POLITICS

Here is a story out of Iraq that caught my eye: About a dozen Marines are being investigated for possible war crimes in connection with the deaths last year of 15 Iraqi civilians who were initially reported killed by a roadside bomb. The Navy has opened a criminal...

Several weeks ago, I wrote about Overland High School teacher Jay Bennish’s indoctrination of his geography class. In commenting on President Bush’s State of the Union address, he told his 10th-graders: “Sounds a lot like the things Adolf Hitler used...

It’s unfortunate for property owners that the battle for the right to own and control their land has fallen on the shrugging shoulders of Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA). The Senator is Chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, which will decide the fate...

Suppose I knew that one man was a magistrate and another was a terrorist, but I had to pick out the terrorist on sight. If I chose the man in the powdered wig over the man in the kefiyah, you would think me daft. And yet our news media have been making a mistake of...

Remember ImClone? This was the company founded by physician Sam Waksal, an immunologist who worked for years to develop a drug to treat colon and other cancers. His company had one product–Erbitrux–and it promised to extend the lives of thousands of...

Presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton used Rev. Al Sharpton’s Martin Luther King Jr. birthday celebration to, as Professor Shelby Steele explains, “whistle for the black vote by pandering to the black sense of grievance.” In response to a question...

The central issue of the “cartoon jihad”–the Muslim riots and death threats against a Danish newspaper that printed 12 cartoons depicting Mohammed–is obvious. The issue is freedom of speech: whether our freedom to think, write, and draw is to...

High up on my list of annoyances are references to the United States as a democracy and the suggestion that Iraq should become a democracy. The word “democracy” appears in neither of our founding documents — the Declaration of Independence nor the...

The Oregon Supreme Court has unanimously upheld the constitutionality of Measure 37, the property rights initiative approved by the voters in 2004. It requires government to either compensate landowners for reductions of real property fair market value due to certain...

It is widely believed today that our cultural and political alternatives are limited either to the ideas of the secular, relativistic left–or to those of the religious, absolutist right–or to some compromised mixture of the two. In other words, one’s...

Let’s start off with a few quotations, then a question. In reference to the president’s State of the Union: “Sounds a lot like the things Adolf Hitler used to say.” “Bush is threatening the whole planet.” “[The] U.S. wants to...

Some of you reading this web site think of yourselves as either Liberal or Conservative. You have views of the world based on personal beliefs, and these beliefs lead you to certain political assumptions. I am neither Liberal nor Conservative and I have political...

According to the University of Washington student government, university alumnus Gregory “Pappy” Boyington is not a person university students should strive to emulate and he should not be honored with a memorial on campus because as a Marine Corps...

John Q. Liberal is a professor at a local college. On Monday he gives a speech in which he denounces capitalism and the profit motive, and praises environmentalism as the highest moral ideal. When his speech is over, he confronts the organizer of the talk....

President Bush, during his State of the Union address, said, “America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.” I decided to check out “addiction” in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary and found:...