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The nomination of Justice Janice Rogers Brown of the California Supreme Court to become a federal Court of Appeals judge has brought out vicious special interest groups with their long knives -- and a long record of smears and character-assassination, going back to the campaign of wholesale misrepresentations that defeated the nomination of Judge Robert Bork in 1987. Leading the charge against Justice Brown, as it did against Judge Bork 16 years ago, is the grossly misnamed organization "People for the American Way." This is a far-left group with only contempt for American traditions and culture. They want judges who...

In much of the liberal media, large-scale confrontations between police and people who are breaking the law are usually reported in one of two ways. Either the police used "excessive force" or they "let the situation get out of hand." Any force sufficient to prevent the situation from getting out of hand will be called "excessive." And if the police arrive in large enough numbers to squelch disorder without the need for force, then sending in so many cops will be called "over-reacting." After all, with so little resistance to the police, why were so many cops necessary? Such is...

Jewish World Review July 3, 2003 / 3 Tamuz, 5763 Thomas Sowell The Fourth of July http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Why do we celebrate the Fourth of July? After all, we are taught from kindergarten to the universities that all cultures are entitled to equal respect. Why then celebrate the creation of a nation that is no better than any other nation? Indeed, if you heard only the litany of sins from American history that our students get throughout their years in educational institutions, you might think that the United States was worse than a lot of other places. Most people, however,...

The twentieth anniversary of the death of Eric Hoffer, in May 1983, passed with very little notice of one of the most incisive thinkers of his time — a man whose writings continue to have great relevance to our times. SRC="http://www.jewishworldreview.com/images/donate2002.gif" hspace=12 vspace=12 align=right border=0> How many people today even know of this remarkable man with no formal schooling, who spent his life in manual labor — most of it as a longshoreman — and who wrote some of the most insightful commentary on our society and trends in the world? You need only read one of his classics like...

The term "useful idiots" has been attributed to Lenin, as a description of those mindless people in the Western democracies who would always find ways to excuse whatever the Soviet Union did. Columnist Mona Charen's new book "Useful Idiots," shows that such people are still with us. Long after the Soviet Union's horrors had become too widely known around the world for their sympathizers in the West to be able to get away with whitewashing the USSR, new Communist dictatorships arose to become the new objects of the affections of the Western intelligentsia and of like-minded people in the media...

Universal health care": Part III Those of us who are getting on in years can remember a time when most people had no health insurance, when we simply paid the doctors or the pharmacies and went on our way, without giving it a second thought. I have especially painful memories of having a hospital bill of $50 for the treatment of a baseball injury back in 1949. You have no idea how big $50 was for me at that time. It was the most money that I had ever paid for anything. But the bill got paid off, a few...

Those of us who are getting on in years can remember a time when most people had no health insurance, when we simply paid the doctors or the pharmacies and went on our way, without giving it a second thought. I have especially painful memories of having a hospital bill of $50 for the treatment of a baseball injury back in 1949.You have no idea how big $50 was for me at that time. It was the most money that I had ever paid for anything. But the bill got paid off, a few dollars at a time, over a...

Whenever I hear about how many Americans do not have health insurance, my usual response is to wish that I were one of them. That does not mean that I want to continue paying taxes and insurance premiums without getting the benefits. It means that I would rather pay doctors and pharmacies directly, without sending the money through bureaucratic channels in the government and the insurance companies, with all the restrictions and red tape that bureaucrats produce. Neither bureaucracies nor red tape is free. So we are talking about my having to pay more money for things I don't want,...

If there was one defining moment in the debates among an already crowded field of Democrats seeking their party's presidential nomination in 2004, it may well have been when Congressman Dennis Kucinich, pushing for government-provided health care, spoke with obvious disgust of the "profits" of the insurance companies and provoked a burst of spontaneous applause from like-minded members of the audience. Insurance companies, like every other kind of institution, have to earn money in order to keep functioning. So does every individual who was not born rich. But some people react to the word "profit" with automatic responses, like Pavlov's...

