Eli Lehrer is a policy writer and commentator who contributed extensively to The Weekly Standard from 2002 to 2018, covering a wide range of topics including crime, insurance policy, natural disasters, and cultural criticism. He is the president of the R Street Institute, a free-market think tank focused on pragmatic policy solutions. His prolific output for the magazine reflected broad expertise spanning domestic policy, environmental risk, and the arts.
If it takes a special talent to make a boring topic interesting, there’s an inverse talent possessed by those who take interesting topics and make them boring. In American Niceness, Carrie Tirado Bramen, associate professor of English at SUNY Buffalo, takes a fascinating topic—one long overdue for…
When the series Enterprise went off the air in 2005, the consensus was that the whole Star Trek enterprise (so to speak) was exhausted: The show’s ratings were too low to keep it on the air and the franchise’s two most recent movies were critical stinkers that fared poorly at the box office.
If angst, lovesickness, and ennui alone made for half-decent poetry, just about every moody high school student would be in the running for the Pulitzer Prize. Although strong emotion has been vital to many artistic movements, from Romanticism on, simply placing emotions on a page almost never…
Mary Cheh, who represents a leafy, affluent, embassy-filled section of Washington, doesn’t fit anyone’s image of a free-market reformer. A member of the D.C. Council since 2007, the sixty-something’s dress and manner are those of the Harvard-educated law professor she is. Many of her legislative…
In a deeply divided America, infrastructure investment appears to be a rare area of political consensus. Donald Trump called for a major road-and-bridge program in his victory speech. Even House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi—opposed to nearly everything else for which Trump stands—has promised to…
The electric power system makes our modern, mobile, information-age economy possible. But it is organized in much the same way it was in 1884, when Thomas Edison created the first system of power plants to light up homes and businesses in lower Manhattan. By way of comparison, the iPhone, which is…
Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) hates e-cigarettes. The devices, he says, are little more than an evil plot, "the new frontier in tobacco companies' quest to get kids addicted while they are young."
Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) hates e-cigarettes. The devices, he says, are little more than an evil plot, "the new frontier in tobacco companies' quest to get kids addicted while they are young."
Is crime spiraling out of control in America? Are we letting too many dangerous people out of prison and jail? Is the nation retreating from the policies that lowered crime and restored public safety in the 1990s and 2000s?
If Congress has any self-respect or desire to preserve its own prerogatives, it needs to overturn the FDA's new proposed regulations on e-cigarettes.
Despite growing support from some conservative policy wonks, the idea of taxing carbon dioxide emissions, even as an alternative to the sort of heavy-handed greenhouse regulations promulgated by the Obama administration, has failed to garner much enthusiasm on the right.
When a few high-profile hacking incidents hit household-name firms like Target and Home Depot in 2014 and 2015, some in the insurance industry – and more than a few in public life– said that cyber risk required an expensive new government solution.
How should we treat children who get into trouble with the law? For more than a century, American attitudes have shifted between sometimes-wild extremes.
