Teaching Enronomics (07/02/02) new
By Stephen Balch in The New York Post
“In the wake of the recent scandals, the National Association of Scholars, an association of academics dedicated to raising standards on campus, asked Zogby International to poll American college seniors about what they’re being taught. College students imbibe from their academic mentors a low opinion of prevailing business ethics. When asked to name a profession in which, according to their teachers, an ‘anything goes’ attitude is most likely to yield success, business leads the pack - chosen by 28 percent - among eight choices provided. (Twenty percent named journalism; 16 percent, law. Teaching, science/medicine, the civil service, religion and the military each drew 5 percent or less.)”

NAS/Zogby Poll Reveals American Colleges Are Teaching Dubious Ethical Lessons (07/02/02) new
A Press Release from National Association of Scholars
“‘These results have disturbing implications both for America’s economy and its institutions of higher education,’ said National Association of Scholars President Stephen H. Balch. ‘They suggest that our colleges and universities, however unwittingly, are contributing to, and perpetuating, the ethical laxness behind the recent scandals at Enron, Worldcom, and other major American firms.’ ‘To be sure, the foundations of ethical education are laid in the home and school. At best, universities can only confirm the lessons taught there. But they can also undermine these lessons by providing sophisticated excuses for succumbing to the temptations of greed and power. The relativization and politicization of ethical standards, plus cynicism about business in general, opens the way for such excuse making.’”

College Seniors Taught Right and Wrong Is Relative (07/08/02) new
At Cybercast News Service by Lawrence Morahan
“A large majority of students also report that they’ve been taught that corporate policies furthering ‘progressive’ social and political goals are more important than those ensuring that stockholders and creditors receive accurate accounts of a firm’s finances, the study said. When respondents were given a list of business practices and asked, based on what they’ve been taught at college, which of the practices rank as the most important, 38 percent chose ‘recruiting a diverse workforce in which women and minorities are advanced and promoted.’ Eighteen percent chose ‘minimizing environmental pollution,’ and another 18 percent chose ‘avoiding layoffs by not exporting jobs or moving plants from one area to another.’ Only 23 percent said ‘providing clear and accurate business statements to stockholders and creditors’ is the most important business practice.”

Professors who see no evil (07/22/02) new
By John Leo in U.S. News & World Report
“A Zogby International poll of college seniors came up with a fascinating finding. Almost all of the 401 randomly selected students around the country–97 percent–said their college studies had prepared them to behave ethically in their future work lives. So far, so good. But 73 percent of the students said that when their professors taught about ethical issues, the usual message was that uniform standards of right and wrong don’t exist (‘what is right and wrong depends on differences in individual values and cultural diversity’). It’s not news that today’s campuses are drenched in moral relativism. But we are allowed to be surprised that college students report they are being well prepared ethically by teachers who tell them, in effect, that there are no real ethical standards, so anything goes.”

Point. Click. Think? As Students Rely on the Internet for Research, Teachers Try to Warn of the Web’s Snares (07/16/02) new
In The Washington Post by Laura Sessions Stepp
“Welcome to the world of Net thinking, a form of reasoning that characterizes many students who are growing up with the Internet as their primary, and in some cases, sole source of research. Ask teachers and they’ll tell you: Among all the influences that shape young thinking skills, computer technology is the biggest one. ‘Students’ first recourse for any kind of information is the Web. It’s absolutely automatic,’ says Kenneth Kotovsky, a psychology professor at Carnegie-Mellon University who has examined the study habits of young people.”

Assignment America: Tales from the newsroom (07/08/02) new
By John Bloom at United Press International
“This new book Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism... will break your heart. I’ve worked in journalism all my life, and I had no idea any of this was going on. All through the 1990s, every time Rush Limbaugh would accuse the media of a liberal bias, I would just chuckle it away as the usual sort of right-wing paranoia we’ve been dealing with since the Nixon administration. But William McGowan has written a carefully researched analysis of news coverage in the ’90s, showing that ... it’s true. It’s even worse than liberal bias.”

Break cycle of eternal poverty (07/16/02) new
By Jim Wooten in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“America’s first public housing projects for the poor were in Atlanta. The idea born here should die here. The nation should never build another stick of public housing. Assembling the poor in concentrations where their life models are broken families and welfare dependency is an idea whose time is gone. It’s a mistake to teach self-destructive behavior — and that is the legacy of public housing.”

Cohabiting can make marriage an iffy proposition; Even married, men may still feel less committed (07/08/02) new
In USA Today by Karen S. Peterson
“An expert addressing a ‘Smart Marriages’ conference this week will drop research on his colleagues that may indeed make some Americans smart. Researcher Scott Stanley’s case is this: Women living unmarried with guys and expecting a lasting, committed marriage down the line had better review their options. His research finds that men who cohabit with the women they eventually marry are less committed to the union than men who never lived with their spouses ahead of time.”

