74 articles
Mindful of popular demand for television shows featuring religious themes, the networks this season have fully obliged us. Consider Father Ray, the priest on ABC's new offering Nothing Sacred. It could be that more people have heard of him than have watched the show, because he has provoked devout…
In the 1989 governor's race in Virginia, media consultant Robert Goodman produced a powerful anti-abortion TV ad for Republican Marshall Coleman. It showed a baby taking his first steps, as an announcer criticized Democrat Douglas Wilder for backing legalized abortion, even in extreme cases like…
In the good news/bad news department, our deputy editor John Podhoretz has been asked to take charge of the editorial and op-ed pages of the New York Post, a responsibility he will assume in a few weeks. Needless to say their gain is our loss, or partial loss. He will continue to write frequently…
Poor Jeffrey Rosen. He evidently thought he had a boffo lede for his cover story on Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. He bumped into Justice Ginsburg at the opera, where Mozart's Cosi fan tutte was playing. The "traditional translation of the title," writes Rosen, is "…
"THE INCOME TAX SHOULDN'T BE a fulllemployment program for accountants and economists," says a leading tax reformer in the House of Representatives. " The lobbyists who have rigged our tax code for decades" must be curbed, he says, and tax forms made so simple they are "printed on a small…
Jaime Escalante, the famed math teacher depicted in the 1987 film Stand and Deliver, joining California's anti-bilingual campaign "English for the Children" as honorary chairman. Before Escalante began his fight to teach advanced-placement calculus to students in an East Los Angeles barrio, he was…
For the past four years, the Washington Scholarship Fund, a non-profit organization founded by two former Department of Education staffers, has provided scholarships for low-income D.C. students. Currently, the WSF pays between 30 and 60 percent of private-school tuition for 460 students. Now,…
IN RECENT WEEKS, REPUBLICANS have been blasted in certain conservative quarters for caving in to the White House on Medicare. The charge? That they allowed the administration to slip a provision into the budget deal that effectively stripped senior citizens of their right to contract privately with…
PRESIDENT CLINTON IS SUPPOSEDLY a staunch supporter of the nation's charter schools -- independently run, but publicly funded, institutions now numbering around 700. Indeed, he has called for the creation of 3,000 of them by decade's end. Meantime, his administration's Education Department is doing…
Let's stipulate right at the outset that there's no people like show people, but I don't think it's a news flash to point out, in addition, that show people are pretty dumb. They can be magnificent at dancing, singing, telling jokes, or emoting; wildly creative at lighting a tableau or making the…
Let's stipulate right at the outset that there's no people like show people, but I don't think it's a news flash to point out, in addition, that show people are pretty dumb. They can be magnificent at dancing, singing, telling jokes, or emoting; wildly creative at lighting a tableau or making the…
We take you first to Texas. On September 26, President Clinton visited Houston for another in an endless series of DNC fundraisers. While he was there, he did a little drop-by at San Jacinto College. His subject was affirmative action. The president heaped praise on outgoing Houston mayor Bob…
Timothy Gatton Ash's The File is an account of a crushing discovery the author made after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A significant number of Garton Ash's best "friends" from his time as a graduate student in Berlin in the early 1980s turned out to have been secret-police informants for East…
Ever heard the one about the two economists who fall into a mass grave? " How are we going to get out of here?" asks the first economist. "Imagine a ladder," says the second.
I am the editor and owner of New York Press, a weekly newspaper distributed free in Manhattan. That automatically makes my paper a member of the "alternative" media community in the United States, but NYPress is, in truth, a very stark alternative to the world of the "alternatives." We have a rock…
JANET RENO'S DAYLONG, ROPE-A-DOPE performance before the House Judiciary Committee October 15 was reported in the press as a clash between frustrated Republicans and an attorney general steadfast in her determination to say as little as possible about her investigation of the Clinton fund-raising…
Those who love fiction, especially literary fiction, are ever inclined to lament its death. But the very same people sometimes ask: How can fiction be dying if I've read a half-dozen new novels in the past five years that I hope my children will read someday? Those who like Irish writers will find…
Of all the iniquities of human history, the slave trade stands among the worst. Slave-trading was the equivalent of murder, since sea captains expected a proportion of slaves on each voyage to die. Of course, quick death might have been preferable to the prolonged agony of life in bondage.
When Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr finally released his report concluding that deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster committed suicide -- the same conclusion reached by previous investigations -- he immediately came under fire from leading Foster conspiracy theorists. "This is a…
The plane, overbooked, was crawling with irritable travelers. After some seat reshuffling, I squeezed by a burly, hostile-looking man and settled in. I figured on an unpleasant flight. The man and I wrestled over our shared armrest for about five minutes, until I gave up.
