124 articles
IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING how the New York Times would size up the Bush reelection campaign, we now have an answer: Hubris. The charge is leveled twice in an article in yesterday's Times. Richard Stevenson and Adam Nagourney report that the Bush campaign is laying the groundwork for a get out the…
WHAT IF TIGER WOODS, frustrated by his inability of late to win one of golf's majors, enrolled at UC-Berkeley to finish the degree he started years ago at Stanford? Tiger would have to identify himself by race, and that would land him in the rough. Woods calls himself a "Cablanasian" (Caucasian,…
ELECTIONS, like warfare, come down to turning points. And should Governor Gray Davis go down in flames a week from tomorrow, remember last Friday as the pivotal moment in California's recall election. The event was a West Hollywood rally for women voters. His guest of honor was former Texas…
LET'S SAY you're a former supreme allied commander of NATO. You want to be the 44th president of the United States. You've never held political office--not even as secretary of your high school student council. There are only four months left before the first Democratic presidential primary, and…
EMAIL is a slippery medium. For example: Is it good or bad for the art of writing? Both. It devalues the written word; email is so fast and easy to send, correspondents exchange semi-articulate gibberings without a second thought. There used to be good letter writers, but there don't seem to be any…
Melbourne
[img nocaption float="right" width="396" height="291" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]1094[/img]IF THE TWIN SCOURGES of mankind are sin and ignorance, America's energy problems, according to the political and environmental left, are caused by our sins against nature. In this view, the problem goes all…
Modern Architecture and Other Essays
THE NINTH CIRCUIT seems to specialize in reminding the country that judges don't come out of nowhere, that they are appointed by presidents, and that, generally speaking, Democratic presidents more than Republicans tend to appoint judges who enforce a "living" or "growing" Constitution that just…
I AM A PERSON OF COLOR. Orange, for the most part, but more than a little salmon-y pink as well. I am a person of pattern, too--with many summers' worth of freckles accumulating on my arms and shoulders and other sun-exposed parts. Spotted, a zoologist might say, but not for camouflage, except…
CHANGES IN Federal Communications Commission regulations don't normally capture national attention. But a decision last June has people who worry about the growing influence of Big Media in a tizzy. Bill Clinton frets that "monolithic control over local media will reduce the diversity of…
THE UNITED STATES and the key members of the International Atomic Energy Agency deserve high praise for demanding that Iran rectify its nuclear naughtiness. Together with the agency's February report to the U.N. Security Council on North Korea's violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the…
My Life As a Fake
Books in Brief Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in An Age of Celebrity by Roger Kimball (Ivan R. Dee, 275 pp., $26). Nothing so conduces to make one's opinions seem incontrovertible as to find a critic who announces them as his own. I think Richard Diebenkorn is the greatest American…
IN JUNE 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly held that the Boy Scouts of America is free to exclude open homosexuals from the ranks of Scout leaders, even where a state anti-discrimination statute would otherwise prohibit the organization from doing so. Ever since, the American Civil Liberties…
Vergil's Empire
Tomorrow's Opposition Research Today Memo to all the Democratic party presidential candidates who aren't retired Gen. Wesley Clark:
ON JUNE 19, 1972, two days after the Watergate break-in, an employee of the Safemasters Company, armed with a high-powered drill and accompanied by a Secret Service agent, rushed to Room 522 in the Executive Office Building. There, they bored open the safe of an obscure Nixon White House consultant…
I HAVE NEVER LIKED restaurants with large plates. Big plates usually mean tiny portions--and not just because food looks smaller on account of the vast stretches of porcelain between morsels. Not long ago, I ate at a restaurant in suburban Washington where the waiter presented my meal on an artsy…
THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.
