Kerry shows he'll do anything to win
John Kerry recently stopped in Las Vegas to say: ''Rest assured, Nevada. If I'm president, Yucca Mountain will not be a depository.'' Back to mind comes Chic Hecht, a one-term Republican senator elected in 1982, who said he opposed using Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as a nuclear waste ''suppository.''
Thursday, June 3, 2004
Upstart airline shows direction of industry
PHOENIX -- Douglas Parker seems normal. But he runs an airline, America West, and is cheerful, so what does he not understand? Preternaturally optimistic, he thinks government policy will become more sensible, other events will cooperate and the airline industry, which has been in the red since flight began at Kitty Hawk, will make money.
Sunday, May 30, 2004
Bush may have to shed some of his optimism
''If Jefferson provided the essential poetry of American political discourse, Hamilton established the prose of American statecraft.'' -- Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton
Iraq war issue gives Nader renewed relevance
The Yankee Doodle Tap Room in Princeton displays old black-and-white photographs of some fresh-faced undergraduates who subsequently became exemplars of what President (of the university) Woodrow Wilson called ''Princeton in the nation's service.'' There are young future Cabinet members John Foster Dulles, Class of '08, James Forrestal, '15; James Baker, '52, and George Shultz, '42; future Senators John Danforth, '58, and Bill Bradley, '65; future Governors Pete du Pont, '56, and Adlai Stevenson, '22. And Donald Rumsfeld, '54, whose future is still unfolding, as is that of Ralph Nader, '55.
Thursday, May 20, 2004
Punctuation? It's the 'key' to clarity -- period.
The actress Margaret Anglin left this note in the dressing room of another actress: ''Margaret Anglin says Mrs. Fiske is the best actress in America.'' Mrs. Fiske added two commas and returned the note: ''Margaret Anglin, says Mrs. Fiske, is the best actress in America.''
Sunday, May 16, 2004
The lessons of Brown vs. Board of Ed
The Supreme Court's decision 50 years ago, although an immense blessing to the nation, also carries a melancholy lesson. It is that great events -- the school desegregation ruling was the largest judicial event since the Dred Scott case of 1857 -- have myriad reverberations, some beneficial, others not.
Hardening of America shapes the battle lines
Michael Barone, America's foremost political analyst, wonders why America produces so many incompetent 18-year-olds but remarkably competent 30-year-olds. The answer is in his new book, Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation's Future. It illuminates the two sensibilities that sustain today's party rivalry.
Wild about Harry