On October 8, 296 members of the House voted to once more send a ban on partial-birth abortion to President Clinton. He promptly vetoed the bill, using exactly the same discredited health-of-the-mother arguments as last time, back in April 1996. The gruesome procedure involves delivering the body…
Does global warming exist? If so, is it caused by man-made pollutants, or by some natural phenomenon? And if the earth's temperature really is rising, is there anything that can be done to reverse it? Questions like these are debated by responsible scientists all over the world. But you would never…
Jane Alexander announced last week that she would be resigning from the chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Arts, having successfully stared down congressional Republicans and other critics of the federal arts agency. The following day, Alexander vented her true feelings to the New York…
Will the "democratic Left" rally to the defense of Kurt Stand? After all, the Washington labor lawyer -- arrested last week on charges he spent two decades spying for East Germany's murderous secret police force, the Stasi -- has an impeccable "democratic Left" credential. Stand is a member -- at…
It looked like a scene out of college fraternity rush. Cable viewers of Fred Thompson's campaign-finance hearings saw columnist Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal warmly greet Harold Ickes as the former Clinton White House aide was about to take his seat and testify. The air of mirth and good humor…
HISPANIC HERITAGE MONTH runs from September 15, independence day for most of Central America, to October 15. This year, the Hispanic press is portraying two sisters, Nadine and Patsy Cordova, as martyrs for the Chicano- history movement. The two were junior-high and high-school teachers in Vaughn,…
There is a time in life when civilized tact checks out and dangerous candor checks in. Usually the time is late in one's seventies or in one's eighties. The condition seems to afflict men more than women. The grave yawns, further suppression of long repressed views no longer seems to have much…
EARLIER THIS YEAR the National Organization for Women and its friends on the cultural left decided it was time to take on Promise Keepers, the men's evangelical movement founded six years ago by the former University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney. Armageddon was to be October 4, 1997,…
Anne Rice
Georg Solti
Anita Hill is back in the spotlight, promoting her new book, Speaking Truth to Power. But her appearance on NBC's Dateline mainly showed how little interested in the truth journalists continue to be. Jane Pauley held a virtual pity party for Hill. "Most people concluded that Anita Hill had lied,"…
This Wednesday, Attorney General Janet Reno will testify at an oversight hearing of the House Judiciary Committee. The hearing will center on her management of the Justice Department inquiry into 1996 campaign fund-raising. Committee chairman Henry Hyde's Republican majority will want to know why…
Instead of more bad news of toadying to the butchers of Beijing, let us suspend for a week the Dianne Feinstein Moral Equivalence Awards and return, as the radio announcer used to say, to those thrilling days of yesteryear. To 1983 to be precise, when Feinstein was still the mayor of a left-coast…
LAST WEEK, A LABOUR PARTY celebration; this week, a Tory wake. Britain's Conservative party gathered beside the Irish Sea in Blackpool to lick its wounds after its electoral rout in May, and to try to persuade itself that it is now on the road to renewal and a return to power. This is, after all,…
Tuesday, October 7
G. A. Henty
THE SCRAPBOOK has been enjoying voluminous nominations for the Dianne Feinstein Appease-China prize. What with the approaching Bill Clinton-Jiang Zemin summit, making goo-goo eyes at China is fast becoming the dominant indoor sport in the nation's capital.
From an Oct. 1 New York Times story on Israel's refusal to extradite Maryland teenager Samuel Sheinbein, who has been charged with the murder of one Alfredo Tello: "Ms. Leitner, Mr. Sheinbein's lawyer, said her client 'doesn't at this time remember being involved in anyone's death.'"
IT WASN'T JUST THE PRESS that sensed dynamite ahead in the recent Senate hearings on the Internal Revenue Service. The Clinton administration was alarmed at the prospect of testimony from IRS agents indignant over abuses of power by their own agency. A senior Treasury official even pressured an…
Okay, the headline in the Sept. 28 New York Times wasn't that outrageous, but it came close: "Crime Keeps on Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling." Gee, there's a paradox. And lest you think the headline writer, in a stab at euphony, has misrepresented the story, here is the lede on Fox…
The fake Tocquevillism that John J. Pitney Jr. sought to stamp out in these pages two years ago -- "America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great" -- not only lives on, it metastasizes. Earlier this year, the Christian Defense Fund…
We have been waiting more than a year, since the enactment of welfare reform in August 1996, to congratulate the Republican Congress on a meaningful and clear-cut political victory. Those congratulations are now in order. The three-day Senate Finance Committee hearings on the Internal Revenue…
Nathan McCall
Roger M. Smith
Last week, Christopher Caldwell noted in these pages that Ted Turner's billion-dollar U.N. gift wouldn't be a billion dollars, wouldn't go to the U. N., and was perhaps less a gift than a quid pro quo. This week we're led to surmise something else: It won't go into free-speech programs, either.