Politicians of both parties have learned in recent decades the perils of being seen handling a disaster poorly — as was the case with George W. Bush following Hurricane Katrina — as well as the potential dividends that come from handling a disaster well. Bill Clinton, after all, helped turn around…
Warby Parker is the most celebrated of the online optical shops upending the traditional eyeglass business. In a market where the average price for a pair of prescription glasses has been near $300, Warby Parker sells hipster-chic frames, complete with lenses, for around $100. Fast Company calls…
To the medieval Europeans who built magnificent cathedrals and oversaw the greatest flowering of Western culture since Rome, few stories had more resonance than that of Troilus and Criseyde. All three European languages that have given us significant medieval literatures—French, Italian, and…
In 1972, at the age of 21, Phillip Garrido had his first arrest. The charge: sexual assault of a minor. Four years later, he kidnapped and raped Katherine Callaway, a crime for which he received a 50-year sentence in the federal Leavenworth Penitentiary. During his trial, Garrido testified to…
Sometime in the next two years, if Obama administration bureaucrats get their way, public housing tenants who smoke in their own apartments will face sanctions, fines and perhaps even eviction. The proposed policy is deeply flawed. However, those who oppose it—as many conservatives will…
In 1988, Robert Tappan Morris, then a graduate student at Cornell University, decided to write a computer program to measure the size of the still-nascent Internet. Morris’s effort, a cleverly written bit of code that exploited security weaknesses, quickly spread through the computer network,…
As electronic cigarettes have proliferated and spawned a sub-culture of their own—vape shops, chai-latte flavored vaping fluid and even the “sport” of cloud chasing—few policies have seemed as intuitive as stopping children under 18 from buying them. As almost all e-cigarettes contain nicotine,…
Some new findings on how conservative voters think about energy issues from a bevvy of top-tier GOP pollsters ought to be required reading for the eventual Republican presidential nominee. While the new polls, commissioned by the ClearPath Foundation, offer some intuitive political messaging advice…
At age 10, Maya R. did something that would disturb just about anyone: “Me and my step-brothers, who were ages 8 and 5, ‘flashed’ each other and play-acted sex while fully clothed,” she told Human Rights Watch researcher Nicole Pittman. After copping to the incident in juvenile court, Maya’s…
From Brussels to Chicago to the headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration in White Oak, Maryland, public health officials, antismoking crusaders, and mayors are waging a battle against flavorings for both tobacco cigarettes and newer e-cigarettes.
Atlantic City
Presidential candidate and former Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee has promised he will switch the United States to the metric system in the exceedingly unlikely event he ends up in the White House. While the idea may help him among the Europhile segments of the Democratic base, it’s a truly…
The ideal of a staid, heavily regulated industry that offers blue-collar jobs with respectable wages, pensions, and strong community ties—usually lamented as a thing of the past by observers on both the left (Elizabeth Warren, Paul Krugman) and the right (Pat Buchanan, Rick Santorum)—does still…
One of the underappreciated problems of the growth of the regulatory state is that rather than clarifying the rules of the road for companies and consumers, regulations often simply beget more regulations. A textbook example can be seen in the evolution of so-called "sharing economy" firms, and how…
When Congress headed home for the year last week without renewing the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) many in the real estate, tourism, and insurance business predicted disaster. The Coalition to Insure Against Terrorism—a broad grouping representing everyone from real estate investors to…
Before his death late last month at the age of 80, Mark Strand could claim one of the most varied careers of Americans active in the arts. Born on Prince Edward Island in 1934 and raised everywhere from Montreal to Brazil to pre-Castro Cuba, Strand was a painter, collage-maker, translator, writer,…
It’s easy to see how Mississippi attorney general Jim Hood—a Bible-reading, pro-gun, pro-life, Democrat—has survived in statewide office even as his already conservative state has turned a deeper shade of red. Quite simply, he’s a likeable, quotable guy who doesn’t seem to have forgotten his roots…
As any visitor to New York City discovers, the Big Apple isn’t the best place to get a hotel room. Rates top $300 per night, the highest in the country, and supply is quite limited.
