August 1997

Jonathan Yardley

The 1997-98 Supreme Court term doesn't even begin for another two months, and already the New York Times is using its news pages to instruct the justices about their most important pending case. This fall, the court will hear Piscataway Board of Education v. Taxman, the notorious affirmative-…

"English for the Children," the campaign to end bilingual education in California with a ballot measure, gathers steam. Fernando Vega, a Latino leader and lifelong Democrat who rallied Hispanic votes for the 1992 Clinton- Gore campaign, has agreed to join the anti-bilingual crusade as honorary…

In June, the editors of THE WEEKLY STANDARD asked 28 writers, thinkers, activists, and political professsionals for their thoughts on the following proposition:

Jesse Jackson sure knows how to help a guy. He traveled to North Carolina last week to protest the role of Republican senator Lauch Faircloth in lifting power from Washington mayor Marion Barry and handing it to a presidentially appointed control board. "Faircloth essentially raped the democracy…

Richard Norton Smith

"The little grey cells," says Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie's great Belgian detective, touching an index finger to his forehead, "ah, Hastings, they are what matter." Those little cells representing our brain power -- who today does not worry about losing them at too rapid a clip? As early as…

Newt Gingrich decided last week to give some of the responsibilities of Bill Paxon -- whom Gingrich dumped from his leadership team after the recent failed coup -- to Pennsylvania's Jim Greenwood, one of the most "moderate" Republicans in the House (moderate being media code for the GOP's liberal…

Longtime Boston Globe editor Ross Gelbspan has been riding high since April, when Addison-Wesley published his book The Heat Is On: The High Stakes Battle Over Earth's Threatened Climate. Gelbspan's publisher claims that oil and coal interests have been "paying off scientists to pose as 'greenhouse…

In the weeks leading up to the budget deal -- while District of Columbia mayor Marion Barry was junketing in Africa, and the Washington Post was detailing his city's epic mismanagement under bureaucracies Barry has bloated during four terms in office -- D.C. delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton was…

THE BOMBING IN JERUSALEM'S open-air Mahane Yehuda market, which killed 13 Israelis and wounded 150 others, had the inadvertent effect of revealing just how confused the Clinton administration's policy on the Middle East peace process really is. A week before the bombing, a foreign-policy adviser to…

In Jim Sleeper's "Ward Connerly Gets Pinched" last week, it was stated that 40 percent of black voters in California had supported Proposition 209. Exit polling suggested that, in fact, about 25 percent had done so.

President Clinton's national security adviser Sandy Berger is in China this week for meetings with numero uno Jiang Zemin -- in order to make arrangements for the Chinese capo's expected visit to Washington this fall. As Berger was leaving, he was probably unhappy to receive a polite letter from…

The director John Frankenheimer recently told an interviewer that his three- hour made-for-cable film about George Wallace is not intended "to give people a history lesson." That's too bad, because Americans, by and large, are not known for their sense of history, even recent history. Of a thousand…

It's been a bad few weeks for smokers. A bad decade, in fact. This is not news. But as the anti-smoking hysteria intensifies, the news becomes increasingly surreal. The first lady used a recent newspaper column -- did you know the first lady is a columnist, like her confidante Eleanor? -- to blast…

It's hard to say exactly when it started, the d-girls in tight black dresses from Penn, the agents with degrees from Yale, sitcom writers from Harvard, up-and-coming young executives who knew each other at Brown, staying out all night at parties at someone's brand-new million-dollar house in the…

Housed at Patrick Air Force Base in four unadorned buildings trimmed in the fecal browns and beiges favored by most military subcontractors, the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute is nuzzled against the Atlantic amidst the burnt palms, Peg Leg's seafood shoppes, and Ron Jon surf…

TRENT LOTT ISN'T THRILLED that Jesse Helms has decided, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to prevent former Massachusetts governor William Weld from becoming ambassador to Mexico. It's easy to see why this fight displeases the Senate majority leader: It has crowded out…

IT SOUNDED INNOCENT ENOUGH when President Clinton made the claim at his press conference August 6 and no reporter rose to question him about it. Here's what Clinton said: The "first step" toward wiping out the budget deficit and creating a strong economy came "back in 1993 when we abandoned…

THE SCRAPBOOK hopes to be the first media outlet to write about the following issue without cutesy puns, double entendres, or cheap scatological allusions.