TEN MORE DAYS, then recall mercifully comes to a vote. Here are some items to consider over the weekend, while the candidates hopscotch California. As Linda Richman would say, "talk amongst yourselves." (1) Jumping on the Bandwagon, or Life in the Slow Lane? State senator Tom McClintock won't quit…
IN WHAT IS SHAPING UP to be the only serious GOP primary challenge next fall, conventional wisdom has Republican Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter beating Republican representative Pat Toomey. Specter is starting out with all the advantages. As the incumbent, he already has the support of the…
A YEAR AGO, Stan Statham was California's answer to the Maytag repairman. As president of the California Broadcasters Association, he sat by in frustration while his planned gubernatorial debate in Sacramento failed to materialize (Governor Gray Davis, ahead in the polls, didn't want to risk a…
IT WAS A YEAR AGO this month that North Korea, in the midst of normalization talks with Japan, dropped a major bombshell: During the late 1970s, North Korean agents infiltrated Japan's west coast and abducted 11 men and women--though Kim Jong Il claims he knew nothing about it at the time. "I…
THERE ARE EDITORS and there are editors. After a quarter century of punditry, I have come to appreciate the best of editors and to refuse to work with the second team. The second team seems intent on substituting their ideas for yours and dulling the sharpest points. The first team polishes and…
PRESIDENT BUSH has a surprising defender of his contention that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction--Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York. "The intelligence from Bush 1 to Clinton to Bush 2 was consistent" in concluding Saddam had chemical and biological weapons and was trying to…
GO FIGURE. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals not only overturns last week's recall delay in less than 24 hours, but does so by unanimous consent--a slam dunk with a shattered backboard. Recall is now set for two Tuesdays from today, which means a record number of Californians will tune in to…
"I think [the Dixie Chicks] will go down as one of the biggest acts in the format, and by doing so--by staying true to their country roots and to country music--they will be a turning point for the industry. They're showing what can work and be country and have its own identity and not have to…
TO KNOW SACRAMENTO is to appreciate the chip on its shoulder. Nearly a decade ago, I moved to California's capital to write speeches for former Governor Pete Wilson. The best my colleagues could say about the place was that it's a quick drive to Lake Tahoe and wine country and a quick flight to Los…
THE HUNT for the assassins is on. With the corpse of the Cancun meeting of the World Trade Organization now moldering in its grave, those who hoped to push the round of trade-opening measures forward are accusing the usual suspects--and some unusual ones--of inflicting the death-dealing blows. The…
WHEN WILL Wesley Clark stop telling tall tales? In the current issue of Newsweek, Howard Fineman reports Clark told Colorado Gov. Bill Owens and University of Denver president Mark Holtzman that "I would have been a Republican if Karl Rove had returned my phone calls." Unfortunately for Clark, the…
FORGET THE SPEECHES, rallies, town hall meetings, and whatever other mischief the recall candidates have planned for today. There's only one place to be and that's in San Francisco, at the corner of 7th and Mission Streets, where the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments over whether to…
AMERICA WASN'T THE ONLY COUNTRY attempting a bit of nation-building this turbulent summer. While U.S. troops and U.N. diplomats battled insurgents in the streets and deserts of Iraq, European politicians and bureaucrats, in the less demanding surroundings of Brussels bistros and Provençal villas,…
AMERICA MAY NOT KNOW IT, but it has a Taiwan problem. No, the problem isn't that Taipei might declare independence and prompt a cross-strait crisis. Rather, it's that American policymakers fail to recognize the many strategic and regional advantages of keeping Taiwan free of Beijing's political and…
Jerusalem
"We think it would not be helpful to expel him because it would just give him another stage to play on." --State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, after the Israeli government threatened to exile Yasser Arafat, Sept. 11, 2003
Cuba, The Morning After
THE DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE is now taking suggestions for its new, improved Food Pyramid, to be unveiled in 2005. This is the federal government's pictograph of an ideal diet. The one now in use dates to 1992. Maybe you've seen it: The base shows six servings of the "Breads & Cereals Group."…
THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION has learned something about the economic consequences of the war. It was not so long ago that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz assured Congress, "We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." The administration now…
WHAT'S THERE TO SAY about Attorney General John Ashcroft's 16-city speaking tour on the subject of the Patriot Act, which ended in New York two days before the second anniversary of September 11? For starters, the Bush administration continues to avoid addressing Americans' concerns about civil…
The Da Vinci Code
IT'S ODD: A secretary of defense in charge of vital counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, peacekeeping, and nation-building operations that have stretched the armed forces to the breaking point is fiercely fighting increases in the size of those forces. Despite calls for more troops from senators…
Vanished Act
THOUGH FAR FROM FINE-TUNED, the Bush administration has finally developed an exit strategy for Iraq. The strategy has two prongs. Through the State Department, the administration will seek to "internationalize" the forces of occupation by obtaining a new U.N. Security Council resolution that would…
Abandon
The Other 9/11, cont. When THE SCRAPBOOK reported last week on various commemorations of the "other" September 11 attack--the coup that toppled Chilean president Salvadore Allende's government in 1973--we thought we were simply publicizing the activities of a few far-left performance artists. Silly…
Books in Brief Hollywood's White House: The American Presidency in Film and History, edited by Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor (University Press of Kentucky, 441 pp., $32). You may not think "Dick," the 1999 comedy featuring Dan Hedaya as Richard Nixon, is worth serious academic analysis. But…
CONGRESSMAN RICHARD BURR is "the perfect candidate," says Sen. George Allen of Virginia, in what may be a perfect year for a Republican to run for the Senate in North Carolina. He's a former defensive back for Wake Forest University. He has a conservative voting record, but a moderate image. He's…
NO SOONER was Saddam Hussein chased from power than CNN revealed that it had often held its tongue about his savagery for fear of losing access to Iraq and provoking violent retribution. Although the confession was stunning, it was only the most recent chapter in a long story. Tyrannies have often…
I MET JOHN RITTER for the first time two-and-a-half years ago when he and Henry Winkler were ending their hit run on Broadway in "The Dinner Party." The rest of the cast, the great Len Cariou, Penny Fuller, Jan Maxwell, and Veanne Cox were staying with it, and Neil Simon offered Jon Lovitz and me…
THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.
