Columnist.
Sometimes the news is that something was not newsworthy. The United Nation's Rio+20 conference -- 50,000 participants from 188 nations -- occurred in June, without consequences. A generation has passed since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, which begat other conferences and protocols (e.g., Kyoto). And, by now, apocalypse fatigue -- boredom from being repeatedly told the end is nigh.
When, in his speech accepting the 1964 Republican presidential nomination, Barry Goldwater said "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" and "moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue," a media wit at the convention supposedly exclaimed, "Good God, Goldwater is going to run as Goldwater." When Mitt Romney decided to run with Paul Ryan, many conservatives may have thought, "Thank God, Romney is not going to run as Romney." Not, that is, as the Romney who 12 months ago, warily eyeing Iowa, refused to say a discouraging word about the ethanol debacle. Rather, he is going to run as the Romney who, less than two weeks before announcing Ryan, told the states -- Iowa prominent among them -- that he opposes extending the wind energy production tax credit, which expires soon.
Barack Obama claims only that his legislative and foreign policy achievements in his first two years matched those of "any president -- with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR and Lincoln" in "modern history." Some Obama enthusiasts are less restrained. They suggest that among presidents, he ranks as the most learned since John Quincy Adams, the most profound since James Madison and the most visionary since Thomas Jefferson. And he is, of course, the most rhetorically gifted politician since Pericles.
PALO ALTO, Calif. -- State Sen. Joe Simitian's district office near Stanford's campus is nestled among shops sporting excruciatingly cute names ("A Street Bike Named Desire," "Mom's the Word" maternity wear) intended to make the progressive gentry comfortable with upscale consumption by presenting it as whimsical. This community surely has its share of advanced thinkers who believe trains are wonderful because they are not cars (rampant individualism; people going wherever and whenever they want, unsupervised).
The opening of the NFL training camps coincided with the closing of the investigation into the April suicide by gunshot of Ray Easterling, 62, an eight-season NFL safety in the 1970s. The autopsy found moderately severe chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), progressive damage to the brain associated with repeated blows to the head. CTE was identified as a major cause of Easterling's depression and dementia. In February 2011, Dave Duerson, 50, an 11-year NFL safety, committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest to spare his brain tissue for research, which has found evidence of CTE. Brain tissue of 20-season linebacker Junior Seau, who was 43 when he killed himself the same way in May, is being studied. The NFL launched a mental health hotline developed and operated with the assistance of specialists in suicide prevention.
WASHINGTON -- Ted Cruz's victory in Tuesday's Texas Republican runoff for the U.S. Senate nomination is the most impressive triumph yet for the still-strengthening tea party impulse. And Cruz's victory coincides with something conservatives should celebrate, the centennial of the 20th century's most important intra-party struggle.
SAN FRANCISCO -- The huge humpback whale whose friendliness precipitated a surreal seven-year -- so far -- federal hunt for criminality surely did not feel put upon. Nevertheless, our unhinged government, with an obsession like that of Melville's Ishmael, has crippled Nancy Black's scientific career, cost her more than $100,000 in legal fees -- so far -- and might sentence her to 20 years in prison. This Kafkaesque burlesque of law enforcement began when someone whistled. Black, 50, a marine biologist who also captains a whale watching ship, was with some watchers in Monterey Bay in 2005 when a member of her crew whistled at the humpback that had approached her boat, hoping to entice the whale to linger. Back on land, another of her employees called the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to ask if the whistling constituted "harassment" of a marine mammal, which is an "environmental crime." NOAA requested a video of the episode, which Black sent after editing it slightly to highlight the whistling. NOAA found no harassment -- but got her indicted for editing the tape, calling this a "material false statement" to federal investigators, which is a felony under the 1863 False Claims Act intended to punish suppliers defrauding the government during the Civil War.
