122 articles
FOR MONTHS, as the Terri Schiavo case roiled much of the country, the establishment media all but ignored the story. But then, in the midst of her dying by dehydration, the Florida Legislature passed "Terri's Law," authorizing Governor Jeb Bush to place a moratorium on the dehydration deaths of…
THE NEW REPUBLIC and its editor-in-chief Marty Peretz, along with Lions Gate Films, hosted a screening of the new movie "Shattered Glass" in Washington Thursday night. Afterwards, Peretz, Peter Beinart, the magazine's present editor, Leon Wieseltier, the magazine's longtime literary editor, and the…
"SHATTERED GLASS" is a slim, reedy film. It presents the now-familiar story of Stephen Glass as a cautionary tale and then offers up a hero in the person of Chuck Lane, the New Republic editor who fired Glass. As a journalism movie, "Shattered Glass" is middle-rank, not up to the standards of "The…
THE STEPHEN'S KANGAROO RAT was listed as "endangered" by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on October 31, 1988. This little-noticed action launched a revolution in land use in southern California that has culminated in the fires that have now claimed at least 17 lives, destroyed close to 2,000…
SENATOR ZELL MILLER OF GEORGIA, the nation's most prominent conservative Democrat, said today he will endorse President Bush for re-election in 2004 and campaign for him if Bush wishes him to. Miller said Bush is "the right man at the right time" to govern the country. The next five years "will…
WITH THE LATINO POPULATION booming, one issue that could come into play in 2004 is President Bush's signal that he would help Hispanic immigrants gain legal residency. During Mexican president Vincente Fox's visit to Washington in early September 2001, President Bush declared that "There are…
AT THE CONGRESIONAL BLACK CAUCUS presidential debate on Sunday, Huel Perkins, an anchor at WJBK TV in Detroit, asked General Wesley Clark a pointed question. How, Perkins wanted to know, can Clark run as a national security candidate when his position on the Iraq war changes so frequently? "I think…
MICHAEL SCHIAVO, Terri Schiavo's husband, finally went on national television last night to tell the world his side of the story. Appearing on "Larry King Live," he strived mightily to play the loving husband. Until more than half way through the interview, when King got around to tentatively…
IS CALIFORNIA READY for Dennis Miller as its next United States senator? Laugh if you like, but some Republican strategists (including a few who just sent a certain movie star to Sacramento) see Miller, the sardonic comedian whose late-night talk show lasted just a little longer than Wesley Clark's…
GOOD NEWS about the U.S. economy is easy to come by. "The good times are back," chortles the Wall Street Journal. Most analysts are guessing that the economy is now growing at an annual rate of somewhere between 6 percent and 7 percent. It seems that the happy recipients of this summer's tax…
ONE EVENING, during the second term of President Ronald Reagan, Terri Schiavo and her husband Michael decided to watch a television movie about Karen Ann Quinlan. Quinlan, as most readers know, had a tragic life. After overdosing on a combination of drugs and alcohol, she fell into unconsciousness…
AMERICANS HAVE DEBATED a lot about Iraq: whether the war was justified, whether the administration lied about Iraq's weapons programs, whether sufficient postwar planning was done, and whether the coalition, the United Nations or the Iraqis themselves should be put in charge of reconstruction. In…
PRESIDENT BUSH hasn't been talking much about the ''axis of evil'' lately. Instead, while touring Asia this week, he said he would be willing to offer North Korea a multilateral security guarantee in return for giving up its nuclear weapons program--precisely the sort of deal he once denounced as…
Family Circle
Collected Later Poems
YOU KNOW THE STORY. The frog in a saucepan on the stove will die--because the temperature creeps up so smoothly and stealthily that he's never given the clue that now is the time to hop out. And so he boils to death, for if the rise from 70 degrees to 71 degrees didn't make him jump, why should the…
LAST WEEK President Bush invited a group of senators to the White House to discuss his request for $87 billion for reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan. The meeting went badly. The bipartisan group favored splitting the $20 billion for reconstruction (the other $67 billion goes to U.S. troops)…
LIKE MANY FORMER and active-duty case officers of the Central Intelligence Agency, I often find it painful listening to outsiders talk about the clandestine service. Operations are usually rather straightforward, earthy affairs between consenting adults--espionage is seldom a seductive recruitment…