MILLIONS OF AMERICANS along the eastern seaboard are hunkered down in fear, weathering the effects and aftermath of Hurricane Isabel. Millions more are rending their garments, collapsing in sustained crying jags, and cursing their Maker over the untimely demises of John Ritter, Johnny Cash, and the…
CALIFORNIA AND RECALL suffer from Isabel envy. While the East coast's hurricane follows a steady course, the big political storm out West remains stalled over the Golden State. It may reach land sometime today, when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is expected to announce whether it will reconsider…
THERE IS A GREAT DEAL of analysis on the California recall court case, with some of the best available at the blogs of Loyola law prof Rick Hasen, University of Iowa law prof Tung Yin, and the SoCalLawBlog . These sites don't mince words when it comes to the reputation and record of the 9th…
DR. CHARLES LEE, an American citizen, was arrested immediately after arriving at Guangzhou airport in January 2003. He left his home in Menlo Park, California, to join the effort in drawing attention to the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners by the Chinese government. He has been imprisoned in…
FOR GRAY DAVIS, old habits die hard. A day after the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals postponed the October 7 recall, the California Association of Highway Patrolmen donated an estimated $50,000 to the governor. That was four days after the legislature approved a new contract--negotiated by the Davis…
FROM CALIFORNIA comes the cry: Order in the court--even as recall candidates try to stay on an orderly course. A day after three 9th Circuit justices put the kibosh on the October 7 election, the same federal appeals court gave California's secretary of state and other "interested parties"…
IT'S WORTH RECYCLING John Burns's stunning denunciation of corruption in the media, already touted on Andrew Sullivan's indispensable blog on Tuesday and elsewhere since. The scandal of some Western media's silence about the atrocities of Saddam Hussein's regime, of course, is old news. It's…
"MY GUESS IS that Edward and Leni are together in the next world. They have eternity to work out the implications of their work," said Andrei Codrescu in a segment titled "Leni and Eddie" on NPR's "All Things Considered" last Friday. Codrescu's vision of "Eddie" (Teller) and "Leni" (Riefenstahl)…
MONDAY'S BIG RECALL NEWS was supposed to be Arnold, Maria, Oprah and a not-so-private chat. That was before another trio grabbed the spotlight--a three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ordered a postponement of the October 7 election because, in the judges'…
ENVY IS A TERRIBLE THING. Not so much because it makes those whom it afflicts unhappy, or as myth has it, turn green, but because it dulls their analytical skills. At meeting after meeting, in university seminars and in think tanks around the world, envy of America distorts discussions of what…
FOR A BRIEF PERIOD this weekend, Los Angeles supplanted New York as America's "fun city." On Saturday, the city played host to the California Republican party's fall convention and a Democratic anti-recall rally. The following morning, Bill Clinton took center stage at LA's First African Methodist…
Aldous Huxley
DESPERATION BREEDS ILLUSIONS. The latest illusion, embraced reluctantly by the Bush administration and enthusiastically by its critics, is that the burden of establishing and maintaining security in Iraq can be substantially shifted off American shoulders and onto someone else's--whether it be the…
THE LONG, HOT SUMMER of grim news out of Baghdad continues to stoke a fierce debate among Democrats: whether to reward George Bush's increasingly maligned and haphazard pursuit of Iraq's reconstruction with a veil of bipartisanship, or succumb to the demands of hard-core party activists and call…
