Opinion-Columns.com

No Child Left Behind Flogs the Wrong Horse

A couple weeks back, the Washington Post ran one of those holier-than-thou editorials about the sad state of primary education.

The Sound of One Hand Clapping

It tires me to hear the constant complaint of Americans that ‘they’ (whoever's life we're changing at the moment) just don’t get it and are not sufficiently desirous of democracy.

Not Seeing Forests for Trees

The news from Pine Falls, Manitoba confirms that the world’s forests—those presumed saviors of the environment, are poised to bite us in the collective ankle.

On the Lam With Alberto Gonzales

It doesn’t matter what headline announces which disgrace in the abuses of power, life goes on, if not unchanged, then certainly unencumbered.

Recent example--Alberto Gonzales pushing forward his assistant Attorney General, the gutless Paul McNulty, to fire San Diego U.S. Attorney Carol Lam, all the time insisting he had clean hands in the putsch.

My First Car Was a Chrysler

I bought my first car in 1953—a six year-old Chrysler Windsor convertible and it was a beauty. Not red, which might have been my boyhood fancy, but deep, midnight blue and I drove it through my last two years of high-school and then to Michigan State.

Dave Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Wrongs

Other than all night bull-sessions, the most positive influence on academic progress is its controversy. Come to think of it, controversy was what those all-nighters were all about. University was, for many of us, a first chance to get away from Dad’s domination of dinner-table politics.

Stumbling Over Political Correctness

One can but wonder where it all comes from, this politically correct language that has so handcuffed our native language. Who was it, first defining blacks and various other non-white minorities as ‘people of color?’'

Who Feeds at This Trough?

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Peter Pace, who is a Marine, apparently isn’t up to date with whoever the general is that currently heads up the Army. Schoomaker? Casey? Where the hell is the speed-dial when you need it?

Arming an Unknown Future--Again

We have certainly done our share of arming countries only to  look down the barrel of those guns in future. The world is swimming in small arms. Kalishnikov automatic weapons are said to bring slightly less than the price of a chicken in many parts of the globe.

The New ‘Sport-Utility’ U.S. Army

The consequence of Donald Rumsfeld’s new, light on its feet and agile military, organized for the new challenges of the 21st century, was to fail us in the first land war test of that epoch—the exact opposite of what he envisioned. Thus, he has outsourced for us the traditional American  military he destroyed.