In 2009, Bryce Harper—then a sophomore at Las Vegas High School and already the best high school baseball player in the nation—made the unusual and controversial decision to forgo his final two years of high school, on the grounds that there was simply no effective competition for him at that…
As anyone who has visited New York City knows, getting a taxicab in the city can prove very, very difficult. And finding a driver that speaks English, has working air conditioning, will let a visitor pay by credit card, and knows directions to major landmarks can be even harder. That’s why it’s…
Still fresh from victories over both cigarettes and the secondhand smoke they emit, many public health advocates have turned their attention to new supposed hazards: e-cigarette “vapor” and “thirdhand” smoke. While the previous campaigns to prevent smoking have had positive results, the latest ones…
Most conservatives, and even some liberals of the dwindling “New Democrat” variety, put near-religious faith in the maxim that greater consumer choice would improve nearly every heavily regulated service. They’re usually right. But examining a case where the benefits of consumer choice haven’t…
Last fall, during an earnings conference call, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings made an announcement that landed him on the front page of every newspaper business section: His company had surpassed HBO to become America’s biggest pay-TV service. Today, about 30 million Netflix accounts exist, serving…
President Obama’s State of the Union speech brimmed with ideas to increase upward mobility and spur job creation—most of which have been tried previously, without good results. From calling on Congress to raise the minimum wage to announcing the creation of six new “high-tech manufacturing hubs”…
After a decade-long run of bad weather that included Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and Ike, and a host of other river valley and storm-surge floods, the 45-year-old National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) owes taxpayers about $25 billion that no analyst believes it will ever pay back. Meanwhile, by…
In order to possess literary merit, poetry must do at least one of three things adequately: condense emotion, embody truths about the human condition, or enrapture readers with the poet’s ability to put words together in a beautiful way. Great poems can do all of these things. Adequate poetry…
The show’s hero has huge muscles, wisecracking sidekicks, and a mysterious origin. In each episode, he performs feats beyond the abilities of mere mortals. He fights for values that just about everyone shares, and he dispenses common-sense wisdom in a way that seems profound. Each episode ends,…
It will draw howls of protest from politicians and the punditocracy, but the time has come to allow Internet access in jails and prisons. It would open a world of new opportunities for prisoners and improve the fraught process of reintegrating them into society, all at nearly no cost to taxpayers.
President Barack Obama’s climate agenda announced last week represents the latest of many Democratic party efforts to address climate change. Although it includes no new legislation, the president’s plan makes unprecedented use of executive branch powers and offers a great many things that appeal…
Mention Ronald Reagan to an avowed environmentalist, and you’ll generally elicit a groan. In the conventional telling, the Gipper appointed right-wing extremists to key environmental positions and proceeded to give timber companies and energy interests a free hand to despoil nature. Had Congress…
The Walt Disney World Resort, located outside of Orlando, has more than twice Manhattan’s land area and about the same number of hotel rooms as Philadelphia. It’s America’s largest single-site employer—over 60,000 people work there—and for many of the 17 million or so who visit each year, it is a…
Hardly anyone who takes a close look at the network of federal and state laws mandating minimum prison sentences for myriad offenses can doubt that they waste billions of dollars, destroy lives, and do a disservice to justice. Reading the stories assembled by groups like Families Against Mandatory…
By almost any analysis, the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP)—the recipient of a $9.7 billion bailout in the wake of Hurricane Sandy—doesn’t work. It is poorly conceived, it’s terribly mismanaged, and it encourages harmful behavior.
NBC’s Revolution (Mondays, 10 p.m. ET/PT) features swordfights, gun-fights, and crossbow fights, chases on horseback, chases on trains, and chases on foot. It is gripping, loud, and entertaining. Who cares that its high-concept premise (all electricity in the world suddenly and mysteriously stops…
A major farm bill is now stalled in the House as members head back to their districts for their traditional break. This is a good thing. The measure approved by the Senate and by the House Agriculture committee with bipartisan support easily ranks as the worst major piece of domestic policy…
Parks and Recreation (NBC, Thursdays, 8:30 ET) offers every ingredient of a good television sitcom: It’s smart, laugh-out-loud funny, well acted, and nicely photographed. Despite good reviews, and a bevy of award nominations, the show, unlike its NBC Thursday night mates The Office and 30 Rock,…
Around the time Lisa Mulhearn’s Old English Sheepdog, Goober, turned 12, a veterinarian discovered a bone tumor in his nose. The doctors at Red Bank Veterinary Hospital in Tinton Falls, New Jersey, gave Mulhearn a grim prognosis. Without expensive chemotherapy treatment, her dog—the newly divorced…
A complete understanding of Michael Robbins’s poetry requires, in roughly equal measures, knowledge of modern academic poetry, its Romantic-era predecessors, seventies and eighties pop music, recent death metal, and au courant literary criticism. Knowing more than a little about hip-hop and Star…
Just about every poll on regulatory issues shows many Americans hold contradictory views. By growing majorities, Americans say they oppose “government regulation” (more than half tell Gallup that government regulates “too much”). However, when pollsters ask about broad areas of regulatory policy,…