IN THE DEMOCRATIC and Republican stampede to find foreign troops to join American GIs in Iraq, virtually no regard has been paid to whether the deployment of these soldiers is wise given the history, culture, and prejudices of the Iraqi people. Both Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense…
Los Angeles
ON OCTOBER 7, Californians will be offered more than a chance to pick a new governor. They will be asked whether they want to amend the state's constitution to outlaw most public classifications by race. Under Proposition 54--known as the Racial Privacy Initiative to its backers, and as CRECNO (the…
HAVING SAVED THE WORLD many times over in one hit movie after another, Arnold Schwarzenegger now has the chance to breathe life into two real-world but comatose bodies: the Republican party of California and the Kennedy machine. Both once were fountains of power and energy. Both now are flat on…
I WENT TO IRAQ in August, the day after a bomb had ripped through the United Nations compound in Baghdad, killing 23 people including the U.N. special envoy. I came home the day after another massive car bomb exploded at a mosque in Najaf, taking more than 95 lives including that of a leading…
Darkness at Dawn
DEFENSE SECRETARY Donald Rumsfeld can claim, as much as any man, to be the architect of victory in Operation Iraqi Freedom. History might also tag him as the architect of defeat in the larger war for Iraq. The secretary's mulish opposition to increasing the number of American soldiers in Iraq--and…
CHANCES ARE I have more friends than you do. In fact, I would venture to say I have thousands more friends than you do. Most people, if they count their every last confidant, drinking buddy, and acquaintance, come up with a list of maybe 200 people. Not me. I know for a fact that I have 112,842…
SEVERAL YEARS AGO an obscure Democratic governor from the politically inconsequential state of Vermont was the guest speaker at a Cato Institute lunch. His name was Howard Dean. He had been awarded one of the highest grades among all Democrats (and a better grade than at least half of the…
Books in Brief How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life by Peter Robinson (HarperCollins, 263 pp., $24.95). Recent years have seen a number of books about the fortieth president, but Peter Robinson's "How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life" offers something different: Instead of a biography or a conservative…
GERMAN PAINTERS are often hard to like, and the best of them can be the least amiable. Grünewald's "Isenheim Altarpiece" is the ghastliest of Old Master paintings, and there are entire galleries in both Hanover and Munich devoted to the martyrdoms of hecatombs of suffering saints as depicted by the…
Wesley Clark's Source, Cont. General Wesley Clark--potential candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination--has come one step closer to revealing the identity of the mysterious caller who irresponsibly urged him to go on CNN and accuse Saddam Hussein of links to the attacks on the World…
THE DEMOCRATS have gone where no party ever has: It has become the party whose senators routinely filibuster nominations to the circuit courts of appeals. The obvious intention is to make it harder to confirm a nominee. Indeed, where a simple majority always has sufficed for Senate approval, 60…
JOHN KERRY shouldn't be so worried. Though he's been trailing in polls behind former Vermont governor Howard Dean, the odds are that Kerry will be the next president of the United States. According to the "Presidential Height Index," an admittedly unscientific comparison of the heights of all…
THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.
