In Melvindale, Michigan, a blue collar suburb of Detroit, the school board held a tumultuous public hearing this week that seems to have caught everyone by surprise. The Board chairman, John Rowe, a former science teacher who now directs nuclear medicine and radiology at an area hospital, started with what he thought was a reasonable idea: Let students know that Read More ›
The victors are toasted and courted, their victory parties packed. People who didn’t answer their calls during the campaign are clamoring now to get onto their schedules. But, as usual, many backers of the losers found it inconvenient to show up at election-night wakes. Defeated candidates typically are allowed a graceful departure speech, but then are expected to disappear. Hardly Read More ›
In a retrospective essay on Carl Sagan in the January 9, 1997 New York Review of Books, Harvard Genetics Professor Richard Lewontin tells how he first met Sagan at a public debate in Arkansas in 1964. The two young scientists had been coaxed by senior colleagues to go to Little Rock to debate the affirmative side of the question: “RESOLVED, that Read More ›
The truth is that the Seattle municipal elections now ending are most notable for their relative lack of rancor and underhanded tactics. Attempts at creating scandals have been half-hearted and fizzled fast. The ad-hominem attacks have been rare and pitifully unimaginative, the exposure of political correctness gaffes almost nonexistent. And we call ourselves a world-class city! For people in the Read More ›
You finally find yourself wanting to help out Charlie Chong; not vote for him, necessarily, just help him make the mayor’s race more interesting by tying together the obviously disconnected strings of his campaign. The avowedly “populous” cause almost always wins elections in Seattle and nothing sells better than those old salted chestnuts, “neighborhood values.” So Chong’s single theme of Read More ›
The apartment on Seattle’s First Hill was nice, though modest, like its occupant. But it also had an inspiring view out over the city Joel Pritchard treasured. He said recently, “Almost every place with the most meaning in my life is within sight,” and that surely included Queen Anne Hill and Bainbridge Island, lands laden with childhood reveries. These were Read More ›
Here’s a riddle: How can a child’s mother become his sister, and his grandmother his mom? Answer: By government edict in America’s newest welfare trend, “kinship care.” Thanks to a biased social service system, welfare recipients anxious for more benefits, and gullible elected officials, the nation’s burgeoning foster care system is being used to discourage adoption of at-risk children and Read More ›
This time next year, when you think of taking the family up to Canada for a visit, or go on your own trip for business, you could find yourself waiting in lines of seven or eight hours duration at Blaine while totally superfluous paperwork is handled by Immigration and Naturalization (INS) officials. Something nearly as grim could await you at Read More ›