Perfidious Belgium (07/13/02) new
By Paul Belien in The Spectator
“According to a recent inquiry ordered by a Belgian parliamentary commission, Brussels has become a major recruiting base for al-Qa’eda and a launch-pad for terrorist attacks on neighbouring countries. The commission investigated the failure of the Sûreté de l’Etat, the Belgian secret service, to screen Islamic terrorists. On 5 June, Mrs Godelieve Timmermans, the head of the Sûreté, resigned after the report concluded that the Sûreté had remained passive because it had found no indications that the terrorists would attack Belgian targets, and also because the Sûreté did not want to discredit certain corrupt Belgian authorities or politicians for fear that these might attribute to the secret service ‘a racist or xenophobic attitude towards immigrants or Muslims’.”

Gays race supporters of marriage amendment (07/15/02) new
In The Washington Times by Larry Witham
“To neutralize state court rulings on same-sex ‘marriage’ rights, Mr. Daniels and other family-values groups are backing the Federal Marriage Amendment, which last month was introduced in the House with bipartisan backing. It would amend the U.S. Constitution to define marriage as between a man and woman and allow state legislatures to decide on marriage benefits.”

The Gay Inquisition (07/19/02) new
By Camille Paglia at FrontPage Magazine
“There was a time when gay men were known for their scathingly independent minds and their encyclopedic knowledge of culture. The welcome relaxation of legal and social sanctions against homosexuality over the past 30 years has paradoxically weakened the unsentimental powers of observation for which gays, as outsiders, were once renowned. Gay men used to be ferocious exemplars of free thought and free speech. But within 15 years of the 1969 Stonewall rebellion, an insidious totalitarianism infected gay activism, parallel to what was occurring in feminism in the Catharine MacKinnon/Andrea Dworkin era. Intolerance and witch hunts became the norm.”

Moral Relativity Is a Hot Topic? True. Absolutely. (07/13/02) new
By Edward Rothstein in The New York Times
“The war now taking shape may even be related to the principles that gave birth to postmodernism. Avatars of absolutism — terrorist Islamic fundamentalists — are challenging the liberal democratic societies of the West, objecting to their power, their values, their differing creeds, their modern (and postmodern) perspectives. This is something Mr. Fish recognizes. But postmodernism tends to retain its old critical habits. So when postmodernist arguments are applied to the war, they often seem directed at the West, relativizing its claims and qualifying condemnations of the opposition.”

America should celebrate its independence (07/04/02)
By Mark Steyn in The National Post
“The anything most of the Western world’s non-believers believe in is government: the age of church-and-state has been superseded by the era of state-as-church. In Europe, they’re happy to have cast off the supposed stultifying oppressiveness of religion for a world in which the EU regulates every aspect of life from ‘xenophobia’ to the curvature of bananas. The fact that the most religious nation in the West is also the most powerful militarily, economically and culturally may be sheerest coincidence, so let’s just say that separating church from state wound up strengthening the vitality of religion in America.”

Why we should all love America (07/04/02)
By Michael Gove in The London Times
“Britain may be more stable, earthed and charming. Australia may have much of America’s openness with a healthier population, freer of conceit. Europe’s smaller nations such as The Netherlands and Denmark may have succeeded in building greater social solidarity while still preserving personal freedom. But no nation has the sheer innovative energy, the democratic vitality, the openness to personal growth and the willingness to shoulder burdens bigger than itself that America has.”

The business of America is America — and we’d better get used to it (07/06/02)
By Matthew Paris in The Spectator
“Why should the Americans join the ICC if they do not want to? Are they not a sovereign nation with some reason to distrust progressive internationalists? America is not preventing other countries setting up whatever international courts we choose; she is simply declining to take part. Any claims we make to jurisdiction over non-participants are preposterous, and if we cannot assure Washington that US peacekeeping troops are safe from being dragged before this court, then — obviously again — her troops will come home.”

Fatah calls for attacks on US, Zionist targets (07/02/02)
By Margot Dudkevitch and Lamia Lahoud in The Jerusalem Post
“Groups affiliated with Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement yesterday called upon all Palestinian organizations, including the Islamic movements, to attack Zionist and American targets everywhere in response to US efforts ‘to remove the legitimate leadership of the Palestinian people.’”

Time for Muslim Show-and-Tell (07/02/02)
By Tammy Bruce at FrontPage Magazine
“Somehow the pathetic proving would rest with the victims as we swim in false guilt and political correctness inflicted on us by the Left Elite for decades. The same mentality that compelled the American establishment to beg Muslims to like us in the aftermath of slaughter brought to us by their ‘brothers’ is also responsible for our inability to stop it as the conspiracy grew. Can you imagine an effort by law enforcement before September 11 to question Arabs or Muslims in this country? It was impossible. And it remains impossible even after the attack. Our hands were tied then as they are now, by a Left Elite rhetoric that has reduced our critical minds to mush, and twisted our legal right to defend ourselves into the bizarre effort at group therapy to make sure those who hate us know that we don’t hate them.”

