Supporters of school vouchers are jumping for joy over a Wisconsin Supreme Court verdict, handed down this summer, that permits tax dollars to be used at religious schools. They hope the decision will be the basis of a vast expansion of vouchers (four other states are debating this same question), eventually leading to a federal...
“No government power can he abused long. Mankind will not bear it.” —Samuel Johnson The stereotype of the British journalist—and stereotypes are usually true—has an arrogant Brit arriving in Washington, rewriting the Washington Post and the New York Times for his dispatches, and spending the rest of his time in fancy...
In the year before the 1994 election, Ralph Reed announced that the Christian Coalition would broaden its focus. It would go beyond traditional social issues like abortion and school prayer and include economics. He made the case that the security of the American family, a central concern of any Christian political organization, is affected by...
The presidency must be destroyed. It is the primary evil we face, and the cause of nearly all our woes. It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us am harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on our rights, invades our communities, and spies on our bank...
On a recent Sunday, my church bulletin ran this edifying announcement: “Is cutting health, income assistance, nutrition and safety guarantees of millions of children and shredding the national safety net for children the kind of reform we support? Call President Clinton to let him know what you are for. ‘I was hungry, thirsty, homeless, sick...
Think of all the ink spilled on foreign policy during the 80’s. Yet for all of Clinton’s “accomplishments” on foreign policy (Middle East “peace,” NAFTA, Haiti), the subject did not even appear on the political radar screen during the 1994 elections. Frankly, voters do not care, and no fact of American political life brings a...
An election footnote. Ron and Nancy Reagan must have thought long and hard before campaigning against Oliver North. After all, the 11th commandment, “never criticize a fellow Republican,” may be the only one this show-biz duo hasn’t broken. But campaign they did, Ron by calling North a liar in the primary and Nancy by repeating...
The assault on Denny’s restaurants, a chain beloved by middle Americans and serving a million customers a day, helps us understand the real meaning of civil rights. Flagship, the chain’s parent company, was forced to settle a group of lawsuits—choreographed by the Justice Department, the NAACP, and Saperstein, Mayeda & Goldstein of Oakland, California—for $54...
Fleet Financial Group. New England’s largest bank-holding company, made big news when it fired 3,000 people and reduced its operating expenditures by $300 million. In addition, employees no longer get certain small perks, and even its best customers will pay fees that used to be waived for them. Analysts chalked it up to “corporate downsizing,”...
The vested interests are sick over it: Americans are beginning, just slightly, to take charge of their own health care. Such best-sellers as the Doctor’s Book of Home Remedies, the Physician’s Desk Reference, and the Merck Manual can keep you out of the doctor’s appropriately named waiting room, or at least help you understand what...
Bitter attacks, tenacious defenses, and great promotion—not to speak of the best TV in a generation—have made David Brock’s book on The Real Anita Hill a best-seller. As Brock admits, he proves neither Clarence Thomas’s innocence nor Anita Hill’s perfidy. But by scouring the transcript of the Senate hearings, he does show that Hill’s reputation...
Poor Denny’s. The South Carolina-based company, with 1,600 “always-open” family restaurants, has been blindsided. After years of serving cheap, decent meals to working Americans, it is under a politico-racial attack. The aggressors are the usual suspects: the central government, the national media, civil rights leaders, and a lawyer, Guy Saperstein, from Oakland, California. A New...
Jack Kemp was the great champion of freedom, according to official conservatives, whereas Dick Darman was the “Prince of Darkness.” In fact, whatever was wrong with Darman (President Bush’s budget director), Kemp was far worse. The Kemp-Darman battle came down to this: Kemp, a leftist Republican, constantly sought to expand the budget for his “war...
“These monstrous views, . . . these venemous teachings.” —Pope Leo XIII on socialism According to the jacket copy of Doing Well and Doing Good, Richard John Neuhaus is “one of the most prominent religious intellectuals” of our time (which helps explain our time). Neuhaus argues that while “Christianity has had nothing to say” to...
What do you get if you cross six Catholic bishops with five “Christian feminists”? The answer: economic ignorance and cultural lunacy. In what has to qualify as the meeting from Purgatory, the bishops and the feminists met for eight and a half years. As a committee of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB), they...
