Senate wannabe suffers self-inflicted identity crisis
BOSTON -- Blond, blue-eyed Elizabeth Warren, the Senate candidate and Harvard professor who cites "family lore" that she is 1/32nd Cherokee, was inducted into Oklahoma's Hall of Fame last year. Her biography on oklahomaheritage.com says she "can track both sides of her family in Oklahoma long before statehood" (1907) and "she proudly tells everyone she encounters that she is 'an Okie to my toes.'" It does not mention any Cherokee great-great-great-grandmother. A DVD of the induction ceremony shows that neither Warren nor anyone else mentioned this.
A nightmare in Tewksbury
TEWKSBURY, Mass. -- Russ Caswell, 68, is bewildered: "What country are we in?" He and his wife Pat are ensnared in a Kafkaesque nightmare unfolding in Orwellian language.
Bipartisanship can be root of our problems
Bipartisanship, the supposed scarcity of which so distresses the high-minded, actually is disastrously prevalent. Since 2001, it has produced No Child Left Behind, a counterproductive federal intrusion in primary and secondary education; the McCain-Feingold speech rationing law (the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act); an unfunded prescription drug entitlement; troublemaking by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; government-directed capitalism from the Export-Import Bank; crony capitalism from energy subsidies; unseemly agriculture and transportation bills; continuous bailouts of an unreformed Postal Service; housing subsidies; subsidies for state and local governments; and many other bipartisan deeds, including most appropriations bills.
It's possible to tax jobs out of existence
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Bill Hewlett and David Packard, tinkering in a California garage, began what became Hewlett-Packard. Steve Jobs and a friend built a computer in the California garage that became Apple's birthplace. Bill Cook had no garage, so he launched Cook Medical in a spare bedroom in an apartment in this university town. Half a century ago, in flight from Chicago's winters, he settled here and began making cardiovascular catheters and other medical instruments. One thing led to another, as things have a way of doing when the government stays out of the way, and although Cook died last year, Cook Medical, with its subsidiaries, is the world's largest family-owned medical devices company.
Jon Will's gift
When Jonathan Frederick Will was born 40 years ago -- on May 4, 1972, his father's 31st birthday -- the life expectancy for people with Down syndrome was about 20 years. That is understandable.
All the way with LBJ
Around noon on Saturday, Nov. 23, 1963, almost exactly 24 hours after the assassination in Dallas, while the president's casket lay in the East Room of the White House, Arthur Schlesinger, John Kennedy's kept historian, convened a lunch at Washington's Occidental restaurant with some other administration liberals. Their purpose was to discuss how to deny the 1964 Democratic presidential nomination to the new incumbent, Lyndon Johnson, and instead run a ticket of Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Sen. Hubert Humphrey.
Illinois learns market forces apply to states, too
After trying to tax Illinois to governmental solvency and economic dynamism, Pat Quinn, a Democrat who has been governor since 2009, now says "our rendezvous with reality has arrived." Actually, Illinois is still reality-averse, so Americans may soon learn the importance of the freedom to fail in a system of competitive federalism.
Cruel and unusual -- a test case
In the summer of 1787, just 94 years after the Salem witch trials, as paragons of the Enlightenment such as James Madison, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, deliberated in the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, a mob pelted and otherwise tormented to death a woman accused of being a witch. Prosecution of alleged witches, writes historian Edmund Morgan, had ceased in the colonies long before the English statute criminalizing witchcraft was repealed in 1736. Some popular sentiment, however, lagged.
Constitution protects individual rights against erring majorities
Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a Reagan appointee to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, is a courtly Virginian who combines a manner as soft as a Shenandoah breeze with a keen intellect. His disapproval of much current thinking about how the Constitution should be construed is explained in his spirited new book -- slender and sharp as a stiletto -- "Cosmic Constitutional Theory: Why Americans Are Losing Their Inalienable Right to Self-Governance" (Oxford).
We may find out whether legalization worth the cost
Amelioration of today's drug problem requires Americans to understand the significance of the 80/20 ratio. Twenty percent of American drinkers consume 80 percent of the alcohol sold here. The same 80-20 split obtains among users of illicit drugs.
Legalizing drugs could cost us more than we can afford
The human nervous system interacts in pleasing and addictive ways with certain molecules derived from some plants, which is why humans may have developed beer before they developed bread. Psychoactive -- consciousness-altering -- and addictive drugs are natural, a fact that should immunize policymakers against extravagant hopes as they cope with America's drug problem, which is convulsing some nations to our south.
