Jack Anderson (Deseret News): Will Bush deal Republicans a fatal blow in fall elections? A Maryland voter confessed bewilderment at the election match-ups in his state. "Let me see if I've got this straight," he said. "McCain can beat Gore, and Gore can beat Bush, but McCain can't beat Bush?" . (2000-03-11)

Peter Bart (Variety): Coppola: technophile Renaissance man. FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA HASN’T directed a film in over two years. The same is true of his friends Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Each in his own way, however, has done something much more gratifying than making a movie. They’ve created their own private universes. (2000-03-21)

Brent Bozell: Artful Standards Of Civility. Here are two rules of civility in politics. One, conservatives are not allowed to question the motivations or crocodile-tear strategies of liberals. Two, because the true visionaries in the Manhattan media elite have a more heightened sense of society's needs, they can say anything they want about those distasteful people who stand in the way of enlightened progress. (2000-03-16)

David Broder (Washington Post): Coordinated Primaries? 2 Parties Conferring on Change for 2004 Presidential Race. In a rare instance of bipartisanship, the leaders of the Democratic and Republican national committees have been conferring on how to change the presidential primary schedule to give more voters a meaningful chance to participate in the choice of nominees. Not surprisingly, consensus within the parties and between them is proving elusive. (2000-03-16)

William F. Buckley, Jr. (Sacramento Bee): Gstaad and the new rich. This is my 40th "winter" (six weeks in February/March) in Gstaad, the twin purposes of coming here with my wife, back when it all began, being to work and to ski. Mens sana in corpore sano stuff. Providence has a way of disarranging people's pretty little life programs, in this case an early and severe accident that ended my wife's skiing life. But work and skiing for me went on year after year. The first book I undertook here in 1959 was "Up From Liberalism." Just now I have completed a novel called "Elvis in the Morning." (2000-03-20)

Jon Carroll (S.F. Gate): A Good Word For the Bad Guys. I KNOW WE are all supposed to hate dot-com people. I don't hate them, but I'd like to assure everyone that I hate their vehicles avidly. But them . . . no, actually, I like them. (2000-03-17)

Mona Charen (Jewish World Review): Not so glorious food. THE DEBATE was heated, the participants sometimes angry. The session was standing room only, and the press was out in force. It was not a presidential debate but something nearer to most Americans' hearts: diets. (2000-03-21)

Linda Chavez (NewsMax): Hair-Raising Fund Raising. Americans have demonstrated they don't care much about campaign finance reform. John McCain hoped to ride the issue from a victory in the New Hampshire primary straight into the White House, but got thrown on Super Tuesday. Bill Bradley never even managed to mount up. And voters in California bucked a campaign finance reform initiative on the ballot there last week, rejecting it by 2-to-1. What hope is there, then, that new revelations about the Clinton-Gore 1996 campaign finance scandal will damage Al Gore's chances to become the 43rd president? Plenty. (2000-03-14)

Joe Conason (The New York Observer): File This ‘-Gate’ Under ‘Dead’. If news reports are to be believed, we are now close to the conclusion of that long-running political hoax known as "Filegate." According to a story in The New York Times on March 13—which ran on an inside page, of course—the Office of Independent Counsel is about to release its final report on the 900 F.B.I. personnel files mistakenly obtained by security officials in the Clinton White House. (2000-03-20)

Maureen Dowd (NY Times): The Real Thing. Bill Clinton has been musing about his presidential afterlife. He doesn't want a pardon. He doesn't want to be just another Senate spouse. He doesn't want to give up the job he loves. (2000-04-16)

Susan Estrich: On St. Patrick's Day in New York, Hillary Clinton will be marching with the smiling Irish -- but gay and lesbian Irishmen and women will not be, at least not openly. The exclusion of gays from the parade, the subject of annual controversy, is justified by the parade's organizers as an expression of their freedom not to associate with those whose sexual orientation conflicts with their fundamental religious belief. (2000-03-17)

