POLITICS

Every argument opposing capital punishment -- e.g., it fails to deter would-be murderers, it's administered according to racial/economic bias, it kills innocent people -- evades the fundamental basis for why state execution, when used with discretion, is just. One...

School's out. What did your children learn this year? Across the country, one poisonous lesson was pumped into the systems of self-esteem-inflated students: There is no such thing as failure. Christine Pelton, a now-famous former biology teacher at Piper High School...

Terry Barton, a U.S. Forest Service worker, was charged this week with intentionally setting the largest wildfire in Colorado history. It is a black mark on the beleaguered federal agency. But it's not the blackest mark. Last summer, four young firefighters died at...

What's so good about democracy -- generally understood as having trust in the general will of a democratic people, as expressed by a vote of the majority, to make all important decisions? If a majority of our 535 congressmen votes for one measure or another, is that...

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 e-government,...

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 supposedly...

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...