Columnist.
WASHINGTON -- Sallie James was born in Australia on July 4, 1976, which suggests that Providence planned what happened 30 years later: She moved to Washington. She studies trade policy at the libertarian Cato Institute and her report "Time to X Out the Ex-Im Bank" illustrates how corporate welfare metastasizes as government tries to rectify the inevitable inequities of its constantly multiplying favoritisms. And while picking American winners, the Export-Import Bank creates American losers.
PHOENIX -- Sal DiCiccio says he’s sorry. It is, he says, no excuse that the complex labor contracts that he, as a member of the city council, voted to ratify for city employees were presented to the council less than a week before the vote. He says he should have seen that the contracts contain some indefensible, not to mention unconstitutional, provisions, such as those pertaining to "release time." Read on, and then find out if similar things are occurring in your community. They probably are.
Two policies of the Obama administration illustrate an axiom: As government expands, its lawfulness contracts. Consider the administration's desire to continue funding UNESCO and to develop a national curriculum for primary and secondary education.
WASHINGTON -- On that evening 48 years ago -- it was still summer, early in the presidential campaign -- Buckley, whose National Review magazine had given vital assistance to Barry Goldwater's improbable capture of the Republican nomination, addressed the national convention of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom. Buckley told his fervent acolytes that "when we permit ourselves to peek up over the euphoria" of Goldwater's nomination, we see that it occurred "before we had time properly to prepare the ground."
WASHINGTON -- The most accomplished social scientist of the last half-century would occasionally visit his friend and Harvard colleague Pat Moynihan at the White House when Moynihan was President Nixon's domestic policy adviser. Once Moynihan took him to Nixon and said: "Mr. President, James Q. Wilson is the smartest man in the United States. The president of the United States should pay attention to what he has to say." Moynihan was right on both counts.
The Post, dismayed about super PACs, reports "a rarefied group of millionaires and billionaires acting as kingmakers in the GOP contest, often helping to decide, with a simple transfer of money, which candidate might survive another day." Kingmakers? Where's the king? If kingmaking refers to, say, Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino owner, keeping Newt Gingrich's candidacy afloat with large infusions to the super PAC supporting Gingrich, then kingmaking isn't what it used to be. Notice that the fellow with the most muscular super PAC, Mitt Romney, has failed to vanquish a singularly weak set of rivals. Might the power of political dollars be finite, and utility of the last dollar be less than that of the first? Who knew?
In 1960, when Thomas Mallon was in the fourth grade, he wore his Nixon-Lodge button to school and warned classmates that John Kennedy was too inexperienced to be president. Mallon was crushed when Richard Nixon lost, but things worked out well. He is a novelist for whom Nixon eventually provided interesting characters. They're back.
WASHINGTON -- The Midwest begins on the western slopes of the Allegheny Mountains, around Rick Santorum's Pittsburgh, birthplace of the Ohio River, the original highway into the Midwest. Pittsburgh fueled the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, an early eruption of Western resentment of the overbearing East, which taxed the whiskey that Westerners made from their grain. Santorum the Midwesterner, after victories in Iowa, Minnesota and Missouri, is waging more of his political capital on the region.
WASHINGTON -- Two coming developments, one dismal and one excellent, pertain to America's memory of a great man. One of several oversight panels soon will consider a proposed memorial to Dwight Eisenhower. The proposal is an exhibitionistic triumph of theory over function -- more a monument to its creator Frank Gehry, practitioner of architectural flamboyance, than to the most underrated president. Fortunately, on Tuesday comes Jean Edward Smith's biography "Eisenhower in War and Peace," which demonstrates why the man's achievements merit a memorial better than the proposed one.
NEW YORK -- James and Jeanne Harmon reside in and supposedly own a five-story brownstone on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a building that has been in their family since 1949. But they have, so to speak, houseguests who have overstayed their welcome by, in cumulative years, more than a century. They are the tenants -- the same tenants -- who have been living in the three of the Harmons' six apartments that are rent controlled. The Harmons want the Supreme Court to rule that their home has been effectively, and unconstitutionally, taken from them by notably foolish laws that advance no legitimate state interest. The court should.
WASHINGTON -- All elected officials, and those who help finance elections in the expectation that certain promises will be kept -- and everyone who cares about the rule of law -- should hope the Supreme Court agrees to hear Don Siegelman's appeal of his conviction. Until the court clarifies what constitutes quid pro quo political corruption, Americans engage in politics at their peril because prosecutors have dangerous discretion to criminalize politics.
WASHINGTON -- Through 11 presidential elections, beginning with the Democrats' nomination of George McGovern in 1972, Republicans have enjoyed a presumption of superiority regarding national security. This year, however, events and their rhetoric are dissipating their advantage. Hours -- not months, not weeks, hours -- after the last U.S. troops left Iraq, vicious political factionalism and sectarian violence intensified. Many Republicans say Barack Obama's withdrawal -- accompanied by his administration's foolish praise of Iraq's "stability" -- has jeopardized what has been achieved there. But if it cannot survive a sunrise without fraying, how much of an achievement was it?
