Category: Vital Signs

I was baking gingerbread men. It was my three-year-old’s idea, but his 13-year-old brother thought it would be a great thing to have on his own birthday the next day. I had to go out and buy the cookie-cutters because, at the age of 40 and as the mother of five sons, I am ashamed...

Frank Rich, op-ed columnist for the New York Times, is an annoying public presence. He is paid by the Newspaper of Record to work himself into a twice-weekly snit, his love of the suit-state making clear that he would do it all for free if he had to. Rich spends much of his professional time...

This year is the bicentennial of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, the foremost formulations of the compact theory of the United States Constitution. By 1798, the Republicans faced an 11-year losing streak. Federalism had reigned supreme in American politics from the end of the Revolution. Even before the institution of the government of...

When Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated 30 years ago with a cheap imported handgun, I was among the many Americans who believed that America’s “gun culture” was out of control. To me, it seemed obvious that all guns should be banned. At the least, a psychiatric test ought to be required for anybody who wanted...

One consequence of the Cold War has gone unnoticed. Before the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States had already ceased to exist. To fight the Cold War and in the name of national security, Washington had destroyed the political structure created by the U.S. Constitution—the well-defined union of states, which...

When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spoke at Harvard University two decades ago, one of the most unfathomable lines in his widely panned commencement address was his lament about “the forfeited right of people not to know.” This line was buried within his section charging the press with hastiness and superficiality—and the reporters in attendance rushed out to...

The left-wing press is in an awful state. Take the Nation (please): there’s little reason even to flip through it anymore. Oh, Alexander Cockburn is always a pleasure, and Stuart Klawans is a fine movie critic, and Christopher Hitchens is worth reading when he isn’t issuing pretentious dispatches from Europe. But good feature stories are...

The agony of Kosovo, Serbia’s ill-omened province, is recorded in the pages of history. Over the centuries, Kosovo was transformed from an ethnically homogeneous center of the Serbian medieval empire to an embattled region populated predominantly by ethnic Albanians demanding independence. To appreciate the position of the Serbs, imagine Hispanics controlling large areas of Texas...

In a radio address last year, President Clinton railed against congressional Republicans who were stalling on his nominees to the federal bench and had even threatened some sitting judges with impeachment. Their actions, he claimed, had endangered our tradition of judicial independence, and were an attack on the rule of law itself. The truth, of...

Fifty years have passed since the orgy of squealing and sanctimony, of perfidy and posturing, that begat the Hollywood blacklist. What a cast of characters paraded before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC): at this table, communist screenwriters making $2,000 a week scribbling claptrap and convincing themselves that it was revolution; and at that table,...

America’s economy is in great shape, government officials and the establishment media tell us. “Just look at the stock market,” they say, pointing at the record-breaking Raging Bull of Wall Street which set a new 12-month high of 9,377 in July. To such “bulls,” I say, “Bull!” Using today’s stock market as a barometer of...

Asia’s currencies will not be the only things plummeting. Look next for a decline in fertility rates (the number of births per woman) in the countries affected by Asia’s financial meltdown. Most people want children, but not more than can be raised well given family standards. Caution about childbearing is widespread when resources and opportunity...

A bit of autobiography. I was born and reared in Chicago. I am married to a man of achievement. I have watched my children leave the nest for college. I am highly opinionated and tend to believe that the world would be a better place if more of my fellow citizens agreed with me. I...

As President Clinton’s Dialogue on Race draws to a close, his panel will be offering a final report on how to remedy the evils of racism in America. Given the members of the hand-picked panel, it can be said with certainty that the racism to be remedied will be white racism and only white racism....

Two separate educational movements exist within the evangelical world, one old and one new, and they are clearly on a collision course. One thing does lead to another, and he who says A must say B. The widespread parental challenge to the tax-financed secularism of the government school system is by now common knowledge. By...

“More power to the faculty” is the current rallying cry of academic reformers. This idea pops up with a persistence that goes beyond ideological divides, appealing even to self-described academic traditionalists, who view professional administrators and boards of regents and trustees as philosophically out of tune. This criticism does seem valid if one looks at...

The longer one observes American public schools today, the more comprehensive and deep-rooted the globalist infection appears. The erstwhile revolutionary-leftist underground has become the establishment, in public education and every other institution. Educators now call themselves “change agents,” in Timothy Leary’s radical parlance. No lie is too big (“Diversity = Excellence”) and no trick too...