If there’s one perfectly safe conclusion to draw from nearly a century of public health research, it’s this: Cigarette smoking is really, really bad for your health. An unusually complete, if rather obvious, 2010 Surgeon General’s Report on the topic shows that inhaling tobacco smoke not only…
Based on his commercial success alone, Shel Silverstein (1932-1999) deserves a great deal of attention from those who care about American poetry. Consider the facts: Both the books of poems and drawings that Silverstein published during his life remain in demand more than a quarter century later.…
The conventional wisdom holds that a housing finance system built on the bedrock of long-term, fixed-rate mortgages—the sensible, historic, ostensibly free-market way to buy a home—is the key underpinning of the country’s residential real estate market and the economy as a whole. A closer look,…
When Sam Howell woke up a year after a car accident left him in a coma, doctors believed the St. Charles, Michigan, man would never walk, talk, or eat solid food again. They were wrong, the Saginaw News reports. With care from his mother, a nurse, and a team of specialists, the 25-year-old can now…
About halfway through his 1984 State of the Union address, Ronald Reagan laid out the need for major tax reform. “There’s a better way,” he said. “Let us go forward with a historic reform for fairness, simplicity, and incentives for growth.” Reagan then proceeded to lay out an ambitious agenda:…
NCIS (the title is short for “Naval Criminal Investigative Service”) is almost certainly the most popular television show in the world.
In 1950, real estate developers looking to satisfy postwar America’s burgeoning demand for housing decided that Assateague Island, a sandy slice of land off the Maryland and Virginia coasts, would make a good place for a new neighborhood. Using federal and state funds, they built a road running…
Sometime late this summer—the Friday before Labor Day if historical patterns hold—the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will announce the beginning of something called Medicare Round Two of “the Competitive Bidding Program for certain Durable Medical Equipment, Prosthetics,…
Residents of California do not have nearly enough insurance to cover rebuilding costs following a big earthquake. One proposal to deal with this problem, a bill before Congress called the Earthquake Insurance Affordability Act, would not make things better and would drain billions from federal…
Those who think the federal government needs even more debt and more responsibilities will love Florida Democrat Ron Klein’s Homeowners’ Defense Act. Everyone else should treat the bill—currently moving forward in the House of Representatives—with a great deal of skepticism. The proposal, intended…
Lansing, Mich.
The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun
When the insurance giant American International Group was threatened with collapse in late 2008, its credit default swap business and other international operations were cited as the heart of its troubles. But the largest consequence of AIG's uncontrolled failure on consumers' pocketbooks could…
After hijackers destroyed the World Trade Center on 9/11, taxpayers ended up spending a lot of money to aid the injured, rebuild public infrastructure, improve security, and help the jobless. But the private firms with property and workers in lower Manhattan fell back on their private insurers. And…
Conan O'Brien, the new host of The Tonight Show, is funny, witty, and possesses the sort of affable geekiness that makes him seem approachable. In its first weeks, his new version of Tonight--airing live-to-tape from a gorgeous purpose-built neo-art deco studio on Los Angeles's Universal lot--has…
For much of the last decade, Massachusetts Democrat Richard Neal has banged away at proposals for vast tax increases on "offshore affiliated reinsurance"--coverage that insurance companies purchase from their own non-U.S. subsidiaries. As arcane as the issue sounds, the tax hike Neal wants could…
When it premiered to high ratings in 1978, the producers of Battlestar Galactica promised their show would bring feature-film standards to network television. It didn't. Although it offered state-of-the art special effects, cute kids, furry space pets, an over-the-top score from the London Symphony…
The Niagara River
Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem, "Praise Song for the Day," doesn't qualify as a great poem, but it might emerge as an important one. As a celebration of the commonplace and an exaltation of the personal over the political, the poem offers a distinctly American take on the concept of…
Red Bird
AS CONGRESS WINDS down its current session, there's little doubt that plenty of bad ideas will pop out of the woodwork as members put the finishing touches on legislation. Unfortunately, one of the worst ideas to come down the pike in quite some time--federal windstorm insurance--has gained some…
When Joe Biden has taken an interest in domestic policy, it has mostly had to do with crime. Of the 31 substantive domestic policy bills the Democratic vice presidential nominee has introduced since 2006, 20 related to crime and policing. His single most significant legislative achievement--one…
About half way through its 12th season, South Park (Comedy Central, Wednesdays, 10 P.M. ET) has attacked, to take just the first five letters of the alphabet, AIDS research, Britney Spears, Canadians, drug-related social panics, and Eliot Spitzer. Indeed, it's difficult to find an interest group,…
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Late last year, two recently elected southern Republican governors, Louisiana's Bobby Jindal and Florida's Charlie Crist, vowed to work together for a "national catastrophe fund" to reduce the soaring insurance premiums for owners of homes in disaster-prone areas. With the endorsement of the…
If a catastrophic Katrina-like hurricane sweeps through the state of Florida, it may leave behind more than wrecked houses, damaged shops, and ruined roads: There's a real chance that Governor Charlie Crist's recent insurance reforms could bankrupt the state.
