Opinions
Climate Change and Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs Fervent. 1. Hot, burning, glowing, boiling.
To Article...Obama's Wallow in the Automobile Industry The Constitution enumerates three requirements for those who would be president (they must be natural-born citizens, at least 35 and a resident within the country for 14 years) and now the government's thrashing about in the economy imposes a fourth: Presidents must be able to speak pluperfect nonsense with a straight face, lest the country understand what the government is doing. Obfuscation serves political salvation when what the government is doing includes promising that if Chrysler will sell itself to Fiat, U.S. taxpayers will lend that Italian firm $6 billion.
To Article...Umpires Are Baseball's Judicial Branch In Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," a time-traveling American brought baseball to sixth-century England, where arguments with umpires were robust: "The umpire's first decision was usually his last. . . . When it was noticed that no umpire ever survived a game, umpiring got to be unpopular." But it remains a necessary, extraordinarily demanding and insufficiently appreciated craft.
To Article...Racing Past the Constitution Rampant redistribution of wealth by government is now the norm. So is this: This redistribution inflames government's natural rapaciousness and subverts the rule of law. This degeneration of governance is illustrated by the Illinois legislature's transfer of income from some disfavored riverboat casinos to racetracks.
To Article...Education, By Any Means "We want freedom by any means necessary."
To Article...America's Bad Jeans On any American street, or in any airport or mall, you see the same sad tableau: A 10-year-old boy is walking with his father, whose development was evidently arrested when he was that age, judging by his clothes. Father and son are dressed identically -- running shoes, T-shirts. And jeans, always jeans. If mother is there, she, too, is draped in denim.
To Article...The Incredible Shrinking Russia America's "progressive" president has some peculiarly retro policies. Domestically, his reactionary liberalism is exemplified by his policy of No Auto Company Left Behind, with its intimated hope that depopulated Detroit, where cattle could graze, can somehow return to something like the 1950s. Abroad, he seems to yearn for the 1970s, when the Soviet Union was rampant and coping with it supposedly depended on arms control.
To Article...Obama's Budget Satire Monday morning the government braced for austerity, as the government understands that. Having sent Congress a $3.5 trillion budget, the president signaled in advance -- perhaps so his Cabinet members could steel themselves for the new asceticism -- that at the first meeting of his Cabinet he would direct the 15 heads of departments to find economies totaling $100 million, which is about 13 minutes of federal spending, and 0.0029 percent -- about a quarter of one-hundredth of 1 percent -- of $3.5 trillion.
To Article...The Wreck of the Racial Spoils System Wednesday morning, a lawyer defending in the Supreme Court what the city of New Haven, Conn., did to Frank Ricci and 17 other white firefighters (including one Hispanic) was not 20 seconds into his argument when Chief Justice John Roberts interrupted to ask: Would it have been lawful if the city had decided to disregard the results of the exam to select firefighters for promotion because it selected too many black and too few white candidates?
To Article...Washington Unreconciled on 'Reconciliation' and Torture Reconciliation: The action of bringing to agreement, concord, or harmony.
To Article...