The Enemy Among Us (07/02/02)
By Editors of The New York Post
“Ten months after 9/11, too many officials remain reluctant to address head-on the question of how much support for terrorism exists within the U.S. Muslim community. Efforts at the worthy goal of reassuring Muslim-Americans that their community isn’t being stigmatized have left many government officials suddenly sharing a platform with known supporters of Islamic terrorism.”

Test of revered wisdom (07/07/02)
By Linda Chavez in The Washington Times
“The Founders understood that religious belief was not incidental to the American experiment in liberty but was the foundation on which it was built. The whole idea that individuals were entitled to liberty rests on the Judeo-Christian conception of man. When the colonists rebelled against their king — an action that risked their very lives — they did so with the belief that they were answering to a higher law than the king’s. They were emboldened by ‘the laws of nature and nature’s God,’ in Thomas Jefferson’s memorable phrase, to declare their independence.”

Death of a Thousand Cuts: Killing the death penalty softly. (07/02/02)
By William Saletan at Slate
“The Times isn’t really angry that the death penalty is administered too secretly in Japan or too openly in the United States. It’s angry that the death penalty is administered at all. But most Americans don’t share that view, so the Times and other critics seize on any related issue — the killer’s youth or mental capacity, the execution’s secrecy or publicity — that might buy extra sympathy for the condemned. Over time, these related issues add up. If you can’t kill murderers when they’re too young or too old, too dumb or too smart, killed secretly or killed openly, then you can’t kill them at all. That’s the objective all these arguments are meant to disguise.”

The Political Intolerance of Academic Feminism (06/21/02)
By Mary Zeiss Stange in The Chronicle Review
“Feminist scholars have struggled to be inclusive when it comes to every conceivable form of "otherness" (race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, age, appearance, education, ability). Every form of otherness, that is, except one: politics. How ironic, given that our movement began with the assertion that the personal is political.”

Letting Parents Decide (06/28/02)
By Editors of The Washington Post
“In affirming yesterday the constitutionality of Ohio’s use of vouchers in Cleveland — one of the country’s most dramatically failed school systems — the Supreme Court’s conservative majority rightly created wiggle room for states, localities and potentially even Congress to try carefully designed voucher programs. The case split the court along ideological lines, with the court’s more liberal justices all but declaring this voucher program to signify the end of church-state separation. We don’t belittle the dangers. But the dangers of vouchers are hypothetical ones at this stage. The crisis in education is real. And the court should not be insisting that the only lawful policies are the ones that have already failed.”

A Win for America’s Children (06/28/02)
By Rod Paige in The Washington Post
“The No Child Left Behind Act, when fully implemented, will make it easier to determine what works and what doesn’t in America’s schools, and it will carry consequences for failure. Among the consequences are public school choice and access to supplemental educational services, both underwritten by federal dollars. Now the Supreme Court has opened the door to even broader school choices, not only ushering in a new era in American education policy but also potentially starting a reformation in American public education. What must emerge through this education reformation should be a focus on students and achievement, rather than on the ‘system.’”

Federal Appeals Court Rules Pledge of Allegiance Unconstitutional (06/26/02)
In The Washington Post by David Kravets of Associated Press
“Harvard scholar Laurence Tribe predicted the U.S. Supreme Court will certainly reverse the decision unless the 9th Circuit reverses itself. ‘I would bet an awful lot on that,’ Tribe said. The 9th Circuit is the nation’s most overturned appellate court – partly because it is the largest, but also because it tends to make liberal, activist opinions, and because the cases it hears – on a range of issues from environmental laws to property rights to civil rights – tend to challenge the status quo.”

“One Nation Under God” (06/27/02)
By Editors of The New York Times
“This is a well-meaning ruling, but it lacks common sense. A generic two-word reference to God tucked inside a rote civic exercise is not a prayer. Mr. Newdow’s daughter is not required to say either the words ‘under God’ or even the pledge itself, as the Supreme Court made clear in a 1943 case involving Jehovah’s Witnesses. In the pantheon of real First Amendment concerns, this one is off the radar screen. The practical impact of the ruling is inviting a political backlash for a matter that does not rise to a constitutional violation.”

One Nation Under Blank (06/27/02)
By Editors of The Washington Post
“If the court were writing a parody, rather than deciding an actual case, it could hardly have produced a more provocative holding than striking down the Pledge of Allegiance while this country is at war. We believe in strict separation between church and state, but the pledge is hardly a particular danger spot crying out for judicial policing. And having a court strike it down can only serve to generate unnecessary political battles and create a fundraising bonanza for the many groups who will rush to its defense. Oh, yes, it can also invite a reversal, and that could mean establishing a precedent that sanctions a broader range of official religious expression than the pledge itself.”