JUST WHAT ARNOLD NEEDS: more national air time. On Monday, Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, will appear on the season premiere of the "Oprah Winfrey Show." It marks the couple's first joint interview during recall--this one, with an old friend (Maria and Oprah worked together in…
YOU'VE SEEN George W. Bush in standard presidential attire--a suit. But chances are you haven't seen him in a snowsuit as a toddler, frolicking in wintry weather with another future president, his father. This charming clip alone, taken from a Bush family home movie, is reason enough to tune into…
THE PERSECUTION OF SCHOLARS for gender bias, on even the flimsiest evidence, has long been a fact of life in academe. Should one professor write, "Mary entered the kitchen," another boils over with feminist indignation, convenes a panel to investigate, and soon the whole campus is sucked into a…
RECALL JUNKIES awoke Wednesday morning to this email from Howard Kaloogian, chairman of the Recall Gray Davis Committee: "I know you are all probably getting sick of hearing about this, but it is absolutely pertinent that we have the funding to match the 'No on Recall' campaign. Whether you can…
TAMMANY HALL had its house organ, the Leader. Gray Davis and Cruz Bustamante have an even better tool for communicating: the Los Angeles Times. To wit: In November of 2000, California voters approved Proposition 34--a campaign finance reform initiative. They were urged not to do so by the Los…
I TAKE A BRISK WALK around the neighborhood every morning. I love those walks. They loosen my back and get the blood pumping and on mornings after I've had a few drinks (never more than 20 days a month; well, not never, but rarely; oh, skip it) they clear my head. Olympian good health, though, is…
SAY GOODBYE to recall's principled Peter. That's Peter Ueberroth, the former baseball commissioner, who yesterday ended his issue-oriented (and mostly invisible) run for governor. "In the four weeks where we are and where we have to get, we just can't get there," Ueberroth said in a farewell news…
THAT TWO-AND-A-HALF TON Ten Commandments monument no longer sits in the rotunda of the Alabama judicial building, having been wheeled into a storage room. But two issues remain. One involves the meaning of the Constitution, the other the duties of government officials. The story began in 2001, when…
ANCIENT LEGEND has it that around 1500 A.D. a Chinese official named Wan-Hu attempted a flight to the moon in a wicker chair. Wan-Hu sat expectantly as 47 torch-bearing assistants came forth to light the 47 rockets secured to the chair. There was a sudden blast, and clouds of smoke filled the air.…
Editor's note: William Kristol and Steven Lenzner have written a fascinating article on Leo Strauss's thought in the Fall issue of The Public Interest.
THE LATEST California Field Poll is out, and it shows that the more recall changes, the more it's unchanged: Governor Gray Davis remains headed for unemployment on October 7, and Democratic Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante is still the leading choice to replace him--followed by Arnold…
Scottsdale, Arizona
AMERICA HAS China in its sights. Fortunately, it's a trade war and not a shooting war that is about to erupt. The Chinese rebuffed Treasury Secretary John Snow's efforts to get them to increase the value of their currency relative to the dollar. After the secretary's visit to China, a spokesman for…
RECALL OFFERS two shades of Gray. On Saturday, at an anti-recall rally outside Los Angeles, the California governor reportedly told a supporter, "You shouldn't be governor unless you can pronounce the name of the state." The next day, Davis told reporters he was "kidding around in a private…
IT KILLED 35 troops during Operation Desert Storm and was considered one of the biggest problems facing U.S. forces on the battlefield. A decade later, little has changed. The U.S. military calls it "blue on blue"--but most people know it as "friendly fire" or "fratricide." The problem of friendly…
RECALL MAKES for strange bedfellows. Arnold Schwarzenegger has coupled onscreen with Sharon Stone. Arianna Huffington and Al Franken hit the sheets, John-and-Yoko-style, to report on the 1996 national conventions. Cruz Bustamante is in bed with the Indian gaming tribes that underwrite his campaign.…
WHY IS IT that a suicide bombing that kills 21 innocents, including six children, is not considered a violation of the "road map" ceasefire, but retaliating against the leaders of the group that perpetrated the massacre is considered a violation that leads to the abandonment of the ceasefire?…
IT'S AN OPEN QUESTION as to whether or not a great movie will ever be made about September 11. Historical events don't always lend themselves to good filmmaking. The Holocaust has translated well; Pearl Harbor has never been done justice. It is a small mercy that no Michael Bay or Jerry Bruckheimer…
AS THE RECALL rocks along, reporters continue to ignore the underlying causes of widespread voter disgust, including Gray Davis' the tripling of the car tax this past summer, and the tidal wave of special interest legislation that ranges from workplace protection for cross-dressing employees to the…
Walnut Creek, California
INTERSTATE 5 is not the road to Damascus. But don't tell that to Gray Davis. He wants Californians to believe he's their St. Paul--a convert who shouldn't be recalled because he's seen the light. The biblical analogy is irresistible. Since he came to the realization that he was in the fight of his…