The worst day of Sugar Bear's 55 years was one of the days -- there have been many of them -- when he got out of prison. In the early 1990s, in a prison where persons whose sentences have ended and are being released, and who see those whose sentences are just beginning, he saw one of his sons coming in.
FOUNTAIN HILLS, Ariz. -- Dina Galassini does not seem to pose a threat to Arizona's civic integrity. But the government of this desert community believes you cannot be too careful. And state law empowers local governments to be vigilant against the lurking danger that political speech might occur before the speakers notify the government and comply with all the speech rules. Last October, Galassini became annoyed -- like many Ron Paul supporters, she is easily annoyed by government -- about the city's plan to augment its spending with a $29.6 million bond issue, to be voted on by mail by Nov. 8. On Oct. 6, she sent emails to 23 friends and acquaintances, urging them to write letters to newspapers and join her in two demonstrations against the bond measure. On Oct. 12, before she could organize the demonstrations, she received a stern letter from the town clerk: "I would strongly encourage you to cease any campaign-related activities until the requirements of the law have been met."
WASHINGTON -- War, said James Madison, is "the true nurse of executive aggrandizement." Randolph Bourne, the radical essayist killed by the influenza unleashed by World War I, warned, "War is the health of the state." Hence Barack Obama's State of the Union hymn: Onward civilian soldiers, marching as to war.
WASHINGTON -- An Illinois lawyer who had a way with words once characterized a particular argument as weaker than soup made from the shadow of a pigeon that died of starvation. The argument for Mitt Romney benefiting from South Carolina's voting is almost as weak as Lincoln's soup, but here it is: In the physics of politics, actions generate reactions. Granted, Newt Gingrich carried 43 of the state's 46 counties, and at least six of the seven congressional districts, now leads in delegates, and his colorful personal life did not prevent him from decisively beating Romney among the women of a culturally conservative state. But Sunday morning, from coast to coast, Republican candidates for Congress, governorships and other offices awakened to a sobering thought: They could be running next autumn with Gingrich -- whose current approval rating nationally in a Jan. 12-14 Fox News and Opinion Dynamics poll was 27 percent favorable, 56 percent unfavorable -- atop the ticket. They have nothing to fear so much as an absence of fear about this. With Gingrich defining the GOP brand, the Republicans' dream -- unified government: a trifecta of holding the House, winning the Senate and the White House -- might become three strikes and they are out.
WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court can pack large portents in small details. When in late March it considers the constitutionality of Obamacare, there will be five and a half hours of oral argument -- the most in almost half a century. This is because the individual mandate (Does Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce extend to punishing the inactivity of not buying insurance?) is just one of the law's constitutionally dubious features. An hour of argument will be devoted to whether Obamacare's enormous expansion of Medicaid is so coercive of states that it is incompatible with federalism -- the Constitution's architecture of dual sovereignty. The court's previous rulings about compulsion point toward disallowing this expansion.
LOS ANGELES -- Shawn Nee, 35, works in television but hopes to publish a book of photographs. Shane Quentin, 31, repairs bicycles but enjoys photographing industrial scenes at night. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department probably wishes both would find other hobbies. Herewith a story of today's inevitable friction between people exercising, and others protecting, freedom. When the Los Angeles Police Department developed a Suspicious Activity Report program, the federal government encouraged local law enforcement agencies to adopt its guidelines for gathering information "that could indicate activity or intentions related to" terrorism. From the fact that terrorists might take pictures of potential infrastructure targets ("pre-operational surveillance"), it is a short slide down a slippery slope to the judgment that photography is a potential indicator of terrorism, and hence photographers are suspect when taking pictures "with no apparent aesthetic value" (words from the suspicious activity guidelines).
CHARLESTON, S.C. -- Thanks to globalization, and to containerized shipping that began in 1956 and makes globalization work, commodities swiftly move vast distances around the planet. Wal-Mart alone imports 400,000 containers a year. Trade flows can, however, be deflected or even defeated by a distance of just five feet. Herewith a story of the high costs of a few feet and of too many years required for our nation's increasingly sluggish public processes to move. This city's port, the East Coast's fourth busiest (1.38 million shipping containers a year), is 45 feet deep. But in two years the Panama Canal will open a larger set of locks capable of handling ships 50 percent wider and with deeper drafts than today's "Panamax" ships -- the largest that can currently transit the canal.
CHARLESTON, S.C. -- They are nearing 70 now, the 11 men who were 12-year-old boys in 1955 and who are remembered for the baseball games they could not play. They were -- actually, with their matching blue blazers and striped ties, they still are -- members of the Cannon Street All Stars. The Cannon Street YMCA is near the Ashley River, which flows toward the harbor and Fort Sumter. The unpleasantness that started there in 1861 had left pertinent questions unsettled 94 years later when the All Stars, all African-Americans, decided to enter this city's Little League tournament. Charleston canceled the tournament because blacks and whites simply did not play together. Actually, they did, all the time, in informal settings, on vacant lots. "Kids do not mess up the world, adults do," says Leroy Major, 69, the All Stars' pitcher and a retired schoolteacher.