The risks in the Rome Statute (07/02/02)
By Editors of Ha’aretz
“The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court goes into force today, establishing for the first time a permanent institution for investigating and judging people accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes. The court, which will begin operating from The Hague next year, will have the authority to judge individuals, based on complaints made to it by governments or the UN Security Council.”

Lone stand for justice (07/01/02)
By Editors of The London Telegraph
“Hitherto, legal systems have been rooted in democratic assemblies. Laws are passed by national legislatures, which are responsible to their peoples, and treaties signed by accountable governments. But, from today, the ICC will cast off the guy-ropes that attach it to its constituent states. From now on, it will function as an international body answerable to no one. The idea that laws ought to be made by the people’s representatives will be replaced by the pre-modern concept that law-makers are answerable to no one but themselves.”

President Bush Calls for New Palestinian Leadership (06/24/02)
George W. Bush in The Rose Garden at The White House
“I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror. I call upon them to build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty. If the Palestinian people actively pursue these goals, America and the world will actively support their efforts. If the Palestinian people meet these goals, they will be able to reach agreement with Israel and Egypt and Jordan on security and other arrangements for independence.”

Democracy for Palestinians: Bush’s bold plan for Mideast peace. (06/25/02)
By Editors of The Wall Street Journal
“It’s important to understand how radical this idea of democracy is for Palestine. For years the U.S. and Israel both winked at the brutality of Arab leaders, in the Faustian hope that they would provide ‘stability’ and ‘peace.’ This was the flaw at the heart of the Oslo peace process, in which the U.S. sub-contracted with Yasser Arafat to stop attacks against Israel. But this was impossible as long as Mr. Arafat and other Palestinian leaders derived all of their political legitimacy from the struggle against Israel. Yesterday Mr. Bush said this day is over.”

What it Means: Politically, Arafat is a dead man walking (06/25/02)
By David Landau in The Ha’aretz
“Yasser Arafat, the seemingly immortal leader of the Palestinian national movement, was politically assassinated Monday by President George W. Bush. His role as Israel’s prospective partner in any future diplomatic process was effectively snuffed out by a stern-sounding American president, delivering his verdict on two years of violent intifada and his recipe for a turnabout towards peace in this war-torn region. Bush’s verdict: Arafat is the guilty party.”

An End to Pretending (06/26/02)
By Michael Kelly in The Washington Post
“There is some limited truth in seeing what Bush is trying to do in the Middle East in traditional terms — hard-liners vs. State Department softies, etc. — but this is missing the elephant on the settee. For better or worse — a great deal better, I think — Bush has set the Palestinian issue within the context of a larger approach that is fundamentally, historically radical: a rejection of decades of policy, indeed a rejection of the entire philosophy of Middle East diplomacy. This philosophy has rested on a willingness to accept a U.S. role as a player in a running fraud.”

Admit terrorism’s Islamic link (06/24/02)
By Michael Medved in USA Today
“Ideas — including religious ones — have consequences, and examining those consequences is the best way to judge them. Americans are mature enough to handle the inescapable truth that our daily dangers come not, as Hollywood would have it, from freelance misfits and nostalgic Nazis, but from a serious and frightening Islamic mass movement implacably devoted to our destruction.”

Occasionally, some links are moved from this section into the Featured Webpages Trove.

The Role of Government in Education (1955)
By Milton Friedman in Economics and the Public Interest
“This re-examination of the role of government in education suggests that the growth of governmental responsibility in this area has been unbalanced. Government has appropriately financed general education for citizenship, but in the process it has been led also to administer most of the schools that provide such education. Yet, as we have seen, the administration of schools is neither required by the financing of education, nor justifiable in its own right in a predominantly free enterprise society. Government has appropriately been concerned with widening the opportunity of young men and women to get professional and technical training, but it has sought to further this objective by the inappropriate means of subsidizing such education, largely in the form of making it available free or at a low price at governmentally operated schools. The lack of balance in governmental activity reflects primarily the failure to separate sharply the question what activities it is appropriate for government to finance from the question what activities it is appropriate for government to administer — a distinction that is important in other areas of government activity as well. Because the financing of general education by government is widely accepted, the provision of general education directly by govern mental bodies has also been accepted. But institutions that provide general education are especially well suited also to provide some kinds of vocational and professional education, so the acceptance of direct government provision of general education has led to the direct provision of vocational education. To complete the circle, the provision of vocational education has, in turn, meant that it too was financed by government, since financing has been predominantly of educational institutions not of particular kinds of educational services.”