Joseph Farah (WorldNetDaily): Take your Census and ... Have you seen the television commercials -- paid for with your hard-earned tax dollars, of course -- promoting compliance with the U.S. Census? You've got to see them. The reason, we're told, to fill out the intrusive survey is so that we can all "get our fair share." That makes it about as clear as you can get. (2000-03-20)

Don Feder (Jewish World Review): Draft Keyes as Bush's runningmate. If conservatives want to elect George Bush and guarantee that a Bush presidency is worth the effort, they should immediately launch a movement to draft Alan Keyes as the his running mate. (2000-03-20)

Germond&Whitcover (Baltimore Sun): Divergent paths to party unity. Talk of party unity has dominated the presidential politics scene since Al Gore and George W. Bush made also-rans of Bill Bradley and John McCain in the 100-yard dash that was the decisive 2000 primaries. (2000-03-20)

Bill Gertz (Washington Times): U.S. sees Chinese amphibious exercise as routine. Chinese military forces are engaged in amphibious landing exercises on the coast of southern China, but defense officials said yesterday the maneuvers are routine and do not appear aimed at Taiwan. The operations are an annual exercise involving several hundred marines and do not include large warship exercises, said officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. (2000-03-21)

Georgie Anne Geyer: CHILE: ECHOES OF PINOCHET-ALLENDE CONFLICT REMAIN. You have to understand what Chile was like in those days. In the 1960s -- before Augusto Pinochet -- Chile was the great hope of the modern revolutionary age. (2000-03-19)

Jonah Goldberg (National Review): CONTENT-RICH GORE BASHING. In response to my column on Friday, any number of readers complained that I was “too personal” in discussing Al Gore; that I made no factual assertions and just made fun of the poor guy for being a weird, stiff, liar. A couple people even decided that they no longer wanted to subscribe to this column because of it. (2000-03-20)

Ellen Goodman (Boston Globe): The downside of open-mindedness. It's a bit uncomfortable to find myself suddenly questioning the value of tolerance. I've spent an awful lot of time and space defending the rights of others to their beliefs, even when they attack mine. Pluralism is a virtue. (2000-03-16)

Lloyd Grove (Washington Post): A Tough Road to the Oscars. Tyrene Manson's life has taken some hairpin turns. The 30-year-old amateur boxer--who is featured in "On the Ropes," a Learning Channel documentary up for an Oscar--grew up in New York among a family of drug addicts, and has spent the last three years behind bars. On Sunday her uncle Randy died of AIDS, the fourth of her relatives to succumb to the disease in the past five years. (2000-03-21)

David Horowitz (Salon Magazine): Templegate. Al Gore is benefiting from the most massive and dangerous coverup of a fund-raising scandal in the history of our republic. (2000-03-20)

Arianna Huffington (Arianna Online): P' IS FOR PRESCHOOLERS ... AND FOR PROZAC. At a White House meeting on Monday (March 20) with health and education officials, Hillary Clinton tapped into a growing national concern and outlined proposals for warning labels and a wide-ranging study on the use of Ritalin. "Some of these young people," she said, "have problems that are symptoms of nothing more than childhood or adolescence." This is good news indeed, coming at a time when those promoting the legal drugging of America's children score fresh triumphs every day. (2000-03-20)

Molly Ivins (Star Telegram): Texans on TV brings out the wince factor. Watching our homeboy George Dubya as he wends his way -- somewhat unsteadily -- toward the presidency is a nerve-racking procedure. Face it, our reputation is on the line along with the governor's. All of us know that 20 million Texans can't be brought to agree on anything, including whether the guys who died at the Alamo were heroes or fools. Nevertheless, we are all being painted with the Bush brush, so whenever he makes a cake of himself, all of us get the blame ("Those Texans, so ignorant.") (2000-03-20).

