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A new U.S. book claims Ernest Hemingway was a not-very-effective spy for the KGB during the 1940s. The Nobel prize-winning author is listed in "Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America," Yale University Press, co-written by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev from notes Vassiliev took in Moscow archives. A former KGB officer, Vassiliev was provided with access in the 1990s to Stalin-era files, The Guardian reported. In the book, Hemingway is referred to as a "dilettante spy." His file says he was recruited in 1941 before he went to China, the book claims. He...

WASHINGTON -- Because John McCain and other legislators worry they are easily corrupted, there are legal limits to the monetary contributions that anyone can make to political candidates. There are, however, no limits to the rhetorical contributions that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright can make to McCain's campaign. Because Wright is a gift determined to keep on giving, this question arises: Can people opposed to Barack Obama's candidacy justly make use of Wright's invariably interesting interventions in the campaign? The answer is: Certainly, because Wright's paranoias tell us something -- exactly what remains to be explored -- about his 20-year parishioner....

Confined to her bed in Atlanta by a broken ankle and arthritis, she was given a stack of blank paper by her husband, who said, "Write a book." Did she ever. The novel's first title became its last words, "Tomorrow is another day," and at first she named the protagonist Pansy. But Pansy became Scarlett, and the title of the book published 70 years ago this week became "Gone With the Wind." You might think that John Steinbeck, not Margaret Mitchell, was the emblematic novelist of the 1930s, and that the publishing event in American fiction in that difficult decade...

<p>A QUARTER OF a century has passed since 44 states said "No, thanks" to Jimmy Carter's offer to serve a second term, yet he still evidently thinks his loss is explained not by foreign policy debacles, such as invading Iran with eight helicopters, and a misery index — inflation plus unemployment — of 22, almost triple today's index.</p>

Ronald Reagan won because he won the only debate. He won it not because of Carter's debate performance ("I had a discussion with my daughter, Amy, the other day, before I came here, to ask her what the most important issue was. She said she thought nuclear weaponry ... "), but only because Reagan had Carter's briefing book. And Reagan had it because this columnist gave it to him.

Exasperated by pessimism about the "war on drugs," John Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, says: Washington is awash with lobbyists hired by businesses worried that government may, intentionally or inadvertently, make them unprofitable. So why assume that trade in illicit drugs is the one business that government, try as it might, cannot seriously injure? Here is why: When Pat Moynihan was an adviser to President Richard Nixon, he persuaded the French government to break the "French connection" by which heroin came to America. Moynihan explained his achievement to Labor Secretary George Shultz, who...

Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Fred. Brevity is not only the soul of wit and the essence of lingerie, it is, in moments like this, when you stand between an audience and strong drink, mandatory. But let me just say this. If I were empowered to design the perfect day, this would just about be it. It began in Mesa, Arizona today at HoHoKam Park with five beautiful words: “Cubs pitchers and catchers report.” And it concludes with the privilege of sharing the stage with Ward Connerly, Robert George and Heather Mac Donald. Ward mentioned his family in his remarks....

With Republicans inclined to change Senate rules to make filibusters of judicial nominees impossible, Democrats have recklessly given Republicans an additional incentive to do so. It is a redundant incentive, because Republicans think -- mistakenly -- that they have sufficient constitutional reasons for doing so. Today 60 Senate votes are required to end a filibuster. There are 55 Republican senators but not five Democrats who will join them. Republicans may seek a ruling from the chair -- Vice President Cheney presiding -- that filibustering judicial nominees is impermissible, a ruling that a simple majority of senators could enforce. Democrats say...

WASHINGTON..In contemporary American politics, as in earlier forms of vaudeville, it helps to have had an easy act to follow. Gerald Reynolds certainly did.The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights new chairman follows Mary Frances Berry, whose seedy career...

In 1992, before delivering the Supreme Court's ruling in an abortion case, Justice Anthony Kennedy stood with a journalist observing rival groups of demonstrators and mused: "Sometimes you don't know if you're Caesar about to cross the Rubicon or Captain Queeg cutting your own tow line." Or perhaps you are a would-be legislator, a dilettante sociologist and a free-lance moralist, disguised as a judge. Last Tuesday Kennedy played those three roles when, in yet another 5-4 decision, the court declared it unconstitutional to execute people who committed murder when they were under 18 years old. Such executions, it said, violate...