“In the end, she went quickly with very little discomfort, and surrounded by her loved ones.” Thus spoke Sir Paul McCartney, four days after the death of his wife, Linda, as rumors swirled that Mrs. McCartney, suffering from breast cancer, had ended her own life in an assisted suicide at age 56. The rumors were...

September 5, 1996, was not your typical workday at Molycorp’s Mountain Pass Mine in California. Molycorp employee Steve Johnson recalls how the intruders arrived: “They stopped at the gate, the guard, he wasn’t going to let them in, and the guys threatened to pull a gun on him, and he let them in.” Susan Messier,...

“Talk is cheap,” skeptics say. “Put your money where your mouth is.” “Money talks louder than words.” If these sayings still apply today, the wallets of the New World Order’s elite have spoken loudly and clearly: Russia is still the main bogey! Forget the cheap talk about a “Partnership for Peace.” Conniving “friendships” like that...

The global economy is out of control, and the global brains at the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank are not quite sure what to do about it. One prescription being bandied about is a global tax and all the monitoring, rules, and regulations that would go along...

Last December, the Weekly Standard, in an article by Matt Labash on a mass wedding conducted by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon at RFK Stadium on November 9, offered a feast of vilification and innuendo. Though the Washington Post and the New Republic both lampooned the same event, Labash’s polemic had a more vicious edge....

“The situation in Krasnoyarsk,” opined Communist Party (CPRF) boss Gennadi Zyuganov, “is reminiscent of Germany in the 1930’s.” Fascism, claimed the national Bolshevik boss, who should know a thing or two about the subject, is threatening Russia, incubating in a Siberian womb. He was not alone in making such dubious charges. In fact, in the...

As recently as the 1930’s, elderly black people in rural Maryland were still keeping headstrong children in line with the admonition that something called “pattiroll” would “get” them if they didn’t behave themselves. “Pattirolls,” or patrols, were gangs of Union Army soldiers who rode throughout the moonlit countryside enforcing curfews in occupied Maryland during the...

As long as the Soviet Union existed, voices were heard in the United States favoring peaceful co-existence with the socialist bloc, pushing for unilateral reduction in the country’s defense expenditures, and protesting the development of nuclear weapons. Some of those voices were well-meaning and naive, while others were serving a “higher” purpose. Seeking to replace...

A cynic once observed that in times of peace nations make war on themselves. Nowhere is this phenomenon more manifest than in the United States military, where the onslaught of political correctness has resulted in the lowest morale in memory. As American Armed Forces recently geared up for another engagement with Iraq, a troubling consensus...

Since the end of the Cold War American foreign policy has been incoherent. The Clinton administration has sent U.S. troops under U.N. authority to Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti; tried to broker peace talks in Northern Ireland and the Middle East; bombed Iraq; ordered American warships to the Taiwan Straits; and antagonized China and Russia—while simultaneously...

Amistad Produced by Steven Spielberg, Debbie Allen, and Colin Wilson Directed by Steven Spielberg Screenplay by David Franzoni Released by Dreamworks If Amistad is not yet a household word like E.T. or Jurassic Park, it may soon be with the power of Steven Spielberg behind it. Amistad is really two movies. One, about the 19th-century...

Titanic Produced by James Cameron and Jon Landau Directed by James Cameron Screenplay by James Cameron Released by Paramount and 20th Century Fox The umpteenth movie about the sinking of the great ship finally meets modern standards. James Cameron’s Academy Award-winning Titanic may be the “movie of the year,” but it is just as dishonest,...

We are, they say, entering an age of New Media, of talk radio, desktop publishing, and the World Wide Web. Not everyone in the old media is pleased. “The new media cater to and are built up by people who used to sit on bar stools and complain to each other,” declared NBC correspondent Gwen...

Dawn is 25. Marty is 27. Dawn works as a preschool teacher at a local private Christian school. Marty is a laborer at a retail distribution center. This Phoenix, Arizona, couple with a small child bring home about $30,000 per year. Yet they could not afford to buy Christmas presents this year. Now, not putting...

Three death threats, one left hook to the jaw, 40 rejections from 40 publishers in 40 months, and a sold-out first edition. Such was the response to my 1994 book, The Martin Luther King, Jr., Plagiarism Story. Chronicles and I first became interested in this story in mid-1990, when we heard 1) that a university...

Since the early 1960’s, compiling statistics on illegitimacy rates in the United States has been the official responsibility of the National Center for Health Statistics. However, the methodology employed by that federal agency to determine illegitimacy rates according to race has been inaccurate, classifying virtually all illegitimate Hispanic births as illegitimate “white” births. The result...

