28 articles
Sanity and prudence combined to produce a great victory on July 31 when the House of Representatives overwhelmingly defeated—the margin was over 100 votes—the legalization of early human embryonic cloning. But the fight is not over. The Senate needs to act as well.
FOR MONTHS, the most cherished notion of Democrats, the media, liberal interest groups, and the permanent Beltway establishment has been that President Bush could no longer govern from the right. Vermont senator James Jeffords’s noisy defection had shifted the balance of power in Washington away…
EXECUTING PEOPLE FOR MURDER deters other people from committing other murders. Common sense would suggest to anyone that such a deterrent effect must exist. After all, people do fear losing their lives. And based on the evidence, it’s hard to see why anyone would doubt the deterrent effect of the…
LAST WEEK’S VOTE in the House to ban human cloning is something to celebrate. It may even be something momentous. The House passed, by 265 to 162, a bill sponsored by representative Dave Weldon of Florida that would ban the creation of all human clones. It rejected an alternative sponsored by…
THE MAN FROM GLAAD THROUGH THE YEARS, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD)—the jackboot division of the gay community—has displayed a gift for publicity-seeking, whether breathlessly chronicling the media appearances of Ellen DeGeneres, counting the number of gay characters on…
WHAT DAVID HALBERSTAM DID IN THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST to explain the formation and failure of America’s intervention in Vietnam, Vincent J. Cannato has now done in The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York for the domestic equivalent, the response to the "urban crisis"…
MOST PRESIDENTS RETREAT to the bully pulpit after suffering a setback, but George W. Bush has done the opposite. Following the Jeffords defection, President Bush went down into the trenches, conducting detailed negotiations with members of Congress, and visiting the Capitol building to personally…
IT’S A FAIR BET THAT in his 30 years of policing, Zhao Zhifei, the deputy commissioner of China’s Hubei Province Public Security Bureau, had never been sued. Then he came to New York. On July 18, Zhao was served at his Manhattan hotel with a $50 million civil suit under federal laws that allow…
PATRICK PATT IS TICKED. The wealthy ex-superintendent of a suburban Chicago school district is so peeved about recovering $600 of the money he paid in taxes last year that he wrote a letter to the Chicago Tribune about it. Patt reveals in his letter that he and his wife paid $50,000 in federal…
THE DISSONANCE OF A JOHN IRVING NOVEL—the typically staid John Irving prose used to express the typically steamy John Irving topics—can be overwhelming. It’s like listening to a schoolmarm reading aloud the letters to Penthouse. Irving’s novels are a parade of cross-dressers, kink freaks,…
"JEEZ, IT’S FOUR O’CLOCK ALREADY," I said to my colleague Andrew Ferguson recently. (At four o’clock yesterday, in fact.) "What am I going to write my Casual on?" "Why don’t you write about that stupid video game you’ve wasted your whole day playing?" said Andy. "Sploodge." He is referring to…
IF GEORGE W. BUSH CAN’T get his own Toy-Safety Czar confirmed by the new Democratic Senate, what chance does he stand when he nominates someone who is actually controversial, for a position that actually affects American life? By a party line vote last Thursday, the Senate Commerce Committee…
NO ARCHITECT SINCE LE CORBUSIER and Mies van der Rohe has had more impact on his profession than Robert Venturi, whose erudite denunciation of the "puritanically moral language of orthodox modern architecture" was published thirty-five years ago as a slender tome entitled Complexity and…
I DON’T WANT THE ABILITY to sue my health insurance company. Lawyers are expensive, so if my insurance providers know that I might sue them, they’ll charge me more. Other people, in contrast, might want to pay for the ability to sue. A true patients’ bill of rights would give all of us the choice.…
Only Rep. Gary A. Condit (D-Ceres) knows whether he has been exposed to legal peril through his involvement with Chandra Levy. But whatever the facts may be, it is certain that he has strayed into dangerous political and moral terrain. After giving Condit cover during the opening gambits of Levy's…
SEND OUT THE CLONES DUELING HUMAN CLONING BILLS are expected to come to the floor of the House for a vote on Tuesday, July 31. The Weldon-Stupak Human Cloning Prohibition Act (the "good bill," for short) would ban all human cloning. The Greenwood Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001 (the "bad bill")…
"I THINK THE RELATIONSHIP is on the upswing now, now that these irritations are behind us, and I know they are anxious to move forward." That keen geopolitical insight, uttered by Secretary of State Colin Powell on the eve of his visit to Beijing, nicely captures the Bush administration’s policy of…
WHEN THE FIRST FEMALE CADETS signed their names in the matriculation roster of the Virginia Military Institute in 1997, proponents of women’s rights trumpeted the event as a great victory for equality. Satisfied with this conclusion to the years-long legal battle that forced the venerable all-male…
THE CRUSADE FOR A PATIENTS’ BILL OF RIGHTS has one big problem: patients. They are indifferent to the issue, supposedly raised in their behalf, and oblivious to the debate in Congress over it. The media, instead of acknowledging this, insist a patients’ bill of rights is an urgent priority for…
WE’RE A HALF YEAR INTO THE BUSH PRESIDENCY, and many conservatives are moderately morose, and many liberals are moderately happy. On the right, Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot summed up the outlook earlier this month: "All of a sudden the political debate has taken a notable turn to the…
OFFICIAL WASHINGTON is a city of the sly evasion, the artful misdirection—spin, we like to call it—but seldom of the outright misstatement. You don’t often see a public official rise in his official capacity to make an official statement that is flatly, demonstrably, unmistakably contrary to the…
IF YOU’VE SEEN THE PREVIEWS or read the Hollywood hype, then you know that this summer’s latest blockbuster, Planet of the Apes, is a movie that asks its viewers deep, deep questions. Across America, we’ve been warned for months that director Tim Burton—famous for his lushly dark versions of Batman…
OVER DINNER AT THE TEHRAN CONFERENCE in 1943, Stalin coolly informed FDR and Churchill of a startling part of his plan for punishing Nazi aggression and deterring future German belligerence, once the war was won: "At least 50,000 and perhaps 100,000 of the German Commanding Staff must be physically…
YOUR BASIC LANGUAGE SNOB—that, friend, would be me—is never out of work. Just as he gets his wind back after railing about one or another overworked or idiotically used word, fresh misusages appear to cause him to get his knickers in a fine new twist. Everyday evidence of the inefficacy of my…
THERE IS A CERTAIN KIND of young man’s novel—George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying comes to mind —that simply can’t get over the fact that men settle down, marry, have children, and get steady jobs to support them. Orwell seems to find such behavior outlandish, at once horrifying and…
ON SEPTEMBER 12, BRITAIN’S CONSERVATIVE PARTY will tally 330,000 mail-in votes for party leader. At that point it will bestow upon either (a) the centrist former chancellor of the exchequer Kenneth Clarke or (b) the hard-line Thatcherite shadow defense minister Iain Duncan Smith what increasingly…
WHO WAS THE GREATEST FRENCH POET of the nineteenth century? André Gide’s immortal comment—"Victor Hugo, alas!"—is as true today as it was when Gide wrote it in a letter to Paul Valéry almost a century ago. But English readers have had to take it on faith. Few French poets of equivalent magnitude…
I FIRST HEARD OF THE MASSACRE of the Berishas, an extended family of Kosovar Albanians, in June 2000, some 14 months after it happened. A colleague and friend, Shpresa Mulliqi, asked me to polish a rough English translation of her long interview with Shyhrete Berisha for publication in a bilingual…