Beth Henary

Marietta, Oklahoma

Abilene, TX

TEXAS REPUBLICANS wanted to accomplish several things last year, when they began redrawing the state's congressional districts. They wanted to increase the number of safe Republican seats to give them a majority. And they wanted to take revenge on, among others, 13-term Democrat Martin Frost. This…

NOT TOO LONG AGO I signed up for a correspondence course in fiction and poetry writing from the University of Texas, my alma mater. The idea is to get myself started on a new genre of writing. In the sixth grade, I won a creative writing contest with a story about a cockroach, and in high school, I…

The Justice Department likes to boast that it employs graduates of nearly every law school accredited by the American Bar Association. At last tally, Justice had on staff lawyers from top schools such as the University of Chicago and Yale as well as from nth-tier schools like the University of…

Ann Arbor

A GROUP OF STUDENTS at the University of Michigan have devised a tool that might have saved me several hours of nail-biting, and perhaps hundreds of dollars in application fees, had it existed for my school of choice when I applied to college. The staff of the Michigan Review, a conservative campus…

EARLIER THIS WEEK, four commissioners of the United States Commission on Civil Rights vehemently objected to a draft of a report made public by their own agency. The commissioners, Abigail Thernstrom, Jennifer Braceras, Peter Kirsanow, and Russell Redenbaugh, said they were not consulted in the…

TUESDAY NIGHT, the Texas GOP delivered for former governor George W. Bush--in grand fashion. Besides holding the governor's mansion and the Senate seat vacated by retiring senator Phil Gramm, the party refused to concede any statewide office to a Democrat, leaving the Democrats' representation at…

A musical endorsement of Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tony Sanchez by members of the Texas-based bands Asleep at the Wheel and Texas Tornadoes insists that The teachers and the farmers and the working folks agree / If you want someone in Austin who will stand for you and me / Tony is…

IN THE FIRST Florida gubernatorial debate on September 27, Republican governor Jeb Bush and Democratic challenger Bill McBride scuffled over the merits of the governor's One Florida executive order, which abolished affirmative action in state contracting and university admissions. McBride said he…

IN THE OPENING SCENES of "Igby Goes Down," the title character (Kieran Culkin) gets the boot from the first of a series of East Coast religious prep schools. He has passed only one course, and that just barely, but Igby, despite his failings, has an inquiring mind.

Beneath the surface, this year's key elections in Texas are all about race. The top of the Democratic ticket has been called a racial "dream team": If Tony Sanchez and Ron Kirk win in November, they will be the state's first Hispanic governor and African-American senator, respectively. Down ballot,…

LAST MONTH, as schools were preparing to open their doors, a heated debate erupted in the media over how students should observe the anniversary of September 11. According to the Washington Times, a lesson plan on the National Education Association's website was urging teachers to use the occasion…

PRO-BUSINESS GROUPS in California are railing against a bill that would require businesses and labor organizations to report racial and gender figures to the state every year. The bill's sponsor says it is designed to "put a little pressure" on companies and unions whose demographics don't mirror…

Slander Liberal Lies About the American Right by Ann Coulter Crown, 256 pp., $25.95 WHILE ON A TOUR of Monticello as vice president, Al Gore examined busts of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and asked the curator, "Who are these people?" A single newspaper reported Gore's embarrassing…

IT'S BEEN SAID that it is important to know one's enemies. By requiring freshmen to read parts of the Koran this year, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, may be trying to do just that. But though this year's selection for the summer reading program may be well intended, some students…

Collision Course The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America by Hugh Davis Graham Oxford University Press, 246 pp., $30 ON JUNE 6 FLORIDA GOVERNOR Jeb Bush signed into law a sleepy-sounding bill called the Florida Minority Business Loan Mobilization Program. The…

THE SEPTEMBER 11 terror attacks and the war on terror that followed have the Middle East studies establishment running scared. The recent events put the university scholars who should have been warning us about Islamic terror, and psychoanalyzing Osama bin Laden, on notice that their departments…

A TWO-YEAR stalemate between the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore and a battery of academics over a yet-to-be-published book about the girls' school ended Monday. In a letter to scholar Andrea Hamilton, who wrote a history of the school as her dissertation in 1997, the Bryn Mawr trustees told Hamilton…

WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT an exclusive, 117-year-old private girls' school would object to having its history written by a capable historian? For reasons that remain obscure, the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore is blocking publication of a book about the school that was originally written--with the…

