In order to understand the steep rise in world food prices that set off food riots in Haiti last week and toppled the government, you need to travel to Iowa. Right now, we're trying to run our cars on corn ethanol instead of gasoline. As a result, we suddenly find ourselves taking food out of the…
The Revenge of Gaia
In June, the Supreme Court decided that Detroit police did not violate the Fourth Amendment rights of a drug dealer named Booker Hudson when they entered his home in August 1998 only five seconds after announcing their presence at his door. Hudson's lawyers argued that--although he had a loaded gun…
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HOMELESS? "We haven't heard much--anything, really--about the homeless since, oh, roughly January 20, 1993," Andrew Ferguson noted in January 2001, predicting that with Bush replacing Clinton, the media would soon rediscover them. As if on cue, days later the Washington…
"NUCLEAR POWER PLANT TOWER IMPLODED," blared a headline on CNN.com last week, sounding overtones of another Three Mile Island. In fact, the cooling tower on the Trojan reactor north of Portland, Ore., abandoned 13 years ago, was being brought down by a demolition crew. Oh well, false alarm. As the…
OF ALL THE SMEARS AIMED at Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, perhaps none was more demagogic than the attack on his opinion in a case involving the body search of a 10-year-old girl during a Pennsylvania drug bust. Leading up to the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, the Alliance for Justice, a…
PRESIDENT BUSH MAY HAVE BEEN blamed unfairly for the hurricane that hit New Orleans, but there isn't going to be anywhere to hide when the next "natural" disaster hits--the Natural Gas Shock of 2005-06. Natural gas is now selling at $12 per thousand cubic feet, up from $2 in 2002. But that's just…
PRESIDENT BUSH WENT TO MADISON County, Illinois, last week to kick off his campaign for tort reform. "Junk lawsuits change the way doctors do medicine," said the president, surrounded by a phalanx of doctors from southern Illinois. "Instead of taking care of patients, they're worried about…
JOHN KERRY wasted no time jumping on President George Bush about the unexpected shortage in flu vaccines this year. Why wasn't Bush paying attention? He should have done things differently. And of course Kerry had a "plan" to solve the whole mess.
IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND trial lawyers like John Edwards, you have to recognize their one enduring fantasy. They are knights in shining armor rescuing damsels in distress.
IN LATE APRIL, a Beaumont, Texas, jury voted to award $1 billion to the family of a plaintiff who allegedly lost her life as a result of taking fen-phen, a drug combination popular among dieters in the 1990s before it was linked to heart-valve damage. The woman, who was morbidly obese and whose…
New York
REPUBLICANS who dream of attacking John Edwards for making his fortune as a trial lawyer should know that his most famous lawsuit--the one he talks about most on the campaign trail--involved a little girl condemned to a lifetime of feeding tubes when she became caught in a powerful drain in a…
MARK BOCCI is a personal injury lawyer in Lake Oswego, Oregon. In the 1980s, he took the case of a Filipino-American high school student who had suffered a grievous injury playing football. Kneed in the head by an all-state fullback, "Richard" suffered headaches and dizziness for two days, then…
THE "LIVING WAGE" movement has become the latest effort to impose socialism on the United States, one city at a time. After a slow beginning in the 1990s, living wage ordinances--which impose minimum wages much higher than the federal one--have now been adopted in over 100 municipalities, from…
FACED WITH RISING Medicaid costs, the states have begun to trumpet the oldest illusion about government power--that price controls can make things abundant and "affordable," in this case prescription drugs. On May 19 the U.S. Supreme Court gave the green light to a Maine program that includes…
New York
TWO YEARS AGO, federal agents in Colorado responded to a complaint at the home of Samuel Patane, an ex-convict under a restraining order for beating his wife. Patane's probation officer had warned the agents that the convicted felon had a Glock pistol and a penchant for violence. After entering the…
MEDICAL MALPRACTICE reform is moving steadily through Congress. The House passed President Bush's plan last Thursday, and it now goes to the Senate. The administration is hoping the reforms will head off a national malpractice crisis, which has already closed emergency rooms and trauma centers in…
NO SUBJECT gets talked to death more than "diminishing our dependence on Middle Eastern oil." Yet as conflict with Iraq looms, what do we face but another Energy Crisis?
"AL FRANKEN IS A VULGAR EGOMANIAC." That's the title of the book I'm going to have to write someday--if Al Franken becomes the new Rush Limbaugh. Chances are, he won't. Earlier this month, Sheldon and Anita Drobny, a wealthy Chicago investor couple, announced a $10 million project to fund a liberal…
WHILE INVESTORS are waiting for the Next Big Thing to emerge from the world of technology, the best business plans are emerging in an entirely different sector--lawsuits.