Jeff Jacoby (Boston Globe): A world full of dangerous messages. My beloved Caleb, You gave me a real jolt a few nights ago. You had just gotten into bed for the night, and I was sitting with you so we could talk for a few minutes before saying good night. (2000-03-20)

Al Kamen (Washington Post): An FAA Inspector's Bad Day at Dulles. Just about everyone has a favorite nightmare story about airline travel. But few can top what happened March 7 to Joseph J. Gore of Mount Prospect, Ill., while he was on a United flight due to leave Dulles for Chicago. Gore, no relation to the vice president, was taken off the plane that afternoon in handcuffs, under arrest by airport security for trespassing. He was taken to a local police station for a few hours and then before a magistrate, who ordered him released on $1,000 bond pending a hearing on April 18. (2000-03-20)

Mickey Kaus (Kaus Files): All e-mail all the time. Many people dread the distinct possibility of a non-stop presidential campaign between now and November. Luckily, modern technology has come to the rescue. ... (2000-03-16)

Michael Kelly (Washington Post): Reform Joke. After seven years of the Clinton administration, it takes something really rich to get a laugh here, but Al Gore's announcement last weekend that he was the candidate of campaign finance reform did the trick. Clinton-Gore fund-raiser Terence McAuliffe, implicated in an illegal 1996 fund-raising scheme involving the misuse of Teamsters' funds, laughed so hard that he dropped a large valise filled with unsequentially numbered old $20 bills he happened to be holding for a friend and badly bruised his foot. (2000-03-15)

Larry King (USA Today): An engaging 'Engagement'. There's a movie coming in April that you must see. Rules of Engagement stars Tommy Lee Jones, Samuel L. Jackson and Guy Pearce. It's directed by Bill Friedkin in what may be his career-best work. (2000-03-20)

Morton Kondracke (Roll Call): Medicare Cutbacks Balance U.S. Budget, But Hospitals Bleed. Last year Congress discovered that U.S. hospitals were bleeding financially and applied a Band-Aid. But new estimates this year show that there's a hemorrhage. Federal Medicare cuts are "killing the U.S. health care industry," according to one hospital lobbyist, but Congress once again is only reaching for a first aid kit. (2000-03-20)

Charles Krauthammer (Washington Post): A Nation of Oil Addicts. Let's see: (1) Flush and prosperous, America goes on a decade-long, gas-guzzling SUV binge. (2) Out of deference to calving Arctic caribou, the government declares off limits for exploration the largest oil repository in the United States. And (3) a brand new $5.5 billion nuclear reactor on Long Island is shut down and dismantled before selling a single kilowatt of electricity, part of a general "China Syndrome" panic about nuclear power. (2000-03-17)

Howard Kurtz (Washington Post): At the Dawn of a News Era: Ted Koppel & 'Nightline'. Ted Koppel admits, without even a cursory interrogation, that he checks his e-mail only once a month. "I'll guarantee you there are 175 e-mail messages there for me right now, and I'll be surprised if two warrant an immediate reply," he says with a nod toward his office computer. "I'm not happy about the enhanced speed of communications. It detracts from reflection, from carefully considered answers and solutions." (2000-03-21)

Chris Matthews (S.F. Examiner): Bush's California dream vs. reality. George W. Bush is California dreaming. It's not the live-and-let-live social attitudes or the state's cultural and ethnic diversity he desires. It's the 54 electoral votes. Unfortunately for the Texan, that loose-talking strategist who leaked the candidate's November electoral targets made a huge mistake by putting the Golden State at the top of the list. (2000-03-16)

Mary McGrory (Washington Post): A Paler Shade of Green. The toxic waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio, burns on in the middle of a rundown neighborhood on a flood plain, just 1,100 feet from an elementary school attended by 400 pupils. The question is why. (2000-03-19)

Michael Medved (Jewish World Review): Oscars: Will Hollywood do its duty or follow its heart? LIKE SO MANY OTHER conflicts in our culture, the Oscar race comes down to an epic battle between two urgent but irreconcilable messages. On March 26, the Academy voters will choose as best picture either a film that urges viewers to Follow Your Heart, or else they will honor another top contender that says to its audience, Do Your Duty. (2000-03-21)

