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The piling on has begun. Last week Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz broke a front page story about CBS anchor Dan Rather’s speech at a Democratic Party fund-raiser in Texas. Considering that Rather is, as Kurtz puts it, “the longest-serving and most outspoken of the major network news anchors,” this has, of course, thrown […]

Environmentalists reacted today with rather restrained enthusiasm to yesterday’s appointment by the Bush administration of Dale N. Bosworth as the new head of the U.S. Forest Service. While not out front in his support of many of the Forest Service’s most recent conservation moves — such as the ban on roads in about one-third of […]

If there are standards of truth or honesty in journalistic commentary, The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page abandoned them long ago. Sadly, the board that administers the Pulitzer Prizes does not agree. Last year, a Pulitzer jury handed the prize for commentary to the Journal‘s Paul Gigot, a man who, in his columns on the […]

“In government, there are two ways to destroy something,” says one federal biologist. “If you can’t do it directly, then just don’t pay for it.” Environmentalists in the executive branch ought to know: This Earth Day, President Bush is scheming to snap the wallet shut on the Endangered Species Act. Bush’s proposed 2002 budget limits […]

As the chattering begins over George W. Bush’s upcoming judicial appointments, much attention has been devoted to the so-called Federalist Society, the rightist legal organization that has been recommending candidates. Launched two decades ago by a clutch of conservative law students — including current Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham — the Society has since colonized […]

There are about 93 vacancies in the federal court system today, and next month, George W. Bush is likely to announce his first batch of nominees to fill them. That there are so many vacancies is not, however, a matter of happenstance. For six years, Republicans in the Senate employed every trick in the book […]

The biggest menace to the personal security of Americans may not be terrorism but government’s response to it. The administration has already rammed through an antiterrorism bill that allows normal due process and privacy protections to be waived if a prosecutor thinks some potential suspect has some remote connection to terrorism. Now the president has […]

As Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force puts the final touches on its report — widely expected to endorse drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and increasing funds for oxymoronic “clean coal” technology — one would expect environmental groups to be getting ready to shred Bush’s sombrero. I wouldn’t count it. […]

You might think it was a sizable oversight that President Bush released his 163-page energy plan for America without including a single provision that would tackle skyrocketing energy prices in the short term. But Bush was way ahead of us on that. At a news conference just before he released his energy plan, he pronounced, […]