THE HORRENDOUS CRIME carried out at the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf, Iraq, last Friday has had immediate repercussions, most of them--in the Western countries as well as the East--unfortunate. Numerous Westerners theorized that the blast was caused by rivalries among Shias, by the intrigues of…
IS ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER the recall Hamlet? To be or not to be a more conventional candidate: that is the question. Barring a last-minute charge of heart, The Terminator won't be back in Walnut Creek for tonight's candidate forum (if you don't live in the San Francisco Bay area, you can catch it…
WHEN WALID SHATER, an Arab-American Secret Service agent, was kicked off an American Airlines flight on December 25, 2001, he said he was the victim of racial profiling. The story made national headlines. Even the president got involved, telling reporters he'd be "madder than heck" if it turned out…
HERE'S ONE REASON why you won't see much of John McCain in California over the next month: If your name was synonymous with campaign finance reform, the recall is the last place you'd want to be. Why? Because the October 7 special election exposes California's new-and-improved donor law for what it…
SOME THINGS were unchanged yesterday as, since 1894, we celebrated the holiday called Labor Day. Millions of hot dogs were grilled, and Democrats took to their soap boxes to proclaim their loyalty to the trade unions that provide the financial and logistical muscle on which they depend. But the…
IN A JULY LETTER to colleges and universities across the country, Gerald Reynolds, head of the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, addressed "a subject," as he put it, "of central importance to our government, our heritage of freedom and our way of life: the First Amendment." Reynolds'…
IF YOU JUDGE by the pictures, the Makkah Hilton is a nice place to stay. There's just one catch, as the Web site notes. The five-star hotel "is exclusively sited within the Holy City which, by national and religious law, is only accessible to visitors of the Muslim Religion." This law is something…
NO ONE WILL CONFUSE the diminutive, bald, and pudgy Cruz Bustamante with Ashton Kutcher (Cosmo Spacely, George Jetson's employer, is a better likeness). But if California's lieutenant governor loses next month's recall vote, it may be because his candidacy reminded too many viewers of "That 70's…
The Almanac of American Politics 2004
Waterloo, August 13
NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER Condoleezza Rice gave an important speech a couple of weeks ago, in which she called on the United States to make a "generational commitment" to bringing political and economic reform to the long-neglected Middle East--a commitment not unlike that which we made to rebuild…
GENERAL WESLEY K. CLARK is running for president. Maybe. With little over a year left before the 2004 election, NATO's former supreme allied commander hasn't announced his candidacy. But Clark sure is considering a run as a Democrat for commander in chief, as he tells any reporter who will listen…
Emerson
RUSH LIMBAUGH, the king of talk radio, was one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's sharpest conservative critics. He zinged the actor-turned-candidate on his show and wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Schwarzenegger "has yet to embrace any conservative positions." But after Schwarzenegger's first press…
THE SALMON-AND-RASPBERRIES world of private foundations is rattling its Pellegrino bottles over a tax bill that would alter a 30-year-old practice whereby most of the foundations' operating expenses--lunch included--are classified as "charitable activity." A bipartisan cast in the House of…
KIDS KNOW exactly when it comes--the point when you're repaving a driveway or pouring a new sidewalk, right before the wet concrete hardens completely. That's when you can make your mark. The Democrats seem to understand this. For months before the war in Iraq, the Bush administration claimed to…
I HAVEN'T HAD a shoeshine, a professional shine, in more than a decade, maybe two. I shine my own shoes, usually once a week. Shoeshine parlors were common when I was a boy, and even a young man, in Chicago; most barbershops also had a shoeshine man. Not always but often he was black. I stopped…
Another Phony Anti-Bush Slander BuzzFlash.com, a sort of Drudge Report for the left, has joined forces with former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal to spin the line that the Clinton administration was heroically tough on terrorism but that the Bush administration, despite being "fully briefed by…
Des Moines, Iowa
THE 2004 presidential election will be the biggest in at least a generation. Perhaps more. The choice between Bush and Dean/Kerry/Hillary (to list Democrats in the order of their chance to become the nominee) will be the starkest since Reagan-Mondale in 1984. More will be at stake in terms of the…
The New Chinese Empire
Books in Brief Winning Smart after Losing Big: Revitalizing People, Reviving Enterprises by Rob Stearns (Encounter, 150 pp., $16.95). He's been my friend for over thirty years, from the time we were roommates at Harvard and spent hours comparing the ingenious techniques Radcliffe girls used to tell…
THE SCRAMBLE IS ON. Politicians who have spent decades watching our vulnerability to power outages greeted the recent massive blackout with the plaintive cry, "If only you'd listened to me . . ." New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, secretary of energy when Bill Clinton was cavorting in the White…