The New Republic

Heard the latest one about William Aramony, the ousted head of the United Way of America?... He took at the office. READ MORE >>

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"No, no, I do not know what is the number of the form. It is the one for a person who has a family to bring to the country. Do you have that one? The one for relatives?... No. I tell you. I do not know the number of the form." READ MORE >>

If Patrick Buchanan is anything, one might think, he's a good Catholic. Unlike other miscreant politicians (Mario Cuomo, for example), he's clearly true to the faith, loyal to the authority of the Church. Buchanan, like the Jesuit teachers of his youth, is often portrayed by the secular media as one of "the pope's Marines," fearlessly vying for the Church Militant against its foes. The man who has been quick to accuse other Catholics of straying from the faith is presented as beyond theological reproach. READ MORE >>

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At least credit Richard Darman for creative accounting in managing to squeeze the new White House budget into the spending categories and constraints of the 1990 budget agreement. But his efforts were doomed from the start; the agreement is obsolete, and everyone knows it. It was cobbled together before the cold war ended and before the recession started. The question is: What's to replace it? READ MORE >>

"I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good." --Adam Smith READ MORE >>

Sitting in a squatter house in the eastern German city of Halle, a house that smelled of sweat and stale beer, listening to a chubby ex-cook spouting neo-Nazi propaganda, leafing through a pamphlet honoring Rudolf Hess, and being bossed about by another blond boy in leather trousers and suspenders who called himself a Gauleiter--and all this on the anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938--I thought of Rimbaud's words in the African desert: “What am I doing here?” READ MORE >>

It was a black day in 1985 when Dan Rostenkowski was seduced by respectability. I didn't think so at the time. Like other advocates of tax reform, I was delighted when the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee abandoned a lifetime of Chicago machine politics and Washington interest group hackery. His famous "write Rosty" TV address, endorsing reform efforts, won him plaudits for his high-mindedness and bipartisanship from which he apparently has never recovered. READ MORE >>

Last July Clarence Thomas attended a private dinner in Washington with a handful of NAACP officials. This was shortly after he’d been nominated to the Supreme Court, and Thomas hoped to soften the antipathy of the black civil rights establishment toward him. Not a chance. He was soon trashed in public statements as a snake, a black copy of David Duke, “Bork in blackface,” and putty in the hands of his conservative white wife. READ MORE >>