The constitutional argument advanced by Senate Republican supporters of the so-called "nuclear option" to end Democratic filibusters of President Bush’s judicial nominees — which is that any nominee who has majority support must be confirmed — is weak.
I was guardedly in favor of invading Iraq, because I believed our president’s confident claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and his collaboration with Al Qaeda.
The idea of putting a person to death for a murder committed at age 17 or younger strikes many of us as grotesque. So it may seem fitting that five Supreme Court justices held on March 1 that juvenile executions violate "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society" — the touchstone since 1958 for determining whether punishments are unconstitutionally "cruel and unusual."
I wish to propound a hypothesis that I can only begin to document here and will abandon should it be undermined by further study: A very large percentage of the professors and administrators at Harvard and most (if not all) other prestigious universities in this country are high-IQ ninnies, ideologues, cowards, and/or hypocrites.
"Not on my watch," wrote President Bush in early September 2001, in the margin of a report on President Clinton’s limp response to the 1994 genocide that took 800,000 lives in Rwanda.
When Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed last month to end (in California, at least) the incumbent-protection racket that is congressional and legislative redistricting, some Democrats accused him of a Texas-style power-grab for more Republican seats.
Like religious fundamentalists seeking to stamp out the teaching of evolution, feminists stomped Harvard University President Lawrence Summers for mentioning at a January 14 academic conference the entirely reasonable theory that innate male-female differences might possibly help explain why so many mathematics, engineering, and hard-science faculties remain so heavily male.
"Tort reform" is a dreary phrase for what could be a noble and exciting endeavor. It could be about fixing our system of justice so that more victims maimed by reckless conduct will get the compensation they need, when they need it; so that fewer good doctors and good companies will get soaked for misfortunes that weren’t their fault; so that the insurance premiums and prices we all pay will no longer be inflated by legal waste, fraud, and abuse.
The birthing process was protracted, ugly, and unprincipled. But the baby doesn’t look as bad as expected. And it may do OK unless it’s strangled in its crib by Congress or abused by the judiciary.
Many human-rights groups and other critics of Bush administration policy on squeezing information out of captured terrorism suspects would have you believe that even mildly coercive "stress" interrogation methods are clearly illegal and indistinguishable from torture.
