PHOENIX -- The federal government is a bull that has found yet another china shop, this time in Arizona. It seems determined to inflict, for angelic motives and progressive goals, economic damage on this state.
The Regulatory Heavy Hand
Our Evolving Social Thoughts
"Even if it could be demonstrated unequivocally that [public flogging and hand branding] were not cruel and unusual measures in 1791 ... I doubt whether any federal judge -- even among the many who consider themselves originalists -- would sustain them against an Eighth Amendment challenge."
Wisconsin's Temper Tantrum
I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up.
Nosir,
NotI,
Not me,
So there!
-- "Peter Pan" the musical, 1954
A Liberal Squeeze Play
WASHINGTON -- In one of his characteristic conniptions about people who frustrated him, Theodore Roosevelt, progressivism's first president, said of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, "I could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that." TR was as mistaken about Holmes' spine as are various progressives today about Chief Justice John Roberts'.
A Nightmare in Tewksbury
TEWKSBURY, Mass. -- Russ Caswell, 68, is bewildered: "What country are we in?" He and his wife Pat are ensnared in a Kafkaesque nightmare unfolding in Orwellian language.
The American Dream in an Automobile
"You have a Prius. ... You probably compost, sort all your recycling, and have a reusable shopping bag for your short drive to Whole Foods. You are the best! So, do we really need the Obama sticker?"
Taking a Scythe to the Bill of Rights
WASHINGTON -- Controversies can be wonderfully clarified when people follow the logic of illogical premises to perverse conclusions.
'Cruel and Unusual' -- A Test Case
WASHINGTON -- In the summer of 1787, just 94 years after the Salem witch trials, as paragons of the Enlightenment such as James Madison, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin deliberated in the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, a mob pelted and otherwise tormented to death a woman accused of being a witch.
Our Turbulent Skies
From his office window, Thomas W. Horton, in his fifth month as CEO of American Airlines, can see in the distance the Manhattan-size footprint of Dallas-Fort Worth airport, where American has 85 percent market share; it also has 68 percent in Miami, gateway to South America's booming market.
High-Flying Corporate Welfare
WASHINGTON -- Sallie James was born in Australia on July 4, 1976, which suggests that Providence planned what happened 30 years later: She moved to Washington.