Advice to Graduates About Advice (06/06/1971)
By Edward C. Banfield at Claremont McKenna College
“Figures of speech, especially metaphors, are peculiarly serviceable to people who give advice about social problems. The use of them tends to create an emotional response in the listener that enhances the urgency of the ‘problem’ thus raising the value of the putative ‘solution’ that the advice-giver offers. I sometimes wonder if we could have an ‘urban crisis’ without a good supply of metaphors. Suppose that a writer could not speak of ‘decaying neighborhoods’ but instead had to say what he meant straight out — say that the well-off have moved away from aging unfashionable neighborhoods, that this has given the less well-off opportunities to move into housing better than they formerly had, and that they, for obvious reasons, are in most instances disposed to spend less on the repair and maintenance of houses than the former occupiers were. Or suppose that a United States Senator instead of saying, as one recently did, that ‘the cities are mortally sick and getting sicker’ and that the ‘states are in a state of chronic crisis’ had to speak plainly — in this instance, perhaps, to say that although in the last decade the cities and states have increased their revenues by a factor of three, there are nevertheless many voters who would like to have more spent, provided of course that the taxes are paid mainly by others.”

The End of History? (Summer 1989)
By Francis Fukuyama in The National Interest
“The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism. In the past decade, there have been unmistakable changes in the intellectual climate of the world’s two largest communist countries, and the beginnings of significant reform movements in both. But this phenomenon extends beyond high politics and it can be seen also in the ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture in such diverse contexts as the peasants’ markets and color television sets now omnipresent throughout China, the cooperative restaurants and clothing stores opened in the past year in Moscow, the Beethoven piped into Japanese department stores, and the rock music enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon, and Tehran. What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. This is not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs’s yearly summaries of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run.”

An Explosion of Green (Apr. 1995)
By Bill McKibben in The Atlantic
“In the early nineteenth century the cleric Timothy Dwight reported that the 240-mile journey from Boston to New York City passed through no more than twenty miles of forest. Surveying the changes wrought by farmers and loggers in New Hampshire, he wrote, ‘The forests are not only cut down, but there appears little reason to hope that they will ever grow again.’ Less than two centuries later, despite great increases in the state’s population, 90 percent of New Hampshire is covered by forest. Vermont was 35 percent woods in 1850 and is 80 percent today, and even Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island have seen woodlands rebound to the point where they cover nearly three fifths of southern New England. This process, which began as farmers abandoned the cold and rocky pastures of the East for the fertile fields of the Midwest, has not yet run its course.... This unintentional and mostly unnoticed renewal of the rural and mountainous East — not the spotted owl, not the salvation of Alaska’s pristine ranges — represents the great environmental story of the United States, and in some ways of the whole world. Here, where ‘suburb’ and ‘megalopolis’ were added to the world’s vocabulary, an explosion of green is under way, one that could offer hope to much of the rest of the planet.”

The Doomslayer (Feb. 1997)
By Ed Regis in Wired
“The world is getting progressively poorer, and it’s all because of population, or more precisely, overpopulation. There’s a finite store of resources on our pale blue dot, spaceship Earth, our small and fragile tiny planet, and we’re fast approaching its ultimate carrying capacity. The limits to growth are finally upon us, and we’re living on borrowed time. The laws of population growth are inexorable. Unless we act decisively, the final result is written in stone: mass poverty, famine, starvation, and death. Time is short, and we have to act now. That’s the standard and canonical litany.... There’s just one problem with The Litany, just one slight little wee imperfection: every item in that dim and dreary recitation, each and every last claim, is false.... Thus saith The Doomslayer, one Julian L. Simon, a neither shy nor retiring nor particularly mild-mannered professor of business administration at a middling eastern-seaboard state university. Simon paints a somewhat different picture of the human condition circa 1997. ‘Our species is better off in just about every measurable material way,’ he says. ‘Just about every important long-run measure of human material welfare shows improvement over the decades and centuries, in the United States and the rest of the world. Raw materials — all of them — have become less scarce rather than more. The air in the US and in other rich countries is irrefutably safer to breathe. Water cleanliness has improved. The environment is increasingly healthy, with every prospect that this trend will continue.’”

A brilliant parody:

Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity (Spring/Summer 1996)
By Alan Sokal in Social Text
“There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in ‘eternal’ physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the ‘objective’ procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.”

... and, in explanation, ...

A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies (May/June 1996)
By Alan Sokal in Lingua Franca
“For some years I’ve been troubled by an apparent decline in the standards of rigor in certain precincts of the academic humanities. But I’m a mere physicist: If I find myself unable to make heads or tails of jouissance and differance, perhaps that just reflects my own inadequacy. So, to test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies — whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross — publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions? The answer, unfortunately, is yes.... What’s going on here? Could the editors really not have realized that my article was written as a parody?”

Networks Need a Reality Check: A firsthand account of liberal bias at CBS News. (02/13/1996)
By Bernard Goldbert in The Wall Street Journal
“There are lots of reasons fewer people are watching network news, and one of them, I’m more convinced than ever, is that our viewers simply don’t trust us. And for good reason. The old argument that the networks and other ‘media elites’ have a liberal bias is so blatantly true that it’s hardly worth discussing anymore. No, we don’t sit around in dark corners and plan strategies on how we’re going to slant the news. We don’t have to. It comes naturally to most reporters.”