In May 1991, Risa Kugal, a fortyish New York woman who said she was unemployed and supported by her mother, appeared at court in Brooklyn. She was there, as James Grant tells us, to have $75,000 in credit card debt wiped off the books under Chapter Seven of the federal bankruptcy code. She owed $18,000...
Conquerors and intellectuals have dreamt of one big European government for centuries. The goal, as with all such millenarian fantasies, was to transform people’s national allegiances (viewed as reactionary and divisive) into larger loyalties to “Europe” (viewed as progressive and cosmopolitan). But they face the barrier even today that there are no “Europeans,” but only...
The Jury is the greatest achievement of the Anglo-Saxon legal system. No matter how much pressure from kings and lords, or in our ease politicians and the media, “twelve good men and true” can do the right thing, so to speak. And that is exactly what they did in the case of Rodney King, although...
Polly Williams, a black Democrat in Wisconsin, has been hailed by the Wall Street Journal, Reason, and other neoconservative organs for her school choice legislation. And the Wisconsin Supreme Court has approved it: underclass public school students can now get more welfare, in this case free tuition, at “nonsectarian” private schools. Neoconservative choicers hail the...
San Francisco’s municipal palace looks like the Wicked Witch of the West might live there, only there aren’t any flying monkeys. But several years ago, the monkeys set up housekeeping right out front. Supplied with food, clothing, tents, and other amenities by “community activists,” hundreds of wild-eyed tramps extorted money from passersby, drank cheap wine,...
Baseball is reportedly replete with racism. Apparently concentrating on the World Series-bound Atlanta Braves was not enough for the Atlanta Constitution, for it came to the conclusion late last summer that the “White Game Is Alienating Many Blacks.” The white game? The problem, said the newspaper, is that while black players are a satisfying 72...
When Clarence Thomas, our newest Supreme Court Justice, asked to be sworn in a week before the official ceremony, so he could go on the payroll early, it summed up the whole affair for me. Why are conservatives cheering his ascent to the judicial oligarchy? Yes, it’s fun to beat liberal senators, but not with...
“Progress needs the brakeman, but the brakeman should not spend all his time putting on the brakes.” —Elbert Hubbard The case for pessimism has been easy to make since Lincoln, and mandatory since Franklin Roosevelt. Today, not much is left of the Old Republic. As early as the 1930’s, Frank Chodorov could describe Washington, D.C.,...
Last December, almost five hundred black men, women, and children met on Jekyll Island, Georgia, for the first National Kwanzaa Celebration. No whites were allowed. Solemnized with what the Atlanta Constitution called “none of the usual holiday hype,” Kwanzaa is a week-long black religious festival founded in 1966 by Maulana Karenga, a professor of black...
Guns N Roses, the rock group, said they liked being white, the music business fell on them like a ton of discs. But racial music is not always insensitive. With what Washington Post music critic David Mills calls “unprecedented directness,” Black Muslim rappers are hitting the charts with records preaching their esoteric doctrines. These include...
Nelson Mandela idolized? Am I the only one who didn’t do a spastic street dance over his arrival in America? Tell him to take “power” in the wrong African language? California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown said being with Mandela was like “being in the presence of God.” A worshiper along the parade route in New...
50,000 Haitian immigrants gathered in the streets of New York the other month, angry at an FDA hint that they consider not giving blood. With the appalling AIDS rate among Haitians, and the ease with which some infected blood can pass the screening tests, it seemed an unobjectionable idea. But not in Manhattan, 1990. You...
Europeans accuse Americans of being childocentric, and I guess I’d have to plead guilty. My nine-year-old daughter is the apple of my eye. I want her to live in a society that is moral and free, that looks as much as possible like the old American Republic, unsubverted by the welfare-warfare state and its allied...
The Washington Post‘s liberal black columnist William Raspberry once said something reasonable on race (he defended the Boy Scouts against charges that their name was racist when applied to blacks). But the DC thought police would have “wilded” any white who made a similar comment. Whites aren’t even allowed to make political criticisms. Just recently,...
“Imperial Congress”—many in the conservative movement are denouncing it these days. From all over the right, we hear worries about slipping presidential prerogatives, or denunciations of Congress’s “meddling” in foreign policy. But I would argue that it is the Imperial Presidency that threatens our freedom. Too often. Congress simply lays down in front of the...