CREDIT FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ACHIEVEMENTS always comes hard for Republicans. Sure enough, the Bush administration's global warming policy, though largely a model of prudent judgment and respect for science, is relentlessly denounced. And the attacks take their toll. The Bush team's alleged indifference…
The Pledge Guy Early last week the Supreme Court announced that it would review United States v. Michael A. Newdow, et al., the case whereby the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has prohibited--as a violation of the First Amendment's religious "establishment clause"--organized recitation of the…
OCTOBER 19 IS THE DAY the Roman Catholic Church will mark the beatification of Ganxhe Agnes Bojaxhiu, the Albanian woman known to the world as Mother Teresa. Beatification is the last step before canonization, or sainthood, and the occasion is one of celebration for Catholics around the world.…
RANDALL TOBIAS, President Bush's pick to oversee his $15 billion AIDS initiative for Africa and the Caribbean, sailed through his recent confirmation vote in the U.S. Senate--only to find himself at the center of a controversial bid to reshape America's AIDS policy overseas. President Bush invokes…
Quicksilver
A FTER THE 1972 AND 1980 ELECTIONS, Republicans said political realignment across the country would soon make them the dominant party. It didn't happen. Now, despite highly favorable signs in the 2002 midterm elections and the California recall, Republicans fear a jinx. Realignment? they ask. What…
Philadelphia
THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT has now agreed to review the ruling from the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in California that challenged the use of the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. To nearly everyone's surprise, the lower court held that the recitation of the pledge in…
ODDLY ENOUGH, words figure prominently among the souvenirs I brought back from a recent short visit to Montana. It all began when we stopped at our very first overlook on the Yellowstone River. Staring down at the whitewater, my friend remembered being at a similar spot maybe 50 years ago and…
ON OCTOBER 11, the Chicago Tribune editorialized that the United States has more important things to worry about than whether or not to amend the Constitution to allow foreign-born citizens to run for president: "This is a nation of immigrants, of course, and one that offers more opportunity to…
WHEN YOU REVIEW MOVIES you occasionally have to go to more than one screening a day. This isn't any sort of hardship, but it can result in bizarre pairings. The weirdest movie day I've had was in the summer of '98 when I saw "Saving Private Ryan" at 10:00 a.m., followed, a few short hours later, by…
WALKING THROUGH FENWAY PARK before Game 4 of the American League Championship Series, one got a notion of what life might have been like in the Dark Ages, for the Boston fans in attendance displayed many benighted tendencies. There was, for instance, fanaticism in the air, a desire to see the Red…
"WE'VE COME TO RUSSIA'S CAPITAL CITY to stop the war or die here for Allah. . . . I swear to Allah, we desire death more than you want life." These words, spoken by Chechen terrorist Movsar Barayev, open "Terror in Moscow," a grim and stomach-churning look at the Moscow theater hostage crisis of…
WHO IS WILLIAM ARKIN? For starters, he is the scribbler who launched the assault on Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin a week ago by providing NBC with tapes of Boykin speaking in churches, and then followed with a Los Angeles Times op-ed that accused the general of being "an intolerant extremist" and a man…
OCTOBER 21, 2003 may have been the most important day in 39-year-old Terri Schiavo's life. She had been without any food or water for six days, per the order of Judge George Greer of the Sixth Judicial Circuit Court in Clearwater, Florida. Terri's family believed she was holding up well. But her…
JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA won't participate in the Pledge of Allegiance case, which the Supreme Court last week accepted for review. Justices typically don't explain their recusals, and Scalia didn't say why he took himself out of Elk Grove School District v. Newdow. The code of conduct for federal…
WHEN TERRI SCHIAVO collapsed in 1990, causes unknown, she could have had no idea that 13 years later people the world over would know her name and care very much about whether she lived or died. Yet what began as a private tragedy--a vivacious young woman stricken in the very prime of her life with…
YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE a close reader of the business pages to know that the free-spending American consumer gets credit for keeping the American economy from slipping into a serious recession. What is less heralded is just how the supply side of the economy has contributed to the willingness of…
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.
Art
San Diego, Calif.
