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Washington DC Commentary
Testing positive
- Each year the College Board sends out Advanced Placement test results in mid-July, ending an agony of waiting for both teachers and students. The results this year were more charged than ever since my nearly 150 test-takers were my very last AP students.
Quin Hillyer: Will Leahy ride to workers’ defense?
- T he Heritage Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union are not accustomed to being allies. Neither are former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese and former Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick. But they and an equally wide-ranging assortment of conservative and liberal lawyers and organizations have joined forces to overturn a Justice Department policy that commonly goes by the innocuous title of “the McNulty Memo.”
Timothy Carney: The Feds and Fannie: Making a beast that’s too big to fail
- Private profit and public risk” is how economists describe companies like Fannie Mae, where good times mean shareholder profits and executive bonuses upward of $50 million, but where bad times mean pain for taxpayers. It’s nice work if you can get it.
Chris Stirewalt: John McCain’s veep vibes
- W hile Barack Obama was trying to avoid rhetorical quagmires in the Middle East, John McCain’s flirtations with potential running mates was starting to look more like heavy petting.
Meghan Cox Gurdon: Who died and made him president?
- R e-entry after a longish vacation is always a disorienting time. You turn the key and have to push the door hard to get past the drifts of unopened mail. Most of the mail is bills, of course, and that brings on its own sense of delirium.
Should felons have the right to vote? - YES: Punishment shouldn’t be confused with basic rights
- T he election this November features an inspiring speaker and the first person of color to represent a major party on a presidential ticket, and a self-described “maverick” and former prisoner of war. Both Barack Obama and John McCain promise a different brand of politics, and all predictions are for record voter turnout. Yet more than 5 million Americans will be staying home from the polls, not because they are uninterested in the process, but because of state laws that restrict the voting rights of people with felony convictions.
Should felons have the right to vote? - NO: Felon disenfranchisement is actually a good idea
- I n election years like this, there is always a spike of interest in whether felons ought to be allowed to vote. Only two states, Maine and Vermont, allow felons still in prison to vote. Some states — and the District of Columbia — allow felons to vote once they have been released from prison, even if they are on probation or parole. Others, including Maryland, don’t allow voting until the sentence has been fully served, including probation and parole. Finally, some states like Virginia restore the right to vote only after full service of the sentence and only on a case-by-case basis. We favor this latter approach.
Mary Katharine Ham: The food police: No cheap trick
- Big government doesn't just put the squeeze on your wallet these days. If you live in South Los Angeles, it's pinching your love handles like a giant pair of bureaucratic calipers.
Jay Ambrose: In Iraq, Obama misses
- S eeing as how Barack Obama emphasized before he went to Iraq that his mind was made up on a virtually unconditional, year-and-four-months troop withdrawal, we can concur with critics that his purpose was not to be instructed by facts on the ground.
Irwin Stelzer: Is the worst behind us?
- T hat jump in share prices (even after Monday’s tiny dip): Start of a recovery from a market bottom, or a “dead cat bounce” typical of bear markets? That drop in oil prices: the end of successive increases, or a pause before we head to $200 oil?
Melanie Scarborough: Pelosi & Co. enabled Bush’s failures
- H ouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently pronounced George W. Bush a “total failure,” which is like Jesse Jackson criticizing someone for not controlling his tongue. While it is true that the majority of the American people have lost confidence in Bush (his approval rating has fallen to 29 percent), their opinion of Pelosi and her ilk is even worse. Congress now has the lowest approval rating ever recorded: nine percent.
George Liebmann: Here’s how to get real political change
- I n the presidential campaign, Democrat Barack Obama supports nourishing bureaucracies and union clients, while Republican John McCain denies needs and fails to provide efficient ways of satisfying them.
Dim Bulb of the Week
- DIM BULB:
Worst Ideas of the Week
- YouTube disses Tony Snow
Brightest Ideas of the Week
- 10 Brightest ideas of the Week
Brightest Light of the Week
- Bright Light for Sunday, July 20, 2008
War and peace and the Democrats: The triumph of politics over national interest
- There was a time when Democrats spoke plainly and consistently about matters of war and peace. During the first half of the Cold War, their position was clear -- they would “bear any burden” (John Kennedy’s words) to prosecute it. During the second half of the Cold War, chastened by Vietnam, their position was equally clear -- no more Vietnams.
New leadership for the GOP or a new party?
- Doomsayers always appear when one of the two major political parties suffers an epic electoral disaster. It happened to the Republicans after the Goldwater and Nixon debacles in 1964 and 1974, and to the Democrats following the Contract with America insurgency in 1994. Obviously, both parties came back strongly from those defeats.
Students grow like onions
- Less than two weeks ago, I was a full-time high school teacher, and had been for more than two decades. Although I always teach George Mason University classes during the summer as well as during the regular year, this summer seems different because these students are representative of my future. Now that I have a full-time college job, I will never again teach anyone younger than 19 years old.