I don't watch much TV news anymore, but when I heard David Brinkley was retiring, I made a point of tuning in to ABC's This Week to see him say goodbye. It was business as usual for the first 45 minutes or so: One of Marv Albert's lawyers did a star turn, and Roy Romer played his why-we-need-…
Alfred Kazin
If you are, as I am, an inveterate consumer of pop culture, half the time you must wonder why on earth you bother. Most of the movies you see, television shows you watch, books you read, are disappointing. I can remember when that wasn't really the case for me, when even a bad television show held…
At the bottom of a stairwell at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., a large oil painting leans against what appears to be a broken shopping cart. The portrait is filthy and badly scratched, its gilt frame smashed at the edges. Wipe the dust away and it is still possible to read the…
This is Steve Forbes's moment: He's propelled himself into the top tier of potential Republican presidential candidates in 2000. "No doubt about it," says GOP representative Bill Paxon of New York, a fresh Forbes admirer. Not only that, Forbes has adroitly embraced a new role as reliable party…
On September 25, America's conservatives gathered in the capital of the world's only superpower to contemplate their navels in the hope of discovering why they have recently been denied power in Washington, London, and Paris. Almost simultaneously, the British Labour party gathered in this…
Perhaps Janet Reno hoped to buy herself a little breathing room by approving a 60-day preliminary investigation that could lead to an independent-counsel probe of Vice President Al Gore's campaign phone calls. Her decision last week seemed designed -- at least in part -- to satisfy Republican…
Atortuous (or is it torturous?) solecism was committed in the lead op-ed piece of the New York Times last Wednesday, right next to William Satire, he of "On Language." This kind of writing ought to be quashed (or is it squashed?) and spurned (or is it scorned?). Lawyer Donna Harrison was writing…
Ron Carey on the illegal fund-raising efforts on behalf of his campaign for the presidency of the Teamsters union: "If there is a victim here, I certainly am the victim. What went on here is a complete betrayal of everything we stood for."
If anything is clear in the murky debate about national education testing, it's that Congress doesn't want the Clinton administration to continue in the course it's been on: constructing tests of fuzzy math and whole language with the help of committees and contractors picked by the Education…
California Republicans are proving gutless on the issue of ending bilingual education in the state, fearing that they will be accused of Hispanic-bashing. This astonishing posture by a party that backed previous ballot measures ending racial preferences and benefits for illegal immigrants…
Stephan Thernstrom Abigail Thernstrom
James W. Ceaser
Fred Thompson hasn't had many good weeks chairing the Senate committee investigating illegal and improper activities in last year's presidential campaign. But in the week beginning September 15, the Thompson hearings finally started to generate serious public attention. A Clinton foreign- policy…
Arnold Rampersad
WHY DOES BILL GATES wear his hair in bangs? This question had never previously infiltrated the left hemisphere of my cerebral cortex, where the big issues get pondered, and I am not even sure I was conscious of the Gatesian hairdo until just the other day. That is when I found myself staring at his…
GEE, IN ALL THE EXCITEMENT of demanding that Attorney General Janet Reno seek the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate Al Gore's fund-raising activities -- including saber-rattling about possible impeachment proceedings against Reno if she didn't -- Republicans clean forgot to…
Come here, Sidney, and let me chastise you." So says a corrupt cop to Tony Curtis before he beats Curtis to a pulp in 1957's Sweet Smell of Success, a memorable movie full of purple chunks of dialogue that no actual person would ever speak -- certainly no thick-necked New York City policeman on the…
We should have noticed something was up when a call to Yellow Cab from my friend Tracy's apartment brought a Checker cab to her doorstep. Since when are the Yellow and Checker guys even on speaking terms? But, then, headed out for a night on the town with the girls -- Tracy, Kelly, Kerry, and me --…
In the guise of fighting bigotry, the American Jewish Committee has issued a pandering press release deploring "the racially insensitive remarks made recently by Lino Graglia, a University of Texas law professor, whose statements suggested that whites are superior to others."
Everything you know about the current politics of campaign-finance reform is wrong. Minority leader Tom Daschle has insisted, and the newspapers have reported, over and over again, that the Senate's entire 45-member Democratic caucus enthusiastically endorses the McCain-Feingold "Bipartisan…
Those who suspect that large parts of the federal government are essentially lunatic in their orientation now have the proof, at least as far as the Federal Trade Commission is concerned. Robert Pitofsky, the FTC chairman, was quoted last week in the Wall Street Journal discussing his agency's…
Heather Cox Richardson
WHEN THE UNITED NATIONS VOTED in November 1947 to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, violence quickly broke out and escalated to all- out war. One byproduct of that war was the creation of an international welfare program for Palestinian refugees, disproportionately funded by the…
TED TURNER'S OFFER TO GIVE A BILLION dollars to the "cash-strapped" (as it's invariably described) United Nations has not been out of the papers since he sprang it on an audience at the United Nations Association award ceremonies in mid-September. It is, by any standard, one hell of an offer. But…
Look at Bob Diehl, and the word "warrior" doesn't immediately come to mind. He's a retired oil-industry analyst who favors short-sleeved dress shirts with leather suspenders and Puma sneakers. And he spends his days hunched in a gray cubicle at a nondescript office building in a seedy, stucco-…
PRESIDENT CLINTON IS VERY KEEN these days on national testing of school children in the subjects of reading and mathematics. This is probably a good idea; a hundred years ago it could be argued that the local school board in a rural town knew best what education was appropriate for the children in…