During the late 1990s, police superintendent Edward F. Davis III presided over epic crime reductions in Lowell, Massachusetts. Under his leadership, the city's crime rate fell almost 60 percent from 1995 to 1999. An economic revival followed, and the city, once among the most dangerous in New…
More than 18 months after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, the state of Mississippi finds itself in a legal battle over homeowners' insurance that may take longer to clean up than the hurricane debris. Thousands of Mississippians have seen their houses reduced to concrete slabs and want…
American Gulag
FROM MASSACHUSETTS mill towns to Southern California suburbs, local police, fire, and emergency management agencies are using a cascade of new federal homeland security grants to go shopping. They've bought some $6 billion worth of chemical weapons suits, emergency command centers, laser-assisted…
FIREFIGHTERS love John Kerry, and the Massachusetts senator loves them back. The International Association of Firefighters endorsed the presumptive Democratic nominee in September 2003, when other unions had flocked to Howard Dean's banner. When the Bush campaign aired commercials featuring…
LESS THAN AN HOUR after hijacked jetliners hit the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, the Coast Guard called "all available boats" to the New York City waterfront. Fishing trawlers, ferries, cargo ships, and luxury yachts came in droves. By day's end, over 300,000 people had left the…
Harsh Justice
MILWAUKEE SCHOOL BOARD member John Gardner has a deep voice, a short temper, plenty of enemies, and left-leaning political views. He also has a bevy of support from nationally prominent conservatives and is fighting a broad spectrum of left-wing forces that want to end his political career.
AROUND 1:00 A.M. on Thursday, October 24, with the manhunt for the Beltway sniper entering its third week, trucker Ronald Lanz--his radio tuned to the "Truckin' Bozo" network--spotted a blue 1990 Chevy Caprice at a rest stop along I-70, a few miles from the Maryland-Pennsylvania border. He saw the…
A MYSTERIOUS PHONE CALL, a fingerprint, a composite sketch, and spent ammunition from an unsolved Alabama killing finally led the police to sniper suspects John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo. In the end, all the scientific-sounding speculation offered by the bevy of professional profilers who…
THANKS TO A COALITION of evangelicals, left-wing prison reformers, and human rights activists, Congress is on the verge of tackling America's most ignored crime problem, prison rape. A measure that would apply various types of pressure to shape up lax prison systems is now working its way towards…
JOE ARPAIO, sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, has some interesting ideas about running prisons: His inmates sleep in tents in the desert, work on chain gangs when they misbehave, wear pink underwear, and eat green baloney sandwiches that cost less than dog food. Smoking, skin mags, and coffee…
AS AMERICA'S best-educated, best-equipped, and best-known law enforcement agency, the FBI runs the world's most sophisticated law enforcement labs, keeps national crime statistics, and gives police all over the country plenty of advice on everything from child abuse to credit card fraud. The…
AFTER HE BEAT an 80-year-old grandmother, took a mother with a stroller hostage, and robbed 11 London banks in broad daylight, Michael Wheatley was finally nabbed by British police late last month. Dubbed the Skull Cracker for his habit of pistol-whipping victims, Wheatley had transfixed the London…