The evening of Jan. 16, 1920, hours before Prohibition descended on America, while the young assistant secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt, drank champagne in Washington with other members of Harvard's class of 1904, in Norfolk, Va., evangelist Billy Sunday preached to 10,000 celebrants: "The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory." Not exactly. Daniel…
July 9, 2010
Pursuant to Elena Kagan's expressed enthusiasm for confirmation hearings that feature intellectual snap, crackle and pop, here are some questions the Senate Judiciary Committee can elate her by asking: • Regarding campaign finance "reforms": If allowing the political class to write laws regulating the quantity, content and timing of speech about the political class is the…
June 28, 2010
Barack Obama, an unbeliever genuflecting before the altar of frugality, is asking Congress, as presidents do, to give him something like a line- item veto. Coming in today's context of his unrelenting agenda of expanding government, his proposal constitutes a counterfeit promise to get serious about controlling spending and the deficit. His purpose is to distract the public while…
May 31, 2010
Hearing about a shortage of farm laborers in California, the couple who would become Susumu Ito's parents moved from Hiroshima to become sharecroppers near Stockton. Thus began a saga that recently brought Ito, 91, to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where he and 119 former comrades in arms were honored, during the annual Days of Remembrance, as liberators of Nazi…
April 26, 2010
In 1994, when first running for Congress, J.D. Hayworth, who today is 51 and trying to wrest from John McCain, 73, the Arizona Republican Party's Senate nomination, went jogging in Washington wearing a T-shirt given to him by some Arizona loggers. Federal solicitude for the supposedly endangered spotted owl was bedeviling the timber industry, and Hayworth's shirt read: "If two teenagers…
March 31, 2010
Barack Obama hopes his famous health care victory will mark him as a transformative president. History, however, may judge it to have been his missed opportunity to be one. Health care will not be seriously revisited for at least a generation, so the system's costliest defect - untaxed employer-provided insurance, which entangles a high-inflation commodity, health care, with the…
March 23, 2010
The increasingly puerile spectacle of presidential State of the Union addresses is indicative of the state of the union, and is unnecessary: The Constitution requires only that the president "shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union." But a reaction may be brewing against these embarrassing events. Speaking in Alabama, Chief Justice John…
March 12, 2010
Memo to that Massachusetts school where children in physical education classes jump rope without using ropes: Get some ropes. And you - you are about 85 percent of all parents - who are constantly telling your children how intelligent they are: Do your children a favor and pipe down. These are nuggets from NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman.…
March 4, 2010
Barack Obama tiptoed Wednesday night along the seam that bifurcates the Democratic Party's brain. The seam separates that brain's John Quincy Adams lobe from its Sigmund Freud lobe. The dominant liberal lobe favors Adams's dictum that politicians should not be "palsied by the will of our constituents." It exhorts Democrats to smack Americans with what is good for them - health care…
January 29, 2010
You know the foreboding you feel while watching the steamier Greek tragedies, when dynasties are falling and sons are marrying their mothers and everyone is behaving badly and you are thinking: Really, things cannot continue like this. Washington feels that way on the rare and fleeting occasions when it really thinks about the nation's looming crisis of public finance. The crisis,…
January 16, 2010
Late in life, the mother of the Rev. Thomas Reese, S.J., began attending mass at a Southern California church, the congregation of which soon became Spanish-speaking. Services were conducted entirely in that language, which she could not understand, yet she happily continued attending. When her son asked why, she replied: "It is just like the Latin Mass, I don't understand a word…
December 27, 2009
A traveler asks a farmer how to get to a particular village. The farmer replies, "If I were you, I wouldn't start from here." Barack Obama, who asked to be president, nevertheless deserves sympathy for having to start where America is in Afghanistan. But after 11 months of graceless disparagements of the 43rd president, the 44th acts as though he is the first president whose predecessor…
December 3, 2009
In 2006, long before there was an Obama administration determined to impose a command-and-control federal health care system, a young orthopedic surgeon walked into the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix with an idea. The institute, America's most potent advocate of limited government, embraced Eric Novack's idea for protecting Arizonans from health care coercion. In 2008, Arizonans…
November 18, 2009
Florida, a geological afterthought, was the last portion of what are now the lower 48 states to emerge from the ocean, and it emerged halfheartedly: Its highest point is just 345 feet above sea level. But the fourth-most-populous state will loom over American politics next summer when Republicans select a Senate nominee. Their primary will test whether the party has become so risk-averse…
September 28, 2009
