For months, courageous protesters have braved riot police to oppose the depredations of a warlike and oppressive regime bent on world domination. No, I am not talking about the "anti-war" protesters who menace the cities of Europe and America--the creeps who scale the...
POLITICS
Dirty Secrets About “Affirmative Action”
"The dirty little secret about affirmative action is that it doesn't work." So concluded ABC network reporter Bob Zelnick in his excellent book on the subject, titled "Backfire."An even dirtier secret is that virtually no one really cares whether or not affirmative...
Government Mandated Benevolence
Q: I agree with you that there's too much emphasis on self-sacrifice in today's world. At the same time, people are often harsh and cruel to each other in everyday life. I don't just mean terrorists and snipers; I also refer to people who don't even do simple things...
American Academics Who Hate America
Americans broadly agree on two facts about the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq: its brutality and the danger it poses to themselves, especially the danger of nuclear attack. Disagreement arises primarily over what to do: Take out the regime now? Give Baghdad another...
Stock Picking Systems: Price to Sales and Discipline
A stock-picking system that can consistently beat the market has always been the Holy Grail of investors - desirable, tempting, but unobtainable. Investing just couldn't be that easy. But a few years ago, James P. O'Shaughnessy, a financial adviser and quantitative...
Bankruptcy
Many normal people -- not to mention politicians looking to exploit the latest headline -- talk about corporate bankruptcy as if it's some sort of financial scam, a gimmick perpetrated by malevolent corporations to avoid paying their bills. So it's not surprising to...
Ordeal by Slander
Wall Street Journal reporter John Gasparino has been on a rampage this week to be the first with every new bit of gossip leaked from NY attorney general Eliot Spitzer's office trying to connect Salomon Smith Barney telecom analyst Jack Grubman's upgrade of AT&T...
Race and Cant
Cant has become the norm in discussions of any issue involving race or ethnicity. However, a new book by Linda Chavez -- a memoir of her own remarkable life -- should make it inescapably clear what counterproductive and even vile things have been going on in the name...
Nancy Pelosi? The Dems Just Don’t Get It
Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., a 15-year member of the House of Representatives, appears poised to succeed Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., as the House minority leader. If one reads the recent Republican off-year victories as an endorsement of Bush's policies (or at least a rejection...
Whither Democrats?
Democrats have now lost two consecutive elections that, by all the usual standards, they should have won easily. Al Gore lost the 2000 election despite a usually unbeatable combination of peace, prosperity, a declining crime rate and the first budget surplus in...
Whither Republicans?
Even in defeat, Democrats can console themselves that they still have a lock on minority votes in general and black votes in particular. Moreover, given the demographic realities, minority voters are going to be a growing percentage of all voters in the years ahead....
Iraqi Dictator Saddam Hussein’s Shop of Horrors
As a boy, writes Kenneth Pollack in his masterful new book on Iraq, "The Threatening Storm," Saddam Hussein would heat an iron poker until it was white-hot, then use it to impale cats and dogs. Years later, when he had boys of his own, he would take them into prisons...
Gun Statistics for the Second-Amendment-challenged
Maryland Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (D) recently urged a ban on Saturday Night Specials and "assault weapons," while recommending a national ballistic fingerprint database. The interviewer, CNN's Judy Woodruff, asked no difficult follow-up...
Nancy Pelosi: A San Francisco Liberal
Now that Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi is becoming the Democrats' House minority leader, she is being celebrated as the first woman to hold such a high post. But she is also being described as a "San Francisco liberal" -- which she definitely is. What do San Francisco...
Child Sacrifice, Palestinian Style
Israel is criticized for alleged insensitivity to the risks of casualties among civilians, especially children, during counter-terrorist missions. But the tragedy of unintended casualties from justified military actions cannot be compared to a society's deliberate...
Scour the World for Stocks
In the good old days, foreign stocks provided balance. Typically, if U.S. stocks were having a bad year, non-U.S. stocks would be having a good year. One study found that for the 25 years between 1970 and 1995, foreign stocks beat U.S. by a wide margin in 12 years,...
Wins and Losses: Bush’s Dilemma
President Bush can count two unexpected victories in the past week: a broad mandate from the American people -- in the form of an unprecedented mid-term congressional sweep -- followed by a unanimous United Nations Security Council vote approving the administration's...
SEC Should Support Markets and Not Central Planning
Harvey Pitt had to go. He had lost the credibility to run the Securities and Exchange Commission. Now, President Bush should move swiftly to replace him. The SEC has too much on its plate for dawdling. What the country needs is someone who has the guts and stature to...
North Korea Building Nuclear Bombs? Perish the Thought
Our leaders express incredible shock that North Korea is building nuclear bombs. This emotion of shock betrays the reasons why we have the whole problem with terrorism in the first place. We are victims of terrorism because too many of us -- and all of our leaders --...
Live Free or Die: Giving Real Meaning to Veterans Day
Veterans Day arouses three emotions in most Americans: solemnity, because it celebrates the veterans who have defended our great country; sadness, because so many have lost their lives in the process; and pride, because they have fought so well. The supreme value that...
Honor Veterans, Rebuff Sacrifice
As a former captain in the US Army, I can attest that I never encountered anyone who joined because of some masochistic yearning to transform himself into a sacrificial animal.
Eliot Spitzer’s Attack on the Securities Industry
Whatever you may think of Microsoft, the decision last Friday by federal judge Colleen Kollar-Kottely to approve the company's settlement with the Department of Justice was a much needed rebuke to the scorched-earth prosecutorial mindset of today's state attorneys...
Deformed Reform of Wall Street
The proposed restructuring of stock research at big Wall Street investment banks -- if "proposed" is the proper word when NY attorney general Eliot Spitzer is doing the proposing holding a rubber hose in his hand -- is an even worse-than-usual regulatory solution to a...
Do you want your child to die fighting in Iraq?
"Do you want your child to die fighting in Iraq?" This type of question is one of the subtle, insidious ways by which pacifists try to undercut the war against Islamic terrorists. To understand how this is done, we must first take an honest look at our enemies....
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