"It's a good thing Americans have a holiday formally set aside for Thanksgiving. It means there is at least one day a year on which complaining is prohibited. Not that complaining is an altogether bad thing -- America's endless dissatisfaction is an important spur to progress -- but it is often a…

As a proud baby boomer I feel it is my right -- indeed my generational obligation -- to shove my personal tastes in music, food, and clothing down the throat of every person who has the misfortune to be either older or younger than I. This is what baby boomers do, what we are called to do. And so…

ALTHOUGH THE HEALTH CONSEQUENCES of smoking have been known for many years, tobacco companies have avoided product-liability judgments for one reason: Smokers have always been held responsible for smoking. But in recent years a new paradigm has emerged. Now smoking is thought to be an addiction,…

In Boston they love their losers. If you lose selfishly -- but do it with a certain blase style -- they love you all the more. And if you claim virtue while you're at it . . . well, then you're William Weld, bucking for Beantown sainthood.

I've seen women weep before, but never with the sense of hopeless desperation that comes over them as they listen to their husbands begin their third hour of summer-camp reminiscences. When middle-aged men start recounting those Jimmy Carter-era camp-staff parties at which they drank grain alcohol…

One afternoon you're in the Cooper-Hewitt museum in New York. You're browsing through an exhibit of work by a long-dead designer, and suddenly you see . . . your phone. It's the Trimline touch-tone, with the buttons in the handset, designed by Henry Dreyfuss in 1965.

MIDWAY THROUGH A PRESS BRIEFING on the last day of July, a reporter asked White House press secretary Mike McCurry if he would "address the allegations that deal with Kathleen Willey and whether or not she was harassed by the president." In the context of a press briefing, the question was not…

SHORTLY AFTER THE 1996 ELECTION, a triumphant President Clinton met behind closed doors with congressional Democrats, who were, if not surprised, at least disappointed by their failure to retake the House of Representatives. According to news reports, the president told his fellow Democrats that…

Just as there are cat people and dog people, there are wedding people and reception people. Most people, I imagine, belong to the latter category -- impatient for the ceremony to be done with, eager for the party to begin. Because that's all a "reception" is, really: a big fat party, only one where…

The July 28 letter to the editor titled "Close to Absolute Good" was attributed to Virginia Postrel, the editor of Reason magazine, who did not write it. The letter was written by Jeff A. Taylor of Gaithersburg, Maryland, who e-mailed it to Postrel, who forwarded it to her Washington editor, who…

John A. Andrew

THE FIGHT OVER THE 2000 CENSUS is a fight between the Republicans and the Democrats over statistics. It reached the high level of national politics when the Republicans added a provision to the disaster-relief bill in June barring the use of "sampling" -- estimating the total population from an…

When Ben Hogan died on July 25, the golf world seemed slightly stunned. He was 84 and had been sick for several years, but he was always a hovering presence around the game, a necessary part of its self-image. Not that he ever talked to anyone. He kept to himself at Shady Oaks Country Club in Fort…

Bernard Lefkowitz

There's plenty to complain about in the "balanced" budget deal, but one thing stands out: welfare. So eager were House speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate majority leader Trent Lott to seal the deal that they capitulated to Clinton-administration demands whose effect will be to undo last year's…

Tony Blair's government has just voted to raise (to 18) the minimum age at which British subjects are allowed to smoke, within days of lowering (to 16) the age of consent for homosexual sex. The latter was in response to an inquiry from the European Court of Human Rights, which was threatening to…

President Clinton has lately been busy, busy, busy bringing us all together for a national conversation on race. And he keeps piling up the words -- so that the rest of us might climb his transcripts to a heaven of inter-ethnic healing. Deep inside this Tower of Bubba, of course, the president's…

Dennis Ross, the State Department's Middle East envoy, canceled a trip to Israel in the wake of the terrorist attack on a Jerusalem market that left 15 dead and hundreds injured. That was okay by Abdel Aziz Shaheen, the supply minister in Yasser Arafat's cabinet. As he told the Washington Post's…

Editor's note: Sen. Jesse Helms passed away July 4, 2008.

