Andrew W. Mellon was one of the most successful financiers and businessmen in American history, served as Secretary of the Treasury for 11 years, and was a renowned philanthropist and creator of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.,…
When I heard that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan complained that the United States had messed things up in the Middle East, specifically echoing Middle Eastern leaders who told him that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a “real disaster”…
The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization By Bryan Ward-Perkins (Oxford University Press 239 pages, $16.95 paper) HAS POLITICAL CORRECTNESS seeped into scholarship regarding the fall of the Roman Empire? Bryan Ward-Perkins thinks it has, resulting in a…
SAN DIEGO — Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, speaking at San Diego State University on July 15, was in typical form, blaming the recent flare-up of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah on George Bush. “If you think what’s going…
When I am at my bank, filling out deposit slips in the management of my vast financial empire, I often think that by adding up my check totals by hand rather than using the calculator stationed by the deposit slips,…
SAN DIEGO — Illegal immigration is a problem that has been long ignored, causing pent-up frustration and emotion that, ironically, now threaten to derail the best realistic attempt to deal with the problem in decades. The House has its “enforcement…
SAN DIEGO — Far too often political debates degenerate into shouting matches in which attempts at rational understanding are swept away by rhetoric aimed at winning an argument rather than solving a problem. Unfortunately, the current debate on illegal immigration,…
I guess it is fair to say that I was a member of a counterculture when I was a teenager. My hero was Milton Friedman. I didn’t care for Punk Rock, never spiked my hair, and never pierced any part…
Over the past few months we’ve been treated to a number of government spectacles that have been very instructive about the nature of our elected representatives. Remember the NSA “domestic wiretapping” flap? Immediately upon the disclosure of this program, top…
When news of the National Security Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program targeting communications into and out of the United States by suspected al-Qaeda operatives (often mislabeled by Democrats and the press as a “domestic surveillance program”) was leaked, Democratic senator Chuck…