republicans' election victories has been to strengthen President Bush's hand in dealing with the threat of Saddam Hussein, the most important long-run effect may be on the kind of federal judges who will shape the direction of...
Environmentalists are up in arms about a recent Bush administration proposal to reduce red tape on logging in federal lands. But what this controversy is really about is not just the "conservation" of forests, but the conservation of the vast, arbitrary authority of...
Given the unequivocal rout in the Nov. 5 election, there's been no shortage of friendly advice on how the Democratic Party can resuscitate itself. From Sen. Zell Miller, a Georgia Democrat, looking at the prospect that Rep. Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco will become...
The hallmark of our political leaders today is moral uncertainty--a quality that is shaping President Bush's shapeless policy toward Iraq. Despite his repeated assertions about the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein, Mr. Bush chose to embrace the appeasing resolution...
I was recently confronted in the Emergency Department with a situation I rarely encounter: a woman requesting "the morning after pill." Since I practice in a largely conservative state, for a few minutes I introspectively debated whether I should provide her with such...
A group of Evangelicals claims a hazard lies in the road ahead. Is their concern radical Islam, you may wonder? Violent crime, you may ask? Smothering taxation, you may guess? No, these Christians got wrapped around the axle about the sinister sport-utility vehicle,...
"If we don't … reaffirm our commitment to fiscal responsibility, years of hard work could be squandered," Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently told Congress. Considering the ever-climbing spending levels on Capitol Hill these days, his warning makes...
Most people who are in favor of gun control laws support such laws because they believe that these laws will reduce the number of firearms deaths. Such people are not the problem. Their minds can be changed when they learn that the facts are very different from what...
There's been a lot of tough talk about how "tainted" Wall Street stock research is -- and what should be done about analyst recommendations influenced by investment-banking fees and other conflicts of interest. It's an important question of business ethics, legal...
Talking facts to gun control zealots is only likely to make them angry. But the rest of us need to know what the facts are. More than that, we need to know that much of what the gun controllers claim as facts will not stand up under scrutiny. The grand dogma of the...
Beauty pageants are not usually events fraught with geopolitical significance. But then again, they are not usually held in the middle of a battleground in the war between Islam and the West. The collapse of the Miss World pageant in Nigeria is an important case study...
The financial media is in an uproar over proposed new New York Stock Exchange and National Association of Securities Dealers rules that would require stock analysts to stop talking to reporters who didn't include mandated disclosures when the analyst is quoted in...
Professor Joyce Lee Malcolm of Bentley College deserves some sort of special prize for taking on the thankless task of talking sense on a subject where nonsense is deeply entrenched and fiercely dogmatic. In her recently published book, "Guns and Violence," Professor...
You've written a tuition check, carted your son or daughter off to college, given those last minute admonitions and made those tearful good byes. For those thousands of dollars, the anguish of seeing your 17- or 18-year-old pack up and leave home for the first time,...
Before the Berlin Wall came down, I worked at a supermarket where a regular customer, a refugee from Communist Yugoslavia, once told me, "In my old country, we were lucky to have small shops that sold some food; in America, we have supermarkets for toys." Not a...
The change from Senate majority leader to Senate minority leader has apparently led Senator Tom Daschle, D-South Dakota, into more of the kind of wild and reckless rhetoric that may have contributed to the Democrats' defeat in the recent elections. According to...
Election Day brought some surprises, but the fact that voters in Florida passed an amendment that would reduce class sizes in their state isn't one of them. Naturally, most parents would rather see their children in classes with just 19 other kids and a qualified...
When an investment celebrity like Pimco's Bill Gross calls for Dow 5,000, we can't help but see it as a sign of extreme investor pessimism suggesting that we must be getting near a bottom. It reminds me of the kind of thing we heard at the top in 2000 -- in reverse....
Ever since Alan Greenspan surprised the markets by lowering interest rates 50 basis points a week ago Wednesday, the financial media have been frantic with worry about deflation. Well, you heard it here first -- exactly a year and a day ago in this column, on November...
In analyzing the recent Democratic bath in the off-year election, black Representative Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., defeated in her own primary, accused the Democratic Party of "taking black voters for granted." Tavis Smiley, black NPR commentator, made the same assertion...
AN ANALOGY-GETTING FROM HERE TO THERE Suppose you are planning to drive from Boston to Los Angeles. If you are like us, you will get a map (online from the Internet), remember that over long distances the great circle route is actually the shortest distance between...
Not to take anything away from Jimmy Carter, the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize winner and a far better ex-president than president, but, when it comes to saving lives, no one can compete with Norman Borlaug. Norman who? Borlaug is one of the great humanitarians of the 20th...
Revolutionary technologies always disrupt society and one of America's biggest "digital age" disruptions is occurring in the area of intellectual property (IP). Indeed, the digital revolution has re-ignited a heated debate over whether intellectual property is even...
Opponents of Social Security reform must feel like they're stuck in a bad horror film. Every time they think they've killed off personal retirement accounts, the campaign to create the accounts comes back, stronger than ever. The 2002 election was no exception. Social...
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