Tuesday, July 29

It's not every day that inner-city Hispanics, grassroots conservatives, and liberal activists find themselves on the same team. But these are the troops that have rallied in California to fight bilingual education -- one of the many educational fads to begin in that state (like self-esteem…

Southerners have a reputation for loudly proclaiming who their friends and enemies are. Richard Scruggs, the greatest trial lawyer Mississippi has ever seen, is no exception. As Scruggs waits in a corridor of the Dirksen Senate office building after a hearing on the tobacco deal he largely crafted,…

Last week, a Fred Thompson aide sent an e-mail to the Senate Republican staffers on the fund-raising investigation committee announcing that the Senate gift shop would soon start selling a limited number of $ 7 coffee mugs emblazoned with the words "Fred Thompson, Chairman" and "Special…

AS I WORKED THIS WINTER on my book Liberal Racism, I had an impish notion: Why not examine how New York Times publisher Arthur ("Pinch") Sulzberger Jr.'s tangled ethnic and religious roots have nourished his obsession with diversity? "It is not enough just to hire a more racially and sexually…

FOR A POLITICIAN WHOSE POPULARITY stems from the perception that he doesn't take himself too seriously, Bill Weld has sounded a lot like Joan of Arc lately. At a press conference in Boston last month, the now-former governor of Massachusetts explained that the fight over his nomination to be…

In fascinating and horrifying detail, Lynne Cheney elsewhere in this issue limns the efforts of Clinton administration education experts and a cabal of teacher bureaucrats to subvert mathematics -- the one subject you might think even the education establishment would have a hard time ruining (see…

Thirty years ago, Gay Talese wrote a famous essay called "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." These days, Frank Sinatra has much more than a cold. There's the two recent heart attacks, the Alzheimer's rumors, and now, the tabloids are certain he has bladder cancer. His family says he's fine. But whoever the…

Barely a week after taking the fall for the failed anti-Newt coup, Bill Paxon is being pushed by influential Republicans for a newly created position as "general chairman" of the Republican National Committee. This would be a largely ceremonial but high-profile title that Paxon would hold along…

For the past few years, the mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne has been offering her audiences an unusual encore: "Bridge Over Troubled Water," the 1970 Simon & Garfunkel hit. The effect is both unsettling and transfixing. The voice is familiar; so is the song. But the voice and the song together are an…

The Gate of Heavenly Peace, an American-made documentary on the 1989 student uprising in Tiananmen Square, was a hit movie in the first half of this year in Hong Kong. In March, the Far Eastern Economic Review reported that the film, directed by the Beijing-born Carma Hinton, had grossed over a…

Even at a downtown intersection at 8:45 in the morning, I recognized the man the moment he rapped on my car window. He was wearing a tweed sport coat with leather patches on the elbows and a rep stripe tie. He had a bulky ring of keys in his hand, and he looked frustrated and impatient, like a…

"They lied to me," says Madalyn McDaniel of Atascadero, California. "They completely betrayed me." At a parents' night at the local high school, McDaniel was told about a great opportunity for her son: the Interactive Mathematics Program, in which he would learn everything taught in traditional…

THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY is marking its 50th anniversary, and it has a new director, George J. Tenet. Last week, Tenet announced his staff, a crew of veterans. The agency -- much embattled, and with good reason -- needs all the help it can get. It should take a particularly hard look at its…

When he started investigating President Clinton's Whitewater dealings, Jim Leach knew he would be playing hardball. But the Iowa Republican never expected to see Jack Palladino lurking around his house.

The gods of the Republican House of Representatives are angry, and the trembling mortals are attempting through ritual to win back heaven's favor. There has been a human sacrifice. The virgin on the altar, Bill Paxon of New York, went under the blade with a smile, as ceremony requires. "You have…

RAY LAHOOD HAS NEVER, EVER, been called a Newtoid. As chief of staff to then-House Republican leader Bob Michel for a dozen years, he often took offense at Newt Gingrich's pressure tactics, which eventually prompted Michel to retire. Running to succeed Michel in 1994, LaHood refused to sign the…

WHEN HOUSE REPUBLICANS GATHERED on the evening of July 23, everyone wondered what Lindsey Graham would say. Lindsey Graham? Hardly a household name, the second-term representative from South Carolina had emerged as a ringleader in the effort to remove House speaker Newt Gingrich. He had caused a…

We inadvertently failed to identify Nelson Lund, author of last week's book review "Down Kevorkian's Slope." Lund, needless to say, is a professor of law at George Mason University.

Richard Russo

Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry's tour of Africa was a many-splendored thing. While the city for which he is nominally responsible continues to wallow in debt and scandalous mismanagement, the four-term former felon and his wife enjoyed an all-expenses-paid nine-day trip to the…

Concerned Women for America last week joined the boycott of Walt Disney begun in early June by the Southern Baptist Convention. And they've added some reasons of their own. Among them: "Disney has changed its once family friendly films to overt anti-Christian and anti-moral themes." One example the…

Tuesday, July 22