Opinion
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June 23-30, 2014
During a commencement address at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on May 28, President Obama continued to make his public case for a new role for American power abroad. At first blush, there is much for critics of recent U.S. military action to appreciate in the president’s remarks. His speech included a strong rejection of U.S. isolationism in a technologically and economically integrated world, but promoted new restraint in the use of America’s...
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June 23-30, 2014
In Washington, conventional wisdom is widely shared and often wrong. After the 2012 elections, the consensus was that immigration reform was one priority which could be accomplished on a bipartisan basis. In early June, the consensus is that this is almost impossible because of opposition in the Republican House. Let’s hope the conventional wisdom is wrong again.
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June 23-30, 2014
Soccer’s Shadow
Starting on June 12, some 600,000 fans will descend on Brazil to attend the 2014 FIFA World Cup. The quadrennial soccer championship will showcase the host country’s vibrant culture and revamped infrastructure as well as the unmatched skill of players from across the globe. But in the shadows of the newly constructed stadiums lurks the ugly underground world of human trafficking.
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June 23-30, 2014
The smoking gun had been fired on July 23, 1972, during an oval office conversation between President Richard M. Nixon and H. R. Haldeman, the flat-topped former Eagle Scout Mr. Nixon had chosen for White House chief of staff. The two men were discussing the bungled burglary of the Democratic National Committee two months earlier, a scandal that had come to be known as Watergate, after the name of the Washington, D.C., complex that housed the D.N.C....
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June 23-30, 2014
It feels useless, even shameful, to write one more column expressing outrage about yet another outburst of gun violence in the United States. What a parade of editorial futility follows each new gun aberration as we “opinion makers” fall into a predictable line to dispatch our familiar script of frustration and anguish. Years of such folly and we remain confronted by the same ghoulish, draining drama.
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June 9-16, 2014
For 25 years I have been a member of University Faculty for Life. A scholarly organization devoted to research on human life issues—with particular attention to abortion, infanticide and euthanasia—U.F.L. hosts an annual conference for the presentation of academic papers. The association is nonsectarian. We have our distinguished atheists: Nat Hentoff of The Village Voice and Doris Gordon of Libertarians for Life. But most of us are religious people,...
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June 9-16, 2014
Minorities in India
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June 9-16, 2014
By the late spring of 1932, Gov. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president. He already had the support of more than half the delegates to the upcoming Chicago convention, and his closest competitors were Al Smith and John Nance Garner, the also-ran and might-have-been, respectively, of 1928. With the unemployment rate stuck at 20 percent and the most unpopular incumbent president since, well, ever, F...
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June 9-16, 2014
My devout Cuban father was afraid that I would leave the faith after seeing the political divisions inside the Catholic Church. He is deceased now, but after 30 years of “church work” that has taken me to most dioceses in the United States and dozens more around the world, I could tell him a few stories. They add up to this: “Yes Dad, there is politics, but there is still more beauty than division, in the form of human beings serving one another according to...
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June 9-16, 2014
‘Greedy” and “expensive,” “money” and “profit”—these were the dominant answers when researchers hired by the public policy website The Morning Call asked average Americans what words come to mind when they thought about health insurance companies. While insurers are likely to treat this outcome as a public relations problem, more evidence that U.S. consumers simply have it right was included in a recent investigation of rising health care costs.