CAN ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER govern California? Of course he can, so long as he adheres to rule number one for Republican governors: Don't raise taxes without first making a heroic effort to wipe out a deficit by spending cuts alone. If spending cuts won't suffice, borrow to cover the shortfall. And…
ON SEPTEMBER 14, 2003, "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert asked Vice President Dick Cheney whether Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11 attacks. Cheney's answer was characteristically straightforward: "We don't know." The reaction was furious, even by Washington standards. Despite the…
Exclusive SCRAPBOOK Leak Investigation In trying to get to the bottom of the who-leaked-the-CIA-wife's-name-to-Robert Novak affair, Newsweek offered a conceptual breakthrough last week. The story, remember, took off in late September when a "senior administration official" told the Washington Post…
AT 2:00 P.M. on October 15, 2003, Terri Schiavo's feeding tube is to be removed, after which she will slowly dehydrate to death. This is to be done at the request of her husband, Michael Schiavo, and at the order of Judge George W. Greer of the Sixth Judicial Circuit, in Clearwater, Florida. If the…
Taipei, Taiwan
IT IS AN ARTICLE OF FAITH among political journalists that Proposition 187, the 1994 initiative approved by California voters to deny illegal immigrants state benefits, was poison to the Republican party. Somehow the measure, though endorsed by 59 percent of voters and many GOP candidates, is bad…
Jonathan Edwards
DAVID KAY'S interim report on the investigation into Saddam Hussein's weapons programs leaves open as many questions as it answers. Exactly what was underway and at what stage of development is still unknown. But it does establish to a certainty the critical point that Saddam had every intention of…
HURRYING DOWN 17TH STREET, I realize I have barely enough time to get to Union Station for my 6:35 train back to Baltimore. I speed up to a jog. As a seasoned commuter, I've learned how to catch the last train out of the city with as little as 15 minutes to go from the time I pass the doorman at…
Where I Was From
GOVERNOR ARNOLD is bad news for the Democrats. Republicans now hold the statehouses in the four largest states. But the really bad news is that the Democrats running for the honor of contesting George W. Bush in the 2004 showdown are being picked by a primary audience that is so out of sync with…
Books in Brief John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father by Francis J. Bremer (Oxford Univ. Press, 478 pp., $39.95). John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, coined a phrase that still reverberates--perhaps the defining phrase for America. Quoting the Gospel of Matthew, he said…
"When I left office, there was a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for. That is, at the end of the first Gulf War, we knew what he had. We knew what was destroyed in all the inspection processes and that was a lot. And then we bombed with the British for four days…
THE FIRST SENTENCE of an article is called the lede. Sometimes it's the first several sentences, sometimes just one, but the concept is what counts. A good lede gets your attention and sets the stage. The best ledes can be intriguing, informative, thrilling, even shattering. Some became immortal…
NEITHER SNOW NOR RAIN nor heat nor gloom of a hurricane can keep me away from a press breakfast at the Ritz-Carlton. And so it was, on the morning of the day Hurricane Isabel was poised to strike our nation's capital, that I found myself alone in an oak-paneled room waiting to meet Wolfgang…
THE LATEST CONCERNS at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp is a sharp reminder that America can't take security for granted--even at its most remote outposts. The capture of Ahmed Fathy Mehalba is even more unsettling because it involved a former Army soldier and naturalized U.S. citizen (by way of…
CALIFORNIA MAY or may not factor into President Bush's reelection strategy, but at least the White House knows the local history. The President and Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger met yesterday at Riverside's Mission Inn, which has hosted GOP presidents as far back as William McKinley. A…
IN THE TURBULENT and dangerous politics of Pakistan, credible public figures willing to stand up for pluralist democracy are no commonplace. So it was a privilege to meet with Afrasiab Khattak and Asfandyar Wali Khan--middle-aged men who between them have spent more than a decade in prison in the…
LIKE MOST CALIFORNIANS, I am sick of discussing the Los Angeles Times. I had intended to write this week about the sudden crystallization of the Democratic party around the campaign theme "Higher Taxes, Lower Defenses." This combination of Mondale economics with McGovernite foreign policy is…
"THIS IS VERY EXCITING, we have never had anyone so important here since I started," said the press attaché to the Hungarian embassy, as Paul Wolfowitz arrived at the unveiling a statue on the embassy's lawn. The statue, according to the invitation, is of "Colonel Commandant Michael Kovats de…
DURING A LUNCH LAST WEEK with reporters and editors of the New York Times, Howard Dean was asked how he would vote, were he a member of Congress, on the proposal to spend $87 billion to cover troop deployment and reconstruction costs in Iraq. Dean, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential…
AMONG THE MOST fatuous devices of political debate, the tactic of disowning "labels" stands proudly: like the Washington hack who catches his breath by saying he does not want to talk about "left" or "right," and then immediately exhales a billowy cumulus cloud of unmistakable partisanship. Next…
THE BRITISH PRIME MINISTER and Hollywood's premier tough guy have similar advice for California governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger. Tony Blair once said that campaigning is a lot more fun and a lot easier than governing. And after congratulating Schwarzenegger on his victory, Clint Eastwood said,…
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.