IT WAS A JOYFUL MOMENT. In 1999 and 2000, for the first time in 50 years, New York City surpassed the rest of the nation in job growth. Silicon Alley was humming. Martha Stewart was remodeling a 1930s West Side industrial building that could lift railroad cars to the eighth floor. Mayor Giuliani…
EXECUTING PEOPLE FOR MURDER deters other people from committing other murders. Common sense would suggest to anyone that such a deterrent effect must exist. After all, people do fear losing their lives. And based on the evidence, it’s hard to see why anyone would doubt the deterrent effect of the…
LAST WEEK, HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON joined a growing chorus of lawmakers in calling for a federal ban on racial profiling. "Profiling is not an effective law enforcement tool," said New York’s junior senator. "The vast majority of African Americans and Hispanics who are stopped or searched have…
Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler a few years back. -- John Maynard Keynes As…
New York City
While California frets over rolling blackouts and Washington sounds the alarm about a new energy crisis, the electrical generating industry has quietly passed a milestone. In 1999, nuclear energy -- the forgotten player in the arena -- became the nation's cheapest source of electricity.
WHEN RACHEL CARSON wrote Silent Spring in 1962, she decried the use of chemical sprays, arguing for more benign and natural "biological" pesticides. One of her favorites was Bacillus thuringiensis, a common soil bacterium that produces a crystalline spore lethal to some insects. "Shortly after…
The Kaiser Aluminum plant in Mead, Washington, is a power-hungry smelting operation that draws cheap electricity from 29 federally constructed hydroelectric dams run by the Bonneville Power Administration. Thanks to vast federal investment, Kaiser pays only about $ 22.50 per megawatt-hour (mwh) to…
Feeling ambitious, Professor David Clemens of Monterey Peninsula College last semester proposed a new course for the English Department, "English 38 -- More or Less Human? A Study of Literature, Technology, and Human Nature." The required materials had a nice contemporary ring. Students would read…
THE BUSH CAMPAIGN needs a new focus. "Compassionate conservatism" got it through the convention but has failed miserably ever since. What happened? While Republicans were worried about trying to put on a good front to blacks, women, single mothers, and the poor, Al Gore and the Democrats made a…
The Forbes 400 list published last October gave a rude surprise to anyone who thought the Northeast Corridor was still the nation's economic center of gravity. Of the 20 richest people in America, two live in Bellevue and one in Mercer Island, Wash., two live in California, four live in Arkansas…
AT MIDNIGHT, JUNE 16, NEW YORK CITY stepped out from under rent control for the first time in 50 years. Five minutes later, like groundhogs frightened by their own shadows, Gov. George Pataki and state senate majority leader Joe Bruno went scurrying back into their holes. New York's flirtation with…
THE ARGUMENT THAT NEWT GINGRICH deserved his reprimand and $ 300,000 fine because he used tax-exempt money to fund a college course at Reinhardt College is based on the idea that the course was actually "political" -- that Gingrich taught the course to further specifically partisan aims. I am one…
As the new Congress gets down to business, the issue of health care will once again be at the top of the agenda -- which is good news for conservatives. No issue is riper for the strategy of dismantling regulation and letting the free market do its work. The problem is, no one much thinks this way.…
Like most people in America, I'm of two minds about gun control. To wit: Several years ago, my parents retired to a remote part of a southern state famous for its military traditions. For a long time, I was consumed with lurid fears about their isolation ("If someone were just to come in and cut…
THERE'S A LITTLE NEWSPAPER STORE in my neighborhood my family and I have grown very fond of. It's the kind of place that brings memories of your own youth -- filled from floor to ceiling with comic books, miniature cars, whiffle balls, all the impossibly desirable amulets of childhood.
In July, the Cato Institute gave New York's George Pataki the highest rating of any governor in its biannual "Fiscal Report Card on America's Governors." A big win for the home team? You'd never know it by reading the New York newspapers. Neither the New York Times nor the Daily News made mention,…
Democrats and Republicans in Congress are now performing an old ritual dating from the 1930s. The ceremony goes like this: Democrats declare themselves to be kind and generous and ready to "give the nation a pay hike." They raise the minimum wage to X dollars an hour. Republicans cite economic…
ON MARCH 14, KATHLEEN WEINSTEIN, a 45-year-old special education teacher in Middletown, New Jersey, stopped to buy a sandwich on her way to take a graduate-course exam. When she returned to the parking lot, she was forced into her car by a youth who claimed he had a gun.
IT WAS A STORY OF ALMOST UNSPEAKABLE HORROR. A bright, vivacious six-year- old was brutalized by her mother and stepfather, sexually abused, hung from a shower rod "just to see if she would die," tattooed with ring imprints that police first thought were cigarette burns, and beaten until her bones…
The same week that O.J. Simpson got off, the U.S. Supreme Court was considering Gore v. BMW, the case of an Alabama doctor who found that his car had been partially refinished after suffering slight damage on the boat trip from Germany. An Alabama jury awarded $ 4,000 in compensatory damages and $…
The same week that O.J. Simpson got off, the U.S. Supreme Court was considering Gore v. BMW, the case of an Alabama doctor who found that his car had been partially refinished after suffering slight damage on the boat trip from Germany. An Alabama jury awarded $ 4,000 in compensatory damages and $…
The House Ethics Committee is reportedly seeking a special prosecutor to pursue the case against Speaker Newt Gingrich for committing ethical violations while writing his best-selling book, To Renew America. The thesis is that he improperly used non-partisan funds from the Progress and Freedom…