POLITICS

Journalists and Economics 101

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 governments spend more than they...

Alex Haley’s “Roots”: Fact or Fiction?

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 himself I never...

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 three-fifths of...

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 repressive regimes, listed by the...

Invalid Abstractions

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...

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: 'racist,' 'homophobe,'...

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 extremism with...

Helen Thomas’s Grandmother Clause

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 earned the respect...

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 Britain...

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...

Enemies Within

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

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

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 accidentally opened it instead...

Infallible Haters?

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 causes so dear to the...

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 folding paper...

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

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...

“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 anthem. Instead,...

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