The New Anti-Semitism
NOT UNTIL SOMETHING like the first of August did conventional Washington opinion finally wake up to the possibility that this mad-as-hell, antiwar Howard Dean fellow might just have a realistic shot at the Democratic presidential nomination. But after that it was off to the races. In no time flat,…
Between Ocean and City
JOSEPH WILSON, the retired ambassador who wants to see top Bush aide Karl Rove "frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs" for allegedly "outing" his CIA-agent wife, wants us to know it's nothing personal against the Bush family. He told a C-SPAN interviewer last week of his warm…
In Memoriam A few hundred people gathered the other day at a wet state park in the wooded hills of Maryland to honor four American journalists who've died in the line of duty in the war on terror. There were family and friends of the fallen. And there were ordinary citizens. Some said they like to…
THE MOVEMENT to set up vouchers for low-income kids in Washington, D.C., has gained a surprising ally--lifelong voucher opponent Senator Dianne Feinstein. But such breakthroughs have been few. Oddly lackluster support from school choice advocates, waffling from moderates, and a threatened…
MENTAL HEALTH PARITY is back as an important issue in Congress. The idea is to have the government require employers to pay for treating mental conditions the same way they pay for treating physical diseases. This approach sounds like a boon for people with psychiatric illness, but it's not. It…
Bournemouth, England
IN 1983, around the time NATO was placing medium-range missiles in Europe, ABC aired the made-for-TV movie "The Day After," which concerned what would happen to Lawrence, Kansas, in a nuclear war. The film had been trumpeted for weeks in advance as "unquestionably-the-most-shocking" this and…
Prokofiev
REALITIES are sometimes unpleasant. Presidents are elected to confront such realities, and to deal with them. Evading them doesn't work. Pundits can afford to indulge in wishful thinking. Partisans can choose to preoccupy themselves with rock-throwing and blame-casting. But presidents have to…
Austin, Texas
Books in Brief Yoga Hotel by Maura Moynihan (Regan, 304 pp., $13.95). Maura Moynihan was brought to India as a teenager much against her wishes when her father, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was appointed the United States ambassador there. By the time the family returned to America, young Maura had…
SAY WHAT YOU WILL about Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, but one thing is sure: The man loves the spotlight. When Wilson's CIA operative wife had her cover blown by leaks from the Bush administration three months ago, the story received little attention. But in the days since the leak investigation…
THIS PAST WEEKEND marked the beginning of prestige season at the movies. The rollout of Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" will be followed in the coming weeks by "The Matrix: Revolutions," "The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King," "Cold Mountain," "The Human Stain" and other high-profile releases.…
FOR THE FIRST TIME in a long time, California isn't the crazy aunt of the western states: not as dysfunctional as last night's presidential debate in Arizona; nor as anxiety-ridden as those Oregon Democrats huddling this weekend to figure how to keep the state from acting Bush league in 2004. As…
IT'S NOT NEWS to report that trailers are often better than the movies they advertise. Some of the best trailers in recent years--"The Phantom Menace," "Mission: Impossible 2," "Pearl Harbor," "Eyes Wide Shut"--have been for movies which can only be charitably considered middling. Are movies…
WHEN POLITICAL OPERATIVES TALK, they have three options. They can tell the truth. They can spin, which means twisting the truth. Or they can indulge in absolutely laughable spin they don't believe for even a nanosecond but put out anyway. The claim by Democrats that the recall of Gray Davis spells…
JOINING NPR in the proud tradition of obituary relativism, the Philadelphia Inquirer offers up thoughts on the death of Elia Kazan--and his equivalency with Leni Riefenstahl. A Saturday feature, titled Kazan and Riefenstahl: Brilliant yet blemished, opens: "In an interesting coincidence, two…
I HAVE A SOFT SPOT for "K Street," the new HBO series that follows the lives of a group of Washington lobbyists. It's not necessarily because the show goes to great lengths to incorporate real-life Washingtonians into each week's episode. And it's not necessarily because the show focuses on the…
HERE'S AN UNLIKELY recall winner: George Schwartzman. The San Diego businessman ran as an independent on Tuesday's ballot, wanting to ban cookies and soda pop from public school vending machines (child obesity is, ahem, a growing concern in California). What makes Schwartzman notable? He finished…
DNC CHIEF Terry McAuliffe trotted out the Democratic talking points on last night's recall vote with twenty minutes to go before the polls closed: "The signal coming out of California would be, with the economic conditions there, George Bush should be very nervous. People are angry in California.…
