Magazine

The relationship ended. “He’s a wonderful guy, but when reality set in I realized that our goals and ambitions were too different. He had a lifestyle on completely the opposite end of the spectrum of anything I’ve ever had.” Did you read about the Pen-tagon civil servant who used her government credit card for $12,000-worth […]

NIMH is supposed to be the federal government’s pre-eminent medical research institution, investigating the cause and better treatment of serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, which are expensive, debilitating diseases. But the birds are partial evidence the Institute has run afoul of its basic mission. The 14 research awards to study pigeons, […]

Bruce Reed, the former Clinton adviser who’s now president of the Democratic Leadership Council, drew the ire of Major League Baseball by penning a recent op-ed in USA Today, which questioned the league’s purported financial difficulty and included this line: “If George W. Bush wants to become Teddy Roosevelt, baseball is the trust to start […]

Six days later, the Hatchers got their trucks down with the help of a local, his Hummer, and a winch, in a dangerous five-hour operation. Dozens of people watched. The brothers each escaped the debacle with $300 in fines from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The fragile alpine tundra they drove over, however, […]

Long inveighing against the “extremist” views of what he has dubbed the “we hate marriage” left, Horn spoke the language of the religious right and was a strident proponent of traditional marriage as the cornerstone of a moral society and the best strategy for lifting single mothers and their children out of poverty. For five […]

Among those most furious was President George W. Bush. “I was stunned and not happy,” the president told reporters at a press conference. “I could barely get my coffee down.” Within days, Bush’s anger cascaded down through the federal bureaucracy. Attorney General John Ashcroft blasted “professional incompetence” for the “disturbing failure.” INS commissioner James Ziglar […]

For critics across the political spectrum, Joe Klein’s character’s assessment of the fictional governor of a small Southern state (who, in the film version of Primary Colors, did go on to win the White House) summed up the Clinton presidency even before Monica Lewinsky. Liberals thought he was faithless for his stances on deficit reduction, […]

Bill Clinton’s scandals were supposed to end on Jan. 20. But days after leaving office, he was taking hits for his late-night pardon of financier fugitive Marc Rich, and absconding with White House furniture. Congress was threatening to pull the plug on his plans for a pricey New York office suite, and Wall Street firms […]

On a Friday afternoon late last year, press secretaries from every recent administration gathered in the Ward Room of the White House at the invitation of Ari Fleischer, press secretary to President Bush. There was no agenda. It was just one of those unexpectedly nice things that seemed to transpire during the brief period after […]

As a result, America’s education debate is as surreal as it is hypocritical. Our nation’s leaders speak and act as though the future of American education will be determined in Washington, and routinely promise to make education reform one of their major priorities in office. Yet the actual role of the federal government in education […]