There is No Time, There Will Be Time (11/18/1998)
By Peggy Noonan in Forbes ASAP
“When you consider who is gifted and crazed with rage... when you think of the terrorist places and the terrorist countries... who do they hate most? The Great Satan, the United States. What is its most important place? Some would say Washington. I would say the great city of the United States is the great city of the world, the dense 10-mile-long island called Manhattan, where the economic and media power of the nation resides, the city that is the psychological center of our modernity, our hedonism, our creativity, our hard-shouldered hipness, our unthinking arrogance.”

Arts & Letters Daily
Articles of Note — New Books — Essays and Opinion

Business Daily Review
Features and Analysis — Opinions and Reviews — Strategy and Tactics

Catholic Dossier
Issues in the Round

Catholic News Service
U.S. Catholic Conference

Catholic Telecommunications
Bringing people together

Catholic World Report
“CWR is an international news magazine published by Ignatius Press.”

City Journal
The Manhattan Institute

CNSNews
Cybercast News Service

Corante
Tech News. Filtered Daily.

First Things
The Journal of Religion and Public Life

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
“FIRE is a nonprofit educational foundation devoted to free speech, individual liberty, religious freedom, the rights of conscience, legal equality, due process, and academic freedom on our nation’s campuses.”

FrontPage Magazine
David Horowitz

The Hoover Digest: Research and Opinion on Public Policy
Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace

Jim Romenesko’s MediaNews
Poynter.org

JunkScience
All the junk that’s fit to debunk

Lucianne’s News Forum
Latest Articles

NewsMax
America’s News Page

Notable Quotables Archive @ Media Research Center
“A bi-weekly compilation of the latest outrageous,
sometimes humorous, quotes in the liberal media.”

RealClear Politics
political commentary for the political junkie

Reason Online
Free Minds and Free Markets

Reuters
The World’s Leading Provider of Financial Information and News

SciTech Daily Review
Features and Background — Books and Media — Analysis and Opinion

Statistical Assessment Service (STATS)
“A non-partisan, non-profit research organization... devoted to the accurate use of scientific and social research in public policy debate.”

Tech Central Station
Where Free Markets Meet Technology

United Press International
From the News Wire

Opinion Journal
Wall Street Journal editorial page

The Wilson Quarterly
Surveying the world of ideas for the intellectually curious reader

WorldNetDaily
A Free Press for a Free People

ZENIT News Agency
The World Seen from Rome

American Heritage Dictionary @ Bartleby.com
Fourth Edition

Columbia Encyclopedia @ Bartleby.com
Sixth Edition

The U.S. Constitution Online
Including Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and other fundamental documents of US history and law

Founder’s Library
Historical American documents

The Cambridge History of English and American Literature @ Bartleby.com
Eighteen volumes, originally published 1907-1921

Catholic Encyclopedia
“Actual work on the Encyclopedia was begun in January, 1905. It was completed in April, 1914.”

IntraText Digital Library
The missing link between text and hypertext

The 1911 Edition Encyclopedia Britannica
“This 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is filled with historical information that is still relevant today. It fills 29 volumes and contains over 44 million words. The articles are written by more than 1500 authors within their various fields of expertise.”

The Internet Archive
Building an “Internet Library”

Special Wayback Collections at The Internet Archive:

The September 11 Web Archive
“This collection of archived documents was commissioned by the Library of Congress to preserve digital materials covering the events of September 11, 2001.”

US Election 2000
“This collection was commissioned by the Library of Congress to archive digital materials covering the Election of 2000. It contains 800 gigabytes of data gathered from 8/1/2000 to 1/21/2001.”

Web Pioneers: The Early Years
“A special Wayback collection of websites that began the Internet revolution.”

A chronicle of high-level USA government actions in September 2001, at two websites:

Ten Days in September (WP)
“This series is based on interviews with President Bush, Vice President Cheney and many other key officials inside the administration and out. The interviews were supplemented by notes of National Security Council meetings made available to The Washington Post, along with notes taken by several participants.”

Response to Terror (Austin American Stateman)
“This is an eight-part series by The Washington Post describing the response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks at the highest levels of government.”

News coverage of September 11 and the aftermath:

Fighting Terrorism: America Retaliates (BG)
“Archive stories from the Boston Globe: Tuesday Sept. 11 – Sunday Sept. 16”

Attack on America (Guardian Unlimited)
Special Report with continuing coverage

Miscellaneous Collections:

Catholic Poets @ ELCore.Net
Joyce Kilmer, Alice Meynell, Joseph Mary Plunkett

Verse @ Bartleby.com
Public-domain Anthologies and Individual Volumes

HTI American Verse Project
“The American Verse Project is a collaborative project between the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) and the University of Michigan Press. The project is assembling an electronic archive of volumes of American poetry prior to 1920.”

Newman Reader
Life and Works of Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman

What We Think of America (Granta)
“In this issue twenty-four writers drawn from many countries describe the part America has played in their lives — for better or worse — and deliver their estimate of the good and the bad it has done as the world’s supreme political, military, economic and cultural power.”

