Emanuel Battles History in Chicago
CHICAGO — A Midwestern humorist, Indiana’s Kin Hubbard, said people often confuse bad management with destiny. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel knows better. He must play the cards that fate has dealt him,...
View ArticleIs Economic Equality a Moral Imperative?
WASHINGTON — America is more distant from the 1933 beginning of the New Deal (82 years) than that beginning was from the 1865 end of the Civil War (68 years). Both episodes involved the nation’s...
View ArticleCandidates Should Choose Their Judicial Muse
WASHINGTON — A supremely important presidential issue is being generally neglected because Democrats have nothing interesting to say about it and Republicans differ among themselves about it. Four...
View ArticleFix The Criminal Justice System
WASHINGTON — The Republican Party, like Sisyphus, is again putting its shoulder to a boulder, hoping to make modest but significant changes in the Electoral College arithmetic by winning perhaps 12...
View ArticleThe Political Reality of Fantasy Sports
WASHINGTON — Americans have been betting on sports since the first time a Puritan pilgrim boasted that his horse was the fastest in Massachusetts Bay Colony and another said, “Wanna bet?” But fish...
View ArticleDoes Iran’s Anti-Semitism Run Too Deep For Deterrence?
WASHINGTON — Yale historian Timothy Snyder is indebted to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who recently made Snyder’s new book even more newsworthy than his extraordinary scholarship deserves...
View ArticleSupreme Court Tackles Sinister Trends
WASHINGTON — The IRS scandal — the denial of essential tax-exempt status to conservative advocacy groups, thereby effectively suppressing the groups’ activities — demonstrates this: When government is...
View ArticleSlandering Reagan
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump is just one symptom of today’s cultural pathology of self-validating vehemence with blustery certitudes substituting for evidence. Another is the fact that the book atop the...
View ArticleO’Reilly Makes A Mess Of History
WASHINGTON — Were the lungs the seat of wisdom, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly would be wise, but they are not and he is not. So it is not astonishing that he is doubling down on his wager that the truth...
View ArticleOn Campus, A Freedom From Speech
WASHINGTON — Yale’s president, Peter Salovey, dealt with the Crisis of the Distressing Email about Hypothetical Halloween Costumes about as you would expect from someone who has risen to eminence in...
View ArticleChris Christie’s Serious Political Talent
WASHINGTON — Paris was for all Americans, but especially for Republicans, a summons to seriousness that should have two immediate impacts on the Republican presidential contest. It should awaken the...
View ArticleFreedom Of Speech Includes Talking About Pets
WASHINGTON — Never has American freedom of speech been attacked so flagrantly, promiscuously and on so many fronts. The most egregious examples come from campuses and Congress. On campuses, censorship...
View ArticleThe Low Depths of Higher Education
WASHINGTON — Give thanks this day for some indirect blessings of liberty, including the behavior-beyond-satire of what are generously called institutions of higher education. People who are imprecisely...
View ArticleStanding Athwart the Administrative State
WASHINGTON — As the administrative state distorts America’s constitutional architecture, Clarence Thomas becomes America’s indispensable constitutionalist. Now in his 25th year on the Supreme Court, he...
View ArticleSouth Carolina’s Predictive Power
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Sen. Tim Scott, who evidently has not received the memo explaining that politics is a grim and bitter business, laughs easily and often, as when, during lunch in this city’s humming...
View ArticleThe Empty Case For Progressive Taxation
WASHINGTON — Progressives are increasingly preoccupied with income inequality, and their current hero, Sen. Bernie Sanders, favors increasing the tax system’s progressivity. So, in this 103rd year of...
View ArticleThe Frank Sinatra We Remember
WASHINGTON — In today’s culture of hyperbole, born of desperate attempts to be noticed amid the Niagara of Internet and other outpourings, the label “genius” is affixed promiscuously to evanescent...
View ArticleA Missouri Town Demands Substantive Due Process
WASHINGTON — If Pagedale, Missouri, is a glimpse of the future, the future is going to be annoying. Pagedale might represent the future of governance unless some of its residents succeed in their...
View ArticleAnother False ‘Turning Point’ On Climate
WASHINGTON — History, on the “right side” of which Barack Obama endeavors to keep us, has a sense of whimsy. Proof of which is something happening this week: Britain’s last deep-pit coal mine is...
View ArticleHigher Education is a House Divided
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Although he is just 22, Andrew Zeller is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at Purdue University. He is one reason the school is a rare exception to the rule of...
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