February 13, 2005 -- GOV. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Austria's gift to American politics and other entertainments, cannot be president because he is not a "natural born citizen," but that does not mean his political power is confined to California. This state is so big — the economy of Los Angeles County is almost as large as Russia's economy — that the continent can reverberate from what happens here, and Schwarzenegger expects much to happen in the next 10 months.

In communist East Berlin, one sign of the government's swollen self-regard was the cluttering of public spaces with propaganda banners by which the government praised itself for providing socialism... Democrats, too, have violated the spirit, and perhaps the letter, of various laws... It is impossible to draw, with statutory language, a bright line between legitimate informing and illegitimate propagandizing by government. What is indispensable is common sense, and that is atrophying as this lawyer-ridden nation sinks deeper into the delusion that sensible behavior can be comprehensively codified...

Washington’s historic Christmas storyBy GEORGE F. WILL LET’S GET this straight: The greatest Christmas in American history was not the result of the Germans being drunk or hung over. Gen. George Washington lost most of his battles — it has been said the Revolutionary War was won by brilliant retreating — so let’s not diminish any of his victories, and certainly not the one without which American independence probably would have been extinguished like a candle in a gale. Among the many things that “everyone knows” that just are not so is that the 2,400 men of the Continental Army...

Oh, well, if studies say so. The secret is out: Liberals dominate campuses. Coming soon: "Moon Implicated in Tides, Studies Find." One study of 1,000 professors finds that Democrats outnumber Republicans at least 7 to 1 in the humanities and social sciences. That imbalance, more than double what it was three decades ago, is intensifying because younger professors are more uniformly liberal than the older cohort that is retiring. Another study, of voter registration records, including those of professors in engineering and the hard sciences, found nine Democrats for every Republican at Berkeley and Stanford. Among younger professors, there were...

Republicans OutnumberedIn Academia, Studies Find-- The New York Times, Nov. 18Oh, well, if studies say so. The great secret is out: Liberals dominate campuses. Coming soon: "Moon Implicated in Tides, Studies Find."One study of 1,000 professors finds that Democrats outnumber Republicans at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. That imbalance, more than double what it was three decades ago, is intensifying because younger professors are more uniformly liberal than the older cohort that is retiring.Another study, of voter registration records, including those of professors in engineering and the hard sciences, found nine Democrats for every Republican...

<p>On Europe's western edge, in Ulster, democracy is producing unlovely results. On Europe's eastern edge, in Russia, the results are even more unsavory. Those whose mission is to finish regime change in Iraq by constructing democracy can sense how long their task may take by noting the difficulties in Europe, which is more politically mature than the Middle East.</p>

Don Cole, aka the Heart Guy, was ailing and wore a beeper. He was a candidate for a heart transplant and was not supposed to ever be more than a two-hour drive from his Nashville hospital, in case it received a heart that could be transplanted. He said that, if the hospital learned that he left the two-hour radius, he would be removed from the list of recipients. So why, weekend after weekend, was he 3 1/2 hours from Nashville, in Tuscaloosa, Ala.? "If I can't go to Alabama football games, what's the point in living?" Then there is the...

A small but significant, because articulate, sliver of the Democratic Party seems to relish interpreting the party's defeat as validation. This preening faction reasons as follows: the re-election of George W. Bush proves that 51 percent of the electorate are homophobic, gun-obsessed, economically suicidal, antiscience, theocratic dunces. Therefore to be rejected by them is to have one's intellectual and moral superiority affirmed.

"THEODORE! with all thy faults -- "-- The New York Sun's 1904endorsement of Teddy RooseveltThis column has expressed abundant skepticism about the grandiosity of George W. Bush's foreign policy. And about his passivity about spending (he has vetoed nothing), his enlargement of the welfare state (the prescription drug entitlement), his expansion of inappropriate federal responsibilities (concerning education from kindergarten through 12th-grade, through the No Child Left Behind Act) and his complicity in vandalizing the Constitution (he signed the McCain-Feingold bill, which rations political speech). Still, this column prefers Bush.

George F. Will: Liberalism uses judiciary as its legislature By GEORGE F. WILL .... Liberalism, having lost its ability to advance by persuasion, increasingly relies on litigation. In its flight from arenas of representation, liberalism has used the judiciary as its legislature. Hence the exultation of Ron Brown, then Democratic Party chairman, addressing an American Bar Association forum immediately after the 1992 election: “My friends, I’m here to tell you that the lawyers won.” The Democratic Party’s love — the word is too weak for the phenomenon— for lawyers is expressed in countless courtesies, from blocking tort reform to the...