Hot Issues: Persecution (Christianity Today)
Reports of contemporary persecution of Christians world-wide

Gay Activism in Schools (Teachers in Focus)
“A single-themed issue on homosexual activism in the schools”

Skepticism Toward The Skeptical Environmentalist (Scientific American)
The Great Debate between Lomborg and Anti-Lomborgs

Document Archive in English (ZENIT)
The World Seen from Rome

Archives: Fallout of September 11 (ZENIT)
The World Seen from Rome

STATS Spotlight (Statistical Assessment Service)
“Here are pieces of more extensive unpublished STATS research.”

Legacy of Shame (New Times LA)
News and opinion about Roger Cardinal Mahony

A Trust Betrayed:
Sexual Abuse by Teachers (Education Week)
“This three-part series on child sex abuse by school employees is the result of a six-month project by Education Week involving scores of interviews with state and local education and law-enforcement officials, other experts, teachers, principals, parents, and victims, as well as an extensive review of court documents, journal articles, and public-policy records.”

Catholic Church Abuse Scandal (Yahoo! News)
U.S. Full Coverage

The Crusades (Catholic Dossier)
“It is difficult for one who lives in an increasingly secularized society not to be influenced by its prejudices. One of the great misunderstandings in the West, even among Catholics, has to do with the Crusades. This issue of Catholic Dossier provides fundamental and irrefutable historical information about what actually happened and why.”

Pope Pius XII (Catholic Dossier)
“The accomplishments of the Vatican diplomatic corps in the various countries occupied by the Germans, over which the sinister Eichmann preyed, had received the plaudits of all free men, not least those in the new country of Israel. There groves were planted in honor of the Pope and of many of his nuncios, not least Cardinal Roncalli who, as nuncio in Istanbul, had been the good right arm of Pius in rescuing Jews. Pius XII escaped martyrdom during his lifetime, but he has been subjected to the martyrdom of vilification, defamation and incredible falsification after his death.”

The New Rise of Islam (Catholic World Report)
“Late in the 20th century, the renewed vigor of Islam has become one of the most important developments on the world scene. By dint of their energetic proselytism, their migration to new lands, and their high birth rate, Muslims are rapidly gaining attention and influence in many countries where their faith has heretofore been virtually unknown. CWR aims to make readers better acquainted with Islam, with a primer on the religious principles, and public practices of that faith.”

Christianity and Islam, Terrorism and War (Catholic World Report)
“Why have thousands of Muslims joined in anti-American protests in Pakistan, Kenya, and Indonesia since the start of the US air strikes on terrorist bases in Afghanistan? These demonstrators are not all supporters of al-Qaeda, thirsting for American blood; they are not Arabs, caught up in the political turmoil of the Middle East. They are united only by the Muslim faith. Is it Islam, then, that prods them toward violence?”

The Cross and the Crescent (Catholic World Report)
“To a remarkable degree, America has united behind President Bush in the war on terrorism. For the first time since World War II there is an overwhelming consensus that we are fighting a necessary battle, for a just cause. That national unity is a clear sign of strength, and a clear warning to our enemies. Nevertheless, beneath the surface of that consensus the careful observer can still detect signs of the fault lines within American society. We are united against terrorists, but divided among ourselves.”

Diane Alden
inflyovercountry

Ann Coulter
Town Hall

Bill Dunn
Faith and Funnies

Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post

Michael Kelly
Washington Post

Jonah Goldberg
National Review Online

Jonah Goldberg
Town Hall

Nat Hentoff
The Village Voice

John Mallon
Peter’sVoice

Steve Milloy
Fox News

Peggy Noonan
Opinion Journal

Fred Reed
Commentary with Moxie

Mark Steyn
National Post

Deb Weiss
A View from Here

George F. Will
Washington Post

The Blog from the Core
E. L. Core
Needless Commentary From Small-Town America

Ad Orientem
Mark C. N. Sullivan

Annunciations
Michael Dubruiel
(husband of blogger Amy Welborn)

BrinkLindsey.com
International politics, economics, and foreign policy

CampusNonsense
Exposing Left-Wing Lunacy

Catholic and Enjoying It!
Mark Shea
“So That No Thought of Mine, No Matter How Stupid, Should Ever Go Unpublished Again!”

ChristianityToday.com
Compiled by Ted Olsen and others

The Conservative Underground
Oubai Shabandar, Shanna Bowman, Dan Moody, Tim Richards
Culture Progress Justice

The Corner
National Review Online
(The Blog Mother Ship, according to Kevin James)

Fool’s Folly
Emily Stimpson
Proverbs 12:23

The Goliard Blog
Kevin James
Your Destination for Deep Thoughts and Alleged Insights

Holy Weblog!
M. J. Garcia
A faithful look at the Net.

Juan Gato’s Bucket o’ Rants
Bunch of crap from a moron.