Those for whom indignation is a way of life often inform us of the fact that families or households in the top 10 or 20 percent in income make far more money than people in the bottom 10 or 20 percent in income. What they almost never inform us of are how much money they are talking about and how many people in these different brackets actually work. These omissions are neither incidental nor accidental. If the full facts were brought out, those facts would completely undermine the picture presented by the envy zealots or, as they prefer to be...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: Even though Saddam Hussein's regime has been toppled, there are still pockets of resistance -- not only in Iraq but in Paris, Berkeley, and in the editorial offices of the New York Times. These die-hards may hold out for years. The many richly deserved tributes to the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan focussed on his rise from a poor shoe-shine boy to the highest pinnacles of government. What also needs to be said is that America is a very fortunate country to be able to tap the brainpower, talents, and insights of people in all...

Princeton professor James M. McPherson's recent arguments for affirmative action, in a newsletter to members of the American Historical Association, makes many sweeping assertions and implicit assumptions that need not even be challenged to show the shakiness of his arguments. However, since we both belong to an organization devoted to history, let me make a few corrections of the history that Professor McPherson offers. First of all, he mentions that his academic career began in 1962 at Princeton, as a result of what he now calls "the infamous 'old boy network,' " which he characterizes as affirmative action for white...

Old-timers may remember a radio program about a crime-fighting hero called The Shadow, who had "the power to cloud men's minds, so that they cannot see him." Affirmative action has that same power today. Some of the murkiest thinking of our times has come from those defending group preferences and quotas. Professor James M. McPherson of Princeton University has launched a recent defense of affirmative action that is classic. For example, affirmative action is redefined to include such things as the fact that he and other white males of his generation "received a great deal of support from faculty and...

Thomas SowellThe recent deaths of journalists in Baghdad are more than just personal tragedies. Both the chances that these journalists have taken and the indignant reactions by the surviving journalists are a sad sign of a growing lack of realism in our times, especially among the intelligentsia in the media and in academia. More than a century after General Sherman said, "War is hell," it still seems to come as a great shock to some people when journalists get killed in the middle of a battle zone. The fact that they were warned beforehand by American authorities that no special...

Jewish World Review April 9, 2003 / 7 Nisan II 5763 Thomas Sowell Academia and the war http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Those of us whose pessimism about our country's social degeneration sometimes borders on despair have been given a reality check by the dedication, discipline, and decency of our troops in Iraq, as well as by the advanced technology of the military equipment they use. There is more than a little hope there. A recent episode at Amherst College provides even more reason to hope, for it shows a striking contrast between the behavior of college professors and their students in response...

Someone once said of Lillian Hellman that every word she uttered was a lie, including "and" and "the." Many defenders of affirmative action deserve a Lillian Hellman award. Not only is much of what they say contradicted by readily available facts, much of what they say publicly contradicts what they themselves say privately. Often their very reasons for favoring affirmative action are false. Supposedly, affirmative action in college admissions -- the issue currently before the U.S. Supreme Court -- is to help black students. But why are so many big businesses filing briefs with the Supreme Court in support of...

If you would like to be taller than you are, do you think that joining a basketball team would help? After all, statistics prove that members of basketball teams are taller than other people.If this seems like a strange way to reason, it is the same kind of reasoning used by those who argue that minority students need affirmative action to get into top-rated colleges and universities, because graduates of those institutions have more upscale careers.I am sure that my graduating class at Harvard has had a high income. After all, it contained a Rockefeller and the Aga Khan,...

Fraud is as pervasive in arguments for affirmative action for women as in arguments for affirmative action for blacks. In fact, a whole fraudulent history has been concocted to explain the changing economic position of women over the years. In the feminist movement's version of history, women's changing economic position is explained by women's being repressed by men until they began to be rescued in the 1960s by the women's movement, anti-discrimination policies, and affirmative action. Hard facts tell a very different story. Women had achieved a higher representation in higher education and in many professions in earlier decades of...

No issue has been more saturated with dishonesty than the issue of racial quotas and preferences, which is now being examined by the Supreme Court of the United States. Many defenders of affirmative action are not even honest enough to admit that they are talking about quotas and preferences, even though everyone knows that that is what affirmative action amounts to in practice.Despite all the gushing about the mystical benefits of "diversity" in higher education, a recent study by respected academic scholars found that "college diversity programs fail to raise standards" and that "a majority of faculty members and...