HOUSTON -- The average high temperature in Texas on July 31 is 94 degrees, which might matter in the selection of this state's next U.S. senator. Or perhaps the crucial fact will be a residue of Reconstruction. With Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison having decided not to seek a fourth full term, a May 29 primary winnowed a field of nine competitors for the Republican nomination -- and, effectively, for the seat from this crimson state -- to two men who are very near to each other in all their convictions and theories of life. David Dewhurst, 66, got rich in the oil and gas business, which is neither a nest of liberals nor resented by Texans, and for nine years he has been lieutenant governor, which in Texas is an approximation of Caesar. He says that during Reconstruction the federal government imposed carpetbagger governors, so in 1876 Texans wrote a constitution that made their governor the nation's weakest and made a muscular lieutenant governor. He appoints all chairmen and members of the state Senate committees, who serve at his pleasure; he schedules all legislation; no senator can speak without his recognition.
The federal government is a bull that has found yet another china shop, this time in Arizona. It seems determined to inflict, for angelic motives and progressive goals, economic damage on this state. And economic and social damage on Native Americans, who over the years have experienced quite enough of that at Washington's hands.
CHICAGO -- The title of the nation's largest labor union -- the National Education Association -- seems calculated to blur the fact that it is a teachers union. In this blunt city, however, the teachers union candidly calls itself the Chicago Teachers Union. Its office is in the Merchandise Mart, a gigantic architectural Stonehenge, which resembles a fortress located on the Chicago River, which resembles a moat. Which is appropriate. Unions are besieged, especially public-sector unions, particularly teachers unions, and nowhere more than here. Teachers unions have been bombarded with bad publicity, much of it earned, including the movie "Waiting for 'Superman,'" and have courted trouble by cashing in on sentimentality, cloaking every acquisitive demand in gauzy rhetoric about how everything is "for the children." Still, have sympathy for Karen Lewis, 58, a Dartmouth graduate who is a daughter of two African-American teachers. She taught chemistry for 22 years until becoming president of the 26,502-member CTU. Her job is to make life better for her members, not to make life easier for Mayor Rahm Emanuel, with his roughneck's reputation and stevedore's profanity, whose ideas are as admirable as his manners are deplorable.
Conservatives won a substantial victory on Thursday. The physics of American politics -- actions provoking reactions -- continues to move the crucial debate, about the nature of the American regime, toward conservatism. Chief Justice John Roberts has served this cause.
WASHINGTON -- In the 1790s, a Tennessee man convicted of horse theft got off easy. Instead of being hanged, as horse thieves often were, he was sentenced to "stand in the pillory one hour, receive thirty-nine lashes upon his bareback well laid on, have his ears nailed to the pillory and cut off, and that he should be branded upon one cheek with the letter H and on the other with the letter T, in a plain and visible manner." Tennessee could not do that today because of what the Supreme Court has called "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society." The Eighth Amendment, ratified in 1791, forbids "cruel and unusual punishments." Originalism holds that the Constitution's language should be construed to mean what the words meant at the time to those who wrote and ratified the Constitution. On Monday, a Supreme Court ruling about punishment vexed the four justices (John Roberts, Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito) most sympathetic to originalism, who dissented. The majority held that sentencing laws that mandate life imprisonment without possibility of parole for juvenile homicide offenders violate the Eighth Amendment.
WASHINGTON -- There they go again. Like those who say climate change is an emergency too obvious and urgent to allow for debate, some proponents of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, aka the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), say arguments against it are nonexistent. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says any such arguments "no longer exist and truly cannot even be taken with a straight face." Favoring condescension over persuasion, she ridicules people who she says think that because the treaty was negotiated under U.N. auspices, "the black helicopters are on their way." Clinton's insufferable tone is not a reason for the necessary 34 senators to reject ratification. It is, however, a reason for enjoying their doing so. LOST, approval of which is supposedly somehow suddenly imperative, emerged from the mists of U.N. deliberations that began in the 1950s. The result, three generations later, is pernicious when it is not superfluous.