Louder Fenn’s Whirligig
Perpetual ephemera

Mallon’s Media Watch
John Mallon
“MMW is a Catholic blog site featuring news analysis, response to and commentary on misinformed media reports on the Catholic Church.”

Media Minded
(An anonymous copy editor looks at the media, especially newspapers.)

Minute Particulars
Mark DB

Nota Bene
Sean Gallagher
Humble (oh really...?) opinions on matters of faith

Orthopraxis
Fr. Nectarios Trevino
A weblog of American Orthodoxy.

OxBlog
“The political rantings of Josh Chafetz, a graduate student in political theory at Oxford, Dan Urman, a graduate student in international relations at Oxford, and Anand Giridharadas, a junior at the University of Michigan spending the year at Oxford.”

Relapsed Catholic
Kathy Shaidle
Where the religious rubber meets the pop culture road...

Rhetorica: Commentary and Analysis
Andrew R. Cline, Ph.D.
Politics, Journalism, Rhetoric, Persuasion, Propaganda, and Spin

Sand in the Gears
Anthony Woodlief
Clogging up juggernauts since 1967.

ScottRubush.com
Scott’s little outpost of sanity on the web.

Veritas
Chris Burgwald
“A blog among friends devoted to the usually serious but occasionally frivolous search for truth in things theological, philosophical, political, historical, etc. etc.”

A five-day series in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: “This week, the focus is on how the family structure is breaking down to the point of becoming not just a critical public policy issue, but a threat to the community’s future.”

Community’s fate tied to strength of families: Weak homes, economics hurt children’s chances (06/30/02)
“A war is on, across the metropolitan area, but especially in impoverished neighborhoods, to improve the lives of children and to strengthen families.”

Stopping cycle of kids having kids: Culture of acceptance may be boosting city’s teen pregnancy rate (07/01/02)
“More and more people wonder if the accepting attitude toward teen pregnancy that evolved in the last quarter century is actually contributing to the phenomenon.”

Remembering forgotten fathers: Year-old program drives home lessons that teen dads need to help their children (07/02/02)
“A small number of programs are targeting the side of teen pregnancy people don't usually pay any attention to: the guys. And why do some of those guys feel obligated to become fathers?”

Kids may pay for city’s high rate of single moms: Where 60% of mothers are single, children are left with a murky future (07/03/02)
“Few factors have more influence on a child’s healthy development than a strong, loving, two-parent family. So says a recent report by a nationally known organization devoted to children’s issues. And yet fewer and fewer children grow up in such a family.”

In fight for families, small wins add up: Though not a substitute for solid homes, city programs try to fill in parenting gaps (07/04/02)
“David beat Goliath in the Bible story, but all the would-be Davids, armed with their good programs, have seemed to make only some dents in the Goliath of a tattered social fabric in large sections of Milwaukee. Still, there are victories, and they should be celebrated.”

Joe Klein is writing a multi-part report from Europe for The Guardian:

France? It’s like 1970s America (05/28/02)
“Over the next six weeks, Joe Klein, America’s leading political commentator, will be travelling through Europe for the Guardian. Today, 36 years after he first arrived there in search of “dark-eyed lovelies with difficult personalities”, he reports from France”

The Prince (06/06/02)
“Is Silvio Berlusconi a medieval thowback to a time when rich men could buy power? Or the shape of things to come? And is he dangerous — or just a colourful rogue? In the second of his weekly dispatches from Europe, Joe Klein meets the billionaire prime minister who just wants to be loved”

How the Solidarity dream turned sour (06/12/02)
“Poland was eastern Europe’s great success story, a reborn country that had embraced free markets and liberal democracy and stood poised to join the EU. But now its economy is in tatters and ugly Catholic nationalism is on the rise. In the third of his weekly dispatches from Europe, Joe Klein asks what went wrong”

How Germany was suffocated (06/19/02)
“For 57 years Germany has been struggling to make amends for its Nazi past and be accepted by its neighbours. But has its desire to avoid discord stifled the nation's public life and prevented much needed reform? On the fourth leg of his European tour, Joe Klein finds a society addled by ‘ferocious blandness’”

Who’s in charge here? (06/26/02)
“The great European project has three — or maybe four — presidents, two foreign policy chiefs and endless, baffling bureaucracy. So can it really hold its own against the might of the US? In the fifth instalment of his continental odyssey, Joe Klein travels to Brussels and Seville to find out”

Neither here nor there (07/03/02)
“For six weeks, Joe Klein has been travelling through Europe, taking the pulse of the continent and exploring its fractious relationship with his native country. He ends his journey in Britain with the gap between the US and Europe wider than ever. So which way should we turn? Neither, he says — we are perfectly placed to take the best of both worlds. And he has some tips: get Bill Clinton to make speeches and Silvio Berlusconi to arrange the social events”

Occasionally, some links are moved from this section into the Featured Webseries Trove.