With bigots harassing and violently attacking loyal Arab-Americans, it is a bit taboo in some circles to advocate racial or ethnic profiling of any kind, in any place, ever. "I’m against using race as a profiling component," even in screening would-be airline passengers, Attorney General John Ashcroft declared in a September 16 television interview.
Unimaginable as it may seem, it could be worse the next time. It could be nuclear or biological terror. While we mourn our loved ones, friends, neighbors, and countrymen, we must focus on the fact that these evil people will kill as many of us as they can-unless we stop them or kill them first.
The way it’s typically portrayed in the media, campaign finance reform is a push to stop big companies and other wealthy interests from buying influence by funneling huge "soft-money" contributions to federal candidates through their political parties. And, oh yes, there’s something in there about barring the use of corporate and union money to sway elections through "sham issue ads." And something about more disclosure of election-related spending.
If you want an inkling of what the McCain-Kennedy-Edwards "patients’ bill of rights" would do, consider the cases of some plaintiffs who have already found ways around the federal law shield-which the bill would dismantle-that now protects managed care plans from liability for most coverage decisions.
The left-liberal reflex reaction to Bush vs. Gore will not be challenged widely in the academy, though the decision is no more vulnerable to criticism than many of the cases that liberals cherish…. Surrounded by the like-minded, browsing comfortably in a herd, implicitly defining a narrow channel of left liberalism as the mainstream, many professors of constitutional law have become dogmatically complacent. Their conversational community is an echo chamber. They utter as truisms what a detached observer would recognize as prejudices.
It started right after the election. The indispensable Jesse Jackson muttered about "a pattern of irregularities and intimidation" in Florida in which "African-American voters were substantially targeted." By December 8, he was claiming that the Bush brothers had "stolen" the election by "schemes of disenfranchisement." Other "leaders" were not far behind. "Police checkpoints were set up in and around polling places to intimidate black men," imagined NAACP Chairman Kweisi Mfume, adding, "it was all part of some grand conspiracy" to keep blacks from the polls. "There was a systematic disenfranchisement of people of color and poor people," hallucinated Donna Brazile, Al Gore’s campaign manager. Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida and others put up police roadblocks to stop blacks from voting and "tampered with the results in Florida," oozed Democratic National Committee Chairman (and Clinton moneyman) Terry McAuliffe.
Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, some current professional golfers, the PGA, and Washington Post sportswriter Sally Jenkins say that walking a golf course, and thus conquering fatigue, is an essential part of PGA Tour competition. Disabled golfer Casey Martin, many other pros, and New York Times sportswriter Dave Anderson say otherwise.
Timothy McVeigh is the ideal poster boy for the death penalty, it is often said. He is an unmistakably guilty, unrepentant, rational, calculating, confessed mass murderer who can complain neither of racism (he’s white) nor of an unfair trial (he had good lawyers). If anyone ever deserved execution, he does. Even leading anti-death-penalty scholar Hugo Adam Bedau has said: "I’ll let the criminal justice system execute all the McVeighs they can capture, provided they’d sentence to prison all the people who are not like McVeigh."
The Supreme Court delivered a timely reminder of the social costs of our "war on drugs" with its May 14 decision rejecting a medical-necessity exception to the federal law criminalizing marijuana. Meanwhile, President Bush has moved toward abandoning his own best instincts and repeating his predecessors’ mistakes by endlessly escalating a $20 billion-a-year "war" that-as most Americans now understand-we have lost.
President Bush made a strategically smart move in the 15-year-old war of the judges by announcing on May 9 a slate of 11 nominees carefully balanced both to please conservative activists and to disarm mainstream Democrats whose help he will need to avoid partisan gridlock.
