Features

Back in September, subscribers to Red Herring magazine’s e-mail bulletin “The Red Eye” received a missive they probably weren’t expecting. “Tony Perkins here with a special invitation,” began the message. “As most Red Herring readers know, I’ve stuck my neck out early in the next presidential campaign by personally backing my friend Governor George W. […]

Determining precisely who are the poorest Americans would seem to be a simple enough things to do. But like many bureaucratic tasks, counting up the official poor is fraught with political complications. Last October the issue became front-page news when The New York Times suggested that the Census Bureau might raise the poverty level, boosting […]

This school year, Governor George Pataki of New York expanded Learnfare–a program making family-assistance grants contingent upon children’s attendance at school–to include all elementary schools in the state. After three unexcused absences, students on welfare must seek counseling. After four unexcused absences, their families lose $60 in monthly assistance, which they can earn back with […]

Weekly Standard editor William Kristol was fired from ABC’s This Week at the behest of the liberal media conspiracy. That, at any rate, is the contention of conservative columnist Mona Charen, who writes that “most chat shows have ratios of liberals to conservatives in the neighborhood of 3 to 2” and “the number of liberal […]

In January, Salon reported that drug czar Barry McCaffrey and the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) had coerced television networks to include governmentapproved antidrug messages in prime-time shows. Under the arrangement, the major networks secretly submitted scripts to McCaffrey’s office in exchange for credit toward public-service advertising that Congress had required them to […]

Free markets are supposed to have made the United States the world’s most fertile ground for entrepreneurial activity. So how come only about 8 percent of Americans are self-employed, compared with much higher self-employment rates in countries alleged to suffer from “Eurosclerosis?” The United States, for example, trails Belgium (15 percent), France (11 percent), Germany […]

On January 20, when it lifted the ban on low-power FM (LPFM) broadcasting, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) opened the airwaves to as many as 1,000 new noncommercial radio stations operating at or below 100 watts. The goal of the FCC’s initiative is to counter the consolidation and homogenization of the radio industry that has […]

There have been revisionist histories of America and the American West at least since the middle of the sixteenth century, when the priest-historian Bartolomé de las Casas accused his fellow Spaniards of the mass murder, essentially the genocide, of millions of Native Americans. In 1879, even as Manifest Destiny and the dream of the open […]

Business opponents of the minimum wage often argue that it is little more than an “entry-level” wage–water-wings for those workers taking their first dip in the labor pool–and therefore needn’t be high enough to sustain a worker over many years. A recent study by two government economists, William Carrington at the Bureau of Labor Statistics […]

When the U.S. Census Bureau asked residents to count off for the new millennium, sharp-eyed individuals noticed a slight oddity in the form’s race question: While Asians or Pacific Islanders could pick from among nine boxes (Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Native Hawaiian, Guamanian, or Chamorro and Samoan), Caucasians had only one box […]