JUSTICE DEPARTMENT LAWYER John Dion has worked on every major national security case of the past quarter-century, including the prosecutions of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hansen. Since 1997, he has run the counterespionage section within the Criminal Division. About once a week, the CIA advises his…
WE HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN that the views of economic forecasters are best taken with a barrel of salt. Now it turns out that not only don't economists have a clear view as to where the economy is headed, they can't even tell with any accuracy where it's been. In Britain, analysts were shocked when the…
WE KNOW the big winner and loser in the California gubernatorial recall. Arnold Schwarzenegger is not only the governor-elect, he got a higher percentage (48.1) of the vote among 135 candidates to replace Gray Davis than Davis himself got (45.3) on the separate ballot on whether he should be…
WITHIN MINUTES of the release of exit polls from California last night, Democrats had wheeled as one and began the hopeless attempt to spin the disastrous verdict. Senator Dianne Feinstein led the charge, but the refrain echoed throughout the party: This was a verdict on Davis's handling of the…
AND SO recall comes full circle. Arnold Schwarzenegger delivered his victory speech after being introduced by Jay Leno, on whose show Arnold announced his candidacy two months ago. All of that occurred at Los Angeles' Century Park Hotel--local Republicans call it the "Reagan Hotel," since it was…
THIS IS THE PART in the movie when the battering rams smash through the besieged town's much-reinforced-but-nevertheless-crumbling wooden gates, and the outsiders pour through the breach and then over the walls to loot and pillage at will. Arnold and his forces are at Sacramento's gates. Think…
IT'S VOTING TIME IN CALIFORNIA. While you wait for the results, some postcards from the edge of recall: Pay to Play to the End. Governor Gray Davis marked the final day of campaigning with a big rally in downtown San Francisco. He did the same event last November, at the end of his reelection…
THE NEWS out of New England is vandals have defaced Robert Frost's farmhouse in Derry, New Hampshire, spray-painting the south side of the poet's house--a national landmark--with swastikas and the slogans "Arnold is a racist" and "Arnold is a Nazi." That makes it official: recall has taken the road…
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.
THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION is asking Congress for an $87 billion appropriation to cover near-term troop deployment and reconstruction costs in Iraq. Let's stipulate a few things about that request right off the bat: One: Foreign aid is politically unpopular.
ON IRAQ the administration likes to talk interest, not duty. "We did ourselves and the world a favor." But interest is always arguable; duty can be absolutely clear. Torture, mass murder, and hellish tyranny make for the clearest case possible. Yet too often the administration has sounded hesitant…
"IF THERE IS ONE THING non-Californians need to know about this campaign," said veteran GOP strategist Allan Hoffenblum towards the end of the mid-September state Republican convention in Los Angeles, "it's that it's not a 'circus.' It's not a 'spectacle.' It's not a joke." There has been a lot of…
Why Societies Need Dissent
WHEN SEN. SAM BROWNBACK of Kansas heard President Bush address the U.N. General Assembly last week, he was taken by surprise. Bush spent several minutes urging international action against human trafficking, an issue Brownback has followed closely in the Senate, but one you rarely hear about. "I…
I AM A PAID SUBSCRIBER to Vanity Fair, Esquire, Gentlemen's Quarterly, and Details. I'm a sucker for fat, slick-paper magazines that go for a dollar or less per issue, at which price I was able to obtain all four, and Details even threw in a black gym bag. True, I have no use for a gym bag, but,…
PRESIDENT BUSH actively opposes gay marriage, cloning, abortion, and euthanasia. He's for sharp limits on stem cell research. Thwarted by Congress, he's establishing a faith-based initiative by executive order. Most of his prominent judicial nominees are conservative and pro-life. Social and…
Who Burned Burns? John Burns of the New York Times was the best reporter on the ground in Iraq before the war. His reporting consistently gave Times readers a sense of real life in Baghdad, telling stories unavailable elsewhere in the Western media. Burns has generated much buzz in the past week…
Vixi
I DIDN'T SEE the big debate among the Democratic presidential candidates last Thursday night, held on a college campus in lower Manhattan, but I did read a transcript. I read every syllable, dammit. It came to more than 20,000 words. And such words! Reading my way through, I was struck again by the…
Triangle
