President Bush’s final press conference, Jan. 12, 2009: Q. Mr. President, in recent days, there’s been a fair amount of discussion in legal circles about whether you might give preemptive pardons, pardons in advance, to officials of your administration who engaged in anything from harsh interrogation tactics to perhaps dismissing U.S. attorneys. I’d like to [...]

By all accounts Bernard Madoff got investors to part with their money by not actually investing the proceeds and earning returns but simply by paying off victims with money from his other marks. If that sounds familiar, it should; it’s the way lotteries work. When all is said and done, the lottery is essentially a [...]

Everyone knows about “activist judges,” the ones who, we’re told, ignore the law as it is plainly written and substitute their political agendas for it. Less well known are activist senators, those who thumb their noses at majority rule and make it tough to get anything of substance approved by Congress. The United States could [...]

Reasonably alert readers of the Des Moines Register may have noticed something missing from their Sunday paper – book reviews. The six-page Opinion section shrank to four pages, and out went the full page devoted to books. So what else is new? Newspapers all across the country have been axing book reviews, either cutting space [...]

Nearly three months after John McCain named Sarah Palin as his running-mate, what possessed McCain to select her is still a mystery. The McCain-Palin candidacy crashed and burned, but the usual post-mortems have shed no definitive light on McCain’s thinking. Republicans had a legitimate issue with which to pummel the Democratic ticket:Barack Obama’s thin resume [...]

Before the election, a young acquaintance, anticipating a Barack Obama victory, commented how meaningful it must be for someone of my generation to have witnessed both segregation in this country and the election of a black president. His point hit home with special force because my personal experience with segregation was in the armed forces, [...]

Satire–A literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision or wit. I quit writing satire years ago when too many angry readers took what I wrote literally. I blamed their lack of discrimination on an increasingly dippy world in which reality too often seemed bizarre. I made the break with [...]

John McCain is taking his lumps for the decision to make Sarah Palin his running mate. The Washington Post said its endorsement of Barack Obama was simplified by McCain’s “irresponsible selection” of Palin “who is not ready to be president.” The New York Times declared that McCain’s choice of someone “so evidently unfit for the [...]

Remember President Gerald Ford’s 1974 pardon of Richard Nixon? The disgraced Nixon was pardoned although he faced no charges at the time. Ford said he acted because “serious allegations and accusations hang like a sword over our former president’s head.” As George W. Bush prepares to exit the White House, are more preemptive pardons on [...]

The Washington Post’s Oct. 17 editorial endorsing Barack Obama was no shocker. Surprising, though, was its barely-breathing treatment of the Supreme Court as an issue. Justice John Paul Stevens is 88 and Justice Ruth B. Ginsberg 75, so who gets to name successors in the next four years is critical. The Post’s lengthy overall appraisal [...]