ON WEDNESDAY, the Bush Education Department signaled its willingness to examine the rigid limitations that Title IX, the federal non-discrimination policy concerning sex in education, has placed on school districts wanting to establish single-sex schools and classes. Education secretary Rod Paige…

Tilting the Playing Field Schools, Sports, Sex and Title IX by Jessica Gavora Encounter, 182 pp., $24.95 TITLE IX, passed by Congress thirty years ago, states simply a non-discrimination policy concerning sex: "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from…

THE ANIMATORS who make green ogres and one-eyed bugs come to life on the big screen should be jumping up and down this Sunday. At 8:00 p.m. EST the Academy Awards commence, and for the first time in the awards' 74-year history, the Academy will recognize the feature-length, animated film with its…

CONVINCED that healthy, two-parent families are best for children, the Bush administration is looking for ways to promote sound marriages among welfare recipients and clients of programs like Head Start. Its point man in the effort is psychologist Wade Horn, assistant secretary of Health and Human…

[img caption="A detail from the Woodburn 100 mural." float="right" width="289" height="349" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]8798[/img]AT INDIANA UNIVERSITY, students are lobbying to have a decades-old work of art removed from a classroom on campus. The work is part of a multi-panel depiction of the…

TODAY is V-Day. Though most of us will celebrate--or hope to celebrate--February 14 as Valentine's Day with a candlelight dinner in an overcrowded Italian restaurant, in very recent history the date has become the subject of an alternative interpretation. February 14 is the focal date of playwright…

A CALIFORNIA effort to enact a civil union law is on hold, but it's far from dead. In what his spokesman calls a "strategic" maneuver, state assemblyman Paul Koretz withdrew his bill--which would have established Vermont-style civil unions in the state--from consideration just days before the…

YESTERDAY New York City developer Forest City Ratner abandoned the design of a September 11 memorial it commissioned after the project brought outcries from firefighters and the public. Forest City Ratner, which manages fire department headquarters where a memorial will eventually stand, expressed…

IT WAS A very Brady New Year for a handful of firearms makers and Chicago gun retailers. On December 31, 2001, an Illinois appeals court ruled that the families of five Chicago area murder victims may sue the gun manufacturers and dealers for public nuisance. In a 35-page opinion, the court…

THE HEADY DAYS of unalloyed patriotism that followed September 11, in which Americans lost their hyphens and became heroes instead of victims, are over.

A PROPOSED admissions policy change at Texas A&M University is rapidly devolving into a squabble over what constitutes racial preferences. Student leaders and anti-preference activists charge that the A&M regents' plan to admit the top 20 percent of high school seniors from some of Texas's poorly…

RECENTLY Fred Barnes reported that the film industry is not overly eager to enlist in the war effort. Studios have produced patriotic, "America-the-Beautiful" public service announcements, now showing after the trailers at theaters everywhere, but how Hollywood responds content-wise--if at all--to…

YESTERDAY the Drudge Report noted that the Montgomery County, Maryland, town of Kensington has asked Santa Claus to stay away from its annual tree-lighting ceremony on December 2. Two families said they would be uncomfortable if the jolly old fellow were present, so he was kept out of this year's…

MANY AMERICANS are wearing or waving the flag now. Patriotism is in, and those who have long focused on educating Americans about the values behind the flag see an opportunity to make that lapel pin prick not just the heart, but also the mind. "Post 9/11 patriotism is surface and cosmetic,…

IN TODAY'S ELECTION EDGAR GONZALEZ is attempting to go where no Latino has gone before--to the Virginia House of Delegates. If he wins, the Republican Gonzalez will be not only the first Latino to sit in the House of Delegates, he'll be the first ever to have run in a general election. From afar,…

CALIFORNIA LEGISLATORS ARE moving to change the legal definition of family through two new bills. The first, AB 1338, proposed by Democratic assemblyman Paul Koretz, was heard in committee for the first time last week. AB 1338, otherwise known as the California Family Protection Act, would create a…

ON SEPTEMBER 11, TWO OF PRESIDENT BUSH'S cabinet-level administrative positions sat dormant: United Nations ambassador and National Drug Control Policy director, or drug czar. But the terrorist attacks inspired bipartisan cooperation on a number of foreign policy and domestic security issues. Just…

WHEN AN EVANGELICAL CHRISTIAN Republican president agrees with radical feminists, there's only one explanation: The subject is the Taliban. The feminists, of course, would have the world believe that they condemned the Taliban first: back in 1996, as soon as that band of militant Islamists seized…