COLUMBIA, Md. -- Three hours before showtime, Brian Wilson says: "There is no Rhonda." Sitting backstage, gathering strength for the evening's 48-song, 150-minute concert, Wilson was not asked about her, he just volunteered this fact. The other members of the Beach Boys seem mildly surprised to learn that the 1965 song "Help Me, Rhonda" was about no one in particular. Not that it matters; the sound is everything. Attention must be paid to baby boomer music-cued nostalgia, and no one pays it better than the Beach Boys. They are currently on a 50th-anniversary tour that has more than 60 concerts scheduled and others still being booked. Their new album, "That's Why God Made the Radio," debuted at No. 3 in Billboard's listing, and with this the Beach Boys topped the Beatles for most weeks on Billboard’s top-10 album chart. Their band began in 1961 in Hawthorne, in Los Angeles County, when the parents of Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson went away for a weekend, leaving the boys with meal money they used to rent instruments and record a song called "Surfin'." They rode a wave of fascination with California to the top of pop music.
Because judicial decisions have propelled American history, and because a long-standing judicial mistake needs to be rectified, the most compelling of the many reasons for electing Mitt Romney is that presidential elections shape two of the federal government's three branches. Conservatives, however, cannot coherently make the case for Romney as a shaper of the judicial branch until they wean themselves, and perhaps him, from excessive respect for judicial "restraint" and condemnation of "activism."
WASHINGTON -- Montgomery County, Md., on the District of Columbia's northern border, is a dormitory for the nation's government, where federal workers' sleep is disturbed only by dreams of new ways to improve us. The county's population of almost 1 million includes many political staffers and consultants, lawyers, lobbyists and others whose common profession is to cause political power to flow to Washington. Montgomery County also is -- this could be just a coincidence -- a laboratory of liberalism. Cross Western Avenue on Wisconsin Avenue, leaving Washington and entering Montgomery County, and you immediately pass Ralph Lauren, Cartier, Bulgari, Christian Dior, Gucci, Jimmy Choo, Tiffany and Saks Fifth Avenue. For those who toil in the ambit of the federal government, virtue may be its own reward, but Louis Vuitton luggage is not to be sneezed at. Washington and its environs are doing well by doing good for -- or at any rate to -- the rest of America. Four of America's five wealthiest counties, and nine of the richest 15, are in the D.C. area. Joel Kotkin, the demographer, notes that median household income in the nine is more than $100,000, twice the national average. Washington, Kotkin notes, is not a center of real commerce, "where people make things or risk their livelihoods on ideas," but it thrives on rent-seeking transactions between economic factions and "the collusional capitalist state." This area is notable not only for its opulence but also -- this could be just a coincidence -- for industrious regulating to bring everyone into compliance with the right rules.
Many parents and the children they send to college are paying rapidly rising prices for something of declining quality. This is because "quality" is not synonymous with "value." Glenn Harlan Reynolds, University of Tennessee law professor, believes college has become, for many, merely a "status marker" signaling membership in the educated caste, and a place to meet spouses of similar status -- "associative mating." Since 1961, the time students spend reading, writing and otherwise studying has fallen from 24 hours a week to about 15 -- enough for a degree often desired only as an expensive signifier of rudimentary qualities (e.g., the ability to follow instructions). Employers value this signifier as an alternative to aptitude tests when evaluating potential employees because such tests can provoke lawsuits by having a "disparate impact" on this or that racial or ethnic group.
WASHINGTON -- Having cleared its throat with the Preamble, the Constitution buckles down to business with those words, which Republican Rep. Geoff Davis of Kentucky takes seriously. He is retiring from Congress, leaving behind excellent legislation that could claw back from the executive branch responsibilities the Founders intended for the government's first branch. His Regulations From the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act (REINS) would redress constitutional imbalance and buttress the rule of law by compelling Congress to take responsibility for the substance that executive rulemaking pours into the sometimes almost empty vessels that Congress calls "laws."
This state, the first to let government employees unionize, was an incubator of progressivism and gave birth (in 1932 in Madison, the precursor of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) to its emblematic institution, the government employees union -- government organized as a special interest to lobby itself to expand itself. But Wisconsin progressivism is in a dark Peter Pan phase; it is childish without being winsome.
WASHINGTON -- Montana uses an interesting argument to justify defiance of a Supreme Court decision: Because the state is particularly prone to political corruption, it should be trusted to constrict First Amendment protections of political speech. At issue is the court's 2010 Citizens United decision, which held, unremarkably, that Americans do not forfeit their First Amendment rights when they come together in corporate entities or labor unions to speak collectively. What do liberals consider the constitutional basis for saying otherwise?
