Girl Wanted: Must Be Able to Mange
Feeling idealistic? The following job description recently appeared online at www.idealist.org , a global directory of opportunities at mostly left-leaning nonprofit groups. Perivate Secretary to the Chairman IHRC Job Category: Administration Type: Full time Description: The International Human Rights Commission need one Specialprivate secretary to the excelleny World Chairman for long term (10 years) fulltime.…
Overruling the Court
One of the myths of our political system is that the Supreme Court has the last word on the scope and meaning of federal law. But time and time again, Congress has shown its dissatisfaction with Supreme Court interpretations of laws it passes–by amending or re-enacting the legislation to clarify its original intent and…
Fiscal Irresponsibility
It’s time to strike the term “fiscalresponsibility” from responsible political rhetoric. Few terms in publicdiscourse have moved as directly as this one has from imprecision tomeaninglessness without any intervening period of coherence. Democrats have been particularly loose-lipped about it lately. HouseMinority Leader Richard Gephardt, recently campaigning in Iowa for a fellowDemocrat, was quoted in The…
Criminally Unjust
It’s no coincidence that declining support for capital punishment has been accompanied by increased mistrust of law enforcement and discomfort with the war on drugs. A relative lull in violent crime during the 1990s contributed to a reconsideration of harsh police practices and prosecutorial tactics. But many people are willing to tolerate bad policing so…
Free Market Shock
The California energy crisis isn’t over: it’s only in remission, thanks to a massive statewide commitment to conservation, a mild summer, and the judicious retreat by energy conglomerates from their extortionist pricing tactics. But the state’s electricity consumers have been left with permanently higher utility bills, and the state’s taxpayers have been slapped with a…
Comment: Free Fall
It is hard to believe that the Bush administration could be in so much trouble on so many fronts. Just in the past few weeks, Bush has found himself politically isolated on the issues of stem cell research, offshore oil drilling, prescription benefits under Medicare, patients’ rights, access to the United States for Mexican trucks,…
An Unfinished Peace
April 1865: The Month That Saved America, Jay Winik. HarperCollins, 496 pages, $32.50 In January 1913, the 50th anniversary of the EmancipationProclamation, Dudley Miles, a professor at Columbia University, published anessay titled “The Civil War as Unifier.” The “true significance” of the war, Mileswrote, was how quickly sectional reconciliation had been achieved. Unlike civilwars and…
Transpotting
We were standing in our neighbors’ house–I must have been five or six–next to a diaper-changing table, where the moms were cooing over a new baby. Suddenly I was dizzyingly puzzled by how adults knew whether that blurry lump of flesh was a girl or a boy. My mother was quite impatient with the question,…
Robots and Actors
Steven Spielberg’s A.I. is neither the worst nor the best movie he has ever made, but it is certainly the strangest. Our initial tendency is to attribute this to the involvement of Stanley Kubrick, who collaborated with Spielberg on the project for many years (though when he was given complete control after Kubrick’s death, Spielberg…