TRADE TALKS in the Mexican beach resort of Cancun collapsed two weeks ago, after the United States and Europe failed to reach an agreement with a group of 22 developing countries that insisted on aggressive cuts in farm subsidies but refused to take small steps to liberalize trade in their own…
IN THE CAMPAIGN TO SAVE California governor Gray Davis's job, no one bothers to defend the Davis record, not even Davis. Instead, in the September 24 gubernatorial debate, the lone Democrat Cruz Bustamante conspicuously distanced himself from Davis's policies, treating the governor like a political…
Books in Brief No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning by Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom (Simon & Schuster, 352 pp., $26). The Thernstroms take an honest look at legislation that demands all students reach "proficiency" by 2014. As things now stand, by his senior year, the average…
POLLS SHOW that most Americans want to ban all human cloning. President Bush is eager to sign such a measure into law. The House has twice enacted a strong legal prohibition with wide, bipartisan votes. But cloning advocates have so far blocked passage of a ban in the Senate (Brownback/Landrieu) by…
HISTORIAN GEORGE MARSDEN begins his excellent new biography of Jonathan Edwards, born 300 years ago last week, with this brief sentence: "Edwards was extraordinary." It is hard to imagine a better summation of the life of a man many Americans remember only for his oft-anthologized sermon, "Sinners…
SUDDENLY Tuesday's election is more than a recall. It has also become a referendum on the Los Angeles Times. In an astonishing story from page A34 of Sunday's Times, Readers Angry at The Times for Schwarzenegger Stories, the paper struggles to report the damage done to its reputation over the past…
HERE'S WHERE RECALL STANDS, heading into the final weekend: * Arnold's on a bus and on the defensive over Gropergate ("I have sometimes behaved badly," he said yesterday. "I have been on rowdy movie sets and have done things I thought were playful but I have offended people. I am deeply sorry about…
YESTERDAY, by a vote of 281-142, the House gave final approval to a bill that will ban partial-birth abortion in all 50 states. Bill Clinton vetoed similar bills passed by Congress in 1995 and 1999, but George W. Bush says he will sign the bill into law. But will it hold up before the Supreme…
THIS HAS TO BE the worst week in Rush Limbaugh's storied career--and yet things could get much worse still. The king of political radio resigned from a side gig doing football commentary on ESPN because of what are being called "racially-charged comments"; at the same time, another story broke that…
LAST SUNDAY, on ESPN's pregame football telecast, conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh said that he doesn't think Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb has ever been all he's cracked up to be. He explained: I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. I think the…
THIS IS THE FACE of momentum and confidence (maybe too much so), six days before an election: Arnold Schwarzenegger, standing before a few hundred fans and advisors, a few hundred yards from the state Capitol, saying what he'll do in the first 100 days after he takes the oath of governor. Not if…
THE AMERICAN ECONOMY seems bedeviled by twin towers. The terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center has left a residue of homeland security costs that will be a drag on the economy for years to come. Then there are those financial twin towers--the trade and budget deficits--that have caused a…
DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES for the White House, Senate, and House face a huge difficulty in 2004: They are on the wrong side of the national security gap. The public doesn't trust their party's collective judgment on the key issues of war and terrorism. The 2002 elections underscored the vulnerability…
NEXT TUESDAY, I'm voting for Cruz Bustamante--on one condition: his sister has to be the headline act at his inaugural. That would be Nao Bustamante, a San Francisco-based "performance pioneer" whose creative spark could make even porn star/recall candidate Mary Carey blush. Here's how the…
FIRST OF ALL, I could be wrong on this. By the way, have you noticed how rarely most people ever admit they were wrong? What's the big deal? Why don't more folks enjoy saying, "Well, I guess I was all wet on that one." I love being wrong. Seriously. I like getting ideas and pitching them, and if…
U.S. FORCES IN IRAQ trying to lock down security in Iraq's "Sunni Triangle" are battling enemies beyond disgruntled Baathist and unemployed Fedayeen. The triangle--the region around Baghdad and west to Ramadhi, then north to Saddam Hussein's ancestral hometown of Tikrit (and sometimes as far north…
THE MEDIA'S NEW WORD for President Bush is "vulnerable." A Gallup Poll last week found he trails Democrats Wesley Clark (49 percent to 46 percent) and John Kerry (48 percent to 47 percent) in presidential race match-ups. His job approval rating dipped to 49 percent in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News…