In the 1980’s, “Cajun” suddenly became “cool.” From rotund Chef Paul Prudhomme and high-rolling Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards to the music of Beausoleil and “blackened” redfish, anyone and anything associated with the remnants of French culture along the Gulf Coast was “in.” The nation eagerly embraced the battle-cry of the Cajun: “Let the good times...

Our little house of wood, a century old, nestles in the countryside in the county of Lotbinière, somewhat to the south of the city of Quebec. There I live with my husband and our five children. Last fall, as my husband and I piled cords of wood in the cellar of our little house, I...

The Second Amendment of the Constitution reads “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” This amendment meant very little to me growing up in a small town on Long Island. I thought the right to...

Ira C. Magaziner, the Rhode Island business consultant turned senior White House advisor to President Clinton, has been in the news again recently as the administration’s Internet man—defending Mr. Clinton’s view that the Web doesn’t need government policing. But Mr. Magaziner is best known as the aide in charge of the effort to create a...

Though more reminiscent of the Middle Ages than of recent times, the marriage ceremony of General P.C.T. Beauregard’s niece. Bertha Hall, the daughter of Angele Beauregard and Frederick Hall, took place in St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans only 100 years ago. According to a contemporary newspaper account, the “evening was a scene of much...

A questionnaire about future needs recently sent to a department of literature provoked at least one interesting reply: “We do not need a new post in Critical Theory. Theory is Old Hat.” An old hat, they say, is better than a bare head, and there can be no quarrel with the view that critical theory...

Among the many things I remember is how nice the “digs” were: we were on the second floor of a well-appointed office building in the South Park area of Charlotte—a tony, upscale area with a beautiful, expansive shopping center, numerous boutiques, top-flight restaurants, coffeehouses before coffeehouses became chic. You get the idea: the high rent...

Parallels between the British Empire and the New World Order are striking. The principal difference is that the British crown relied on brute force to achieve its objectives, while the NWO elite mostly use financial terrorism (except for occasional raw power demonstrations, such as in the Gulf War or in Bosnia). The Great Asian Banking...

The Keeper Produced by Michelle Silverstein Written and Directed by Joe Brewster Released by Kino International Joe Brewster’s film The Keeper came out while New York was reeling from the ease of Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant beaten and tortured by white cops in Brooklyn. Coincidentally, his movie is about wayward corrections officers—but the officers...

        “Uzivajte u ratu, uzivajte, O braco moja i vojnici, Jer mir ce’ biti gori . . . “ (“Enjoy war, enjoy, Oh my brothers and soldiers, because peace will be worse . . . “) —An old Serbian war song There is a belief among the peoples of the Balkans that...

In March 1997, Japanese-Peruvians who had been interned in the United States during World War II called upon President Clinton to issue an executive order awarding them financial compensation similar to that awarded in 1988 to Japanese-American former internees and relocatees under Public Law 100-383. Simultaneously, these Japanese-Peruvians lobbied members of Congress to enact legislation...

Unless you are just back from a long stay aboard Russia’s rapidly disintegrating Mir space station, you have probably heard about Ted Turner’s plans to give a billion dollars to the United Nations—as if the world needed absolute proof that Atlanta’s Captain Outrageous is more than a few cards short of a full deck. Over...

Seldom has a piece of foreign legislation elicited such an outcry among America’s bien pensants as did a recent Russian bill designed to regulate the activities of the many religious sects that have been setting up shop in Russia since the fall of communism. While the media chorus from New York and Washington was predictable...

What Hillary failed to do through healthcare, she is now attempting to do via childcare. And who dares to complain? Motherhood and baby’s welfare are all packaged with a media blitz and backed by a panoply of technical experts. The socialization of American society is accomplished via pabulum, and the mean-spirited had best keep quiet....

The Committee of 50 States, of which I am founder and president, is currently trying to find a state sponsor who would propose a new federal government and Constitution. Several state legislators in Idaho, Utah, and Arizona have expressed interest in our work, and they realize that this notion of forming a new government and...

Back when William Weld was still governor of Massachusetts—an office he quit to concentrate on his futile fight with Jesse Helms—his homosexual allies in the state were fond of calling him the nation’s “most pro-gay governor.” It’s easy to see why. Like Nixon going to China, Weld blazed a new path for the Grand Old...

On June 26, 1997, the Supreme Court dodged the constitutional questions surrounding the Line Item Veto Act. In Raines v. Byrd, the Court claimed it had no jurisdiction and dismissed the complaint. Federal courts only have jurisdiction over a dispute if it is a “case” or “controversy.” An element of the case or controversy requirement...