Articles

Opinion: 1930s NRA incident a cautionary tale today

JERSEY CITY, N.J. — The crime scene at 138 Griffith St. has changed in 76 years. Today it is a barber shop. In 1934, it was a tailoring and cleaning establishment owned and run by Jacob Maged, 49.

Opinion: South Carolina has changed for the better

KIAWAH ISLAND, S.C. — The libretto of this operatic election season, understandably promoted by Democrats and unsurprisingly sung by many in the media, is that Republicans have sown the seeds of November disappointments by nominating candidates other than those the party’s supposedly wiser establishment prefers. This theory is inconvenienced by two facts: South Carolina’s Nikki Haley and Tim Scott.

Opinion: Colorado Senate race includes tea party flavor

DENVER — Put away the pitchfork metaphors that are prevalent in this season of populist ferment: Colorado’s Senate contest is a duel of distinguished diplomas. Tea partiers toiled mightily to nominate Ken Buck as the Republican candidate to run against Sen. Michael Bennet, who is a direct descendant of a Mayflower passenger, grandson of an economic adviser to Franklin Roosevelt and son of an official in the Carter and Clinton administrations. He attended tony St. Alban’s school in Washington, D.C., and Yale Law School. Buck is a Princetonian.

Opinion: Israelis have never known peace, don’t need lectures

JERUSALEM — In the intifada that began in 2000, Palestinian terrorism killed more than 1,000 Israelis. As a portion of U.S. population, that would be 42,000, approaching the toll of America’s eight years in Vietnam. During the onslaught, which began 10 Septembers ago, Israeli parents sending two children to a school would put them on separate buses to decrease the chance that neither would return for dinner. Surely most Americans can imagine, even if their tone-deaf leaders can not, how grating it is when those leaders lecture Israel on the need to take “risks for peace.”

Opinion: Israeli leader honors Churchill

JERUSALEM — Two photographs adorn the office of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Together they illuminate a portentous fact: No two leaders of democracies are less alike — in life experiences, temperaments and political philosophies — than Netanyahu, the former commando and fierce nationalist, and Barack Obama, the former professor and post-nationalist.

Opinion: GOP’s best option may be resident of Puerto Rico

WASHINGTON — A Republican governor — a very Republican governor — has an idea for solving one of his party’s conundrums. The party should listen to Luis Fortuno, the Reaganite who resides in Puerto Rico’s executive mansion.
Conservatives need a strategy for addressing the immigration issue without alienating America’s largest and most rapidly growing minority. Conservatives believe the southern border must be secured before there can be “comprehensive” immigration reform that resolves the status of the 11 million illegal immigrants. But this policy risks making Republicans seem hostile to Hispanics.

Opinion: Candidate nobody is not to be underestimated

LAS VEGAS — Sometimes provocative people become that way because they were provoked. Sharron Angle, 60, could be enjoying the 10 grandchildren she loves even more than her .44 magnum. Instead, she is the Republican nominee against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s quest for a fifth term as senator. Her campaign began, in a sense, three decades ago, when a judge annoyed her.

Opinion: Some better questions for the Kagan hearings

Pursuant to Elena Kagan’s expressed enthusiasm for confirmation hearings that feature intellectual snap, crackle and pop, here are some questions the Senate Judiciary Committee could have elated her by asking:
• Regarding campaign finance “reforms”: If allowing the political class to write laws regulating the quantity, content and timing of speech about the political class is the solution, what is the problem?

Opinion: Afghanistan policy is consumed by caution

WASHINGTON — Torrents of uninteresting mail inundate members of Congress, but occasionally there are riveting communications, such as a recent e-mail from a noncommissioned officer (NCO) serving in Afghanistan. He explains why the rules of engagement for U.S. troops are “too prohibitive for coalition forces to achieve sustained tactical successes.”

Opinion: A war in fast forward

WASHINGTON — Evidently Hamid Karzai did not get the memo on terminology. U.S. military commanders have stopped using the word “operation” to describe the drive, now delayed, against the Taliban in Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city. This word connotes danger and stirs dread among the population, whose allegiance is the prize for which counterinsurgency is waged. But Afghanistan’s president, speaking there last Sunday, anticipated a “purification operation,” saying “this operation requires sacrifice.”

Columns

OPINION: What it was, was football

WASHINGTON -- A few millennia from now, when archaeologists from an ascendant Brazil or Turkey or wherever sift the shards of American civilization and find the ruins of the Big House in Ann Arbor, Mich., they will wonder why a 109,901-seat entertainment venue was attached to an institution of higher education.

• George Will

OPINION: Drowning in a river of words

WASHINGTON — You step onto an airport’s moving walkway, a flat metal conveyor belt that conveys travelers down an airport concourse, sparing them the indignity of burning a few calories by walking a bit. And soon a recorded voice says: “The moving sidewalk is coming to an end. Please look down.”

• George Will

OPINION:Progressives fight initiative process they helped to create

The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government ... — U.S. Constitution

• George Will

OPINION: A frank ‘cure’ for fed

WASHINGTON — “If two people always agree,” says Ben Bernanke, “one of them is redundant.” So, imagine what the Federal Reserve chairman thinks of Rep. Barney Frank’s legislation designed to dampen dissent within the Fed.

• George Will

OPINION: Post-9/11 America a demoralized nation

WASHINGTON — On Dec. 8, 1951, the day after the 10th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, The New York Times’ front page made a one-paragraph mention of commemorations the day before, when the paper’s page had not mentioned the anniversary. The Dec. 8 Washington Post’s front page noted no commemorations the previous day.

• George Will

OPINION: Dem governor cooks up purple brew in Colorado

DENVER — “Beer,” said Benjamin Franklin, who knew a thing or two about pleasure, “is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” If so, perhaps He wanted John Hickenlooper to be Colorado’s governor.

• George Will

OPINION: If everything isn’t free, nothing is safe

MADISON, Wis. — The residues of liberalism’s Wisconsin Woodstock — 1960s radicalism redux: operatic lamentations, theatrical demonstrations and electoral futilities — are words of plaintive defiance painted on sidewalks around the state capitol.

• George Will

OPINION: Not so ‘special’ anymore for US, Great Britian

LONDON — During the Second World War, a future prime minister, Harold Macmillan, said America is “the new Roman empire and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them how to make it go.” How goes the tutoring of Rome by Athens?

OPINION: ‘Morbidly obese’ British government goes on diet

LONDON — The chancellor of the exchequer has a dry, sly sense of humor. George Osborne, 40, says Britain escaped the sort of housing bubble and crash that staggered America because, whereas America recklessly expanded its housing stock, “We were saved by the fact that you can’t build anything in this country.”

OPINION: Alibi Obama gives ammo to Republicans

WASHINGTON — The Republicans’ 2012 presidential nominee will run against Alibi Ike.