Immigrant taxi company owner reminds us of economic freedoms
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Ali Bokhari, now 39, emigrated from Pakistan in 2000 and eventually settled here as a taxi driver, and soon experienced a quintessentially American itch, a nagging sense that "I cannot grow." But he had an idea: "I can build a better business model for something Nashville has been missing." He built it, and now knows that no good deed goes unpunished by today's political model -- collusion between entrenched businesses and compliant government.
Clip wings on Ex-Im Bank's high-flying corporate welfare
Sallie James was born in Australia on July 4, 1976, which suggests that Providence planned what happened 30 years later: She moved to Washington. She studies trade policy at the libertarian Cato Institute and her report "Time to X Out the Ex-Im Bank" illustrates how corporate welfare metastasizes as government tries to rectify the inevitable inequities of its constantly multiplying favoritisms. And while picking American winners, the Export-Import Bank creates American losers.
Those pesky things called laws don't seem to bother Obama
Two policies of the Obama administration illustrate an axiom: As government expands, its lawfulness contracts. Consider the administration's desire to continue funding UNESCO and to develop a national curriculum for primary and secondary education.
Farewell, honored prophet: James Q. Wilson's rare social vision
WASHINGTON -- The most accomplished social scientist of the last half-century would occasionally visit his friend and Harvard colleague Pat Moynihan at the White House when Moynihan was President Nixon's domestic policy adviser. Once Moynihan took him to Nixon and said: "Mr. President, James Q. Wilson is the smartest man in the United States. The president of the United States should pay attention to what he has to say." Moynihan was right on both counts.
Neither Santorum nor Romney have winning strategy
The Midwest begins on the western slopes of the Allegheny Mountains, around Rick Santorum's Pittsburgh, birthplace of the Ohio River, the original highway into the Midwest. Pittsburgh fueled the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, an early eruption of Western resentment of the overbearing East, which taxed the whiskey that Westerners made from their grain. Santorum the Midwesterner, after victories in Iowa, Minnesota and Missouri, is waging more of his political capital on the region.
Time to evict outdated rent-control laws
NEW YORK -- James and Jeanne Harmon reside in and supposedly own a five-story brownstone on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a building that has been in their family since 1949. But they have, so to speak, houseguests who have overstayed their welcome by, in cumulative years, more than a century. They are the tenants -- the same tenants -- who have been living in the three of the Harmons' six apartments that are rent controlled.
GOP's rhetoric on national defense does country few favors
Through 11 presidential elections, beginning with the Democrats' nomination of George McGovern in 1972, Republicans have enjoyed a presumption of superiority regarding national security. This year, however, events and their rhetoric are dissipating their advantage.
Pettifogging bureaucracy clouds free speech rights
FOUNTAIN HILLS, Ariz. -- Dina Galassini does not seem to pose a threat to Arizona's civic integrity. But the government of this desert community believes you cannot be too careful. And state law empowers local governments to be vigilant against the lurking danger that political speech might occur before the speakers notify the government and comply with all the speech rules.
With 53 more chances to pick up delegates, no one is 'inevitable’
An Illinois lawyer who had a way with words once characterized a particular argument as weaker than soup made from the shadow of a pigeon that died of starvation. The argument for Mitt Romney benefiting from South Carolina's voting is almost as weak as Lincoln's soup, but here it is:
Overreaching in name of security offers snapshot of our times
LOS ANGELES -- Shawn Nee, 35, works in television but hopes to publish a book of photographs. Shane Quentin, 31, repairs bicycles but enjoys photographing industrial scenes at night. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department probably wishes both would find other hobbies. Herewith a story of today's inevitable friction between people exercising, and others protecting, freedom.
Charleston's Cannon St. All Stars reminds us how far we've come
CHARLESTON -- They are nearing 70 now, the 11 men who were 12-year-old boys in 1955 and who are remembered for the baseball games they could not play. They were -- actually, with their matching blue blazers and striped ties, they still are -- members of the Cannon Street All Stars.
Gingrich a one-man wrecking crew on constitution
When discussing his amazingness, Newt Gingrich sometimes exaggerates somewhat, as when discussing Bosnia and Washington, D.C., street violence, he said, "People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz." (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jan. 16, 1994). What primarily stands between us and misrule, however, is the Constitution, buttressed by an independent judiciary.
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