Robert Novak (Chicago Sun-Times): McCain faces push to reconcile with Bush. California Secretary of State Bill Jones, who switched from George W. Bush to John McCain in February, is in the forefront of McCain's supporters who want him to quickly endorse Bush for president. (2000-03-19)

Camille Paglia (Salon Magazine): The pussy-whipped princelings of the press corps. Shame on the media for mistaking a stunted Uriah Heep for a real man; all hail Rush Limbaugh's cultural indispensability! (2000-03-15)

Kathleen Parker (Jewish World Review): It's common sense to restrict Internet usage in libraries. TED'S JAW DROPPED perceptibly as I described how easily he could find pornography on the Internet. It's as simple as pushing a button, I said. No, it couldn't be that easy, he said. It's that easy. (2000-03-21)

Richard Reeves (richardreeves.com): The Story So Far. So much for campaign reform — financial and esthetic. The big story of the first nomination campaigns of the 21st Century is that negative works. The campaign reformers were defeated by negative commercials, negative debating and below-the-belt, below-press-radar telephone and direct mail campaigns. So what else is new? (2000-03-10)

Robert Paul Reyes (Forth Worth StarTelegram): THE POPE'S APOLOGY. Allow me to preface my remarks by stating that is not my intent to single out the Catholic Church as a particularly evil religion. Any institution that has survived for two millennia is bound to have a few dark chapters in its history. The Catholic Church has done much more good than harm, but we must all seek to make amends for any mistakes that we have committed. That said, a few pious words of contrition and a few tears, no matter how sincere, can't atone for 2,000 years of mortal sins and grievous shortcomings. (2000-03-20)

Stuart Rothenberg (RollCall): Travels With Stu: Politics and Cocktails In South Carolina. The folks sitting at the bar at Montague's cocktail lounge during happy hour Monday afternoon preferred Texas Gov. George W. Bush over Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) by a 10-4 vote, with two votes for Alan Keyes. That may not be stunning news considering that the upscale restaurant and watering hole in Greenwood seems to cater to prosperous Republicans. (2000-03-17)

William Safire (NY Times): Contrasting Elections. The first great test of a new democracy is not only in the way its government tolerates opposition, but whether it is willing to transfer power to that opposition after a fair election. (2000-03-20)

Walter Shapiro (USA Today): Florida school plan watched closely. After more than three decades as a teacher and a school administrator, Earl Lennard knows a thing or two about educational accountability. In fact, the Hillsborough County school superintendent has $8,250 of his own money riding on how well Tampa-area schools and their students perform on a battery of statewide exams known as the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Tests (FCAT).(2000-03-16)

Tony Snow (Detroit News): Al Gore has thrown down the gauntlet! He has raised the bar! He has drawn a line in the sand! He has challenged George W. Bush to debate him twice a week on national television from now until Nov. 7. Before exploring the merits of his proposal, read carefully the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. It says: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." (2000-03-16)

Joe Sobran (sobran.com): Lesser Evils. As a rule, conservatives support the presidential candidate of the Republican Party, and more often than not with reluctance. To vote for a smaller, purer conservative party, the saying goes, is to “waste” one’s vote and help ensure a Democratic president. Safer to settle for an imperfect Republican president, a Nixon, a Ford, a Bush, a Dole, who at least has a chance of winning. (2000-03-02)

Thomas Sowell (Jewish World Review): A friend like Iago. AS POLITICIANS SCRAMBLE to get votes this election year, those seeking the votes of blacks are pulling out all the stops in denouncing "racism" and promoting paranoia. If they cannot find enough racism for their purposes in the present, then they go back into the past, reliving the march to Selma or even resurrecting racial grievances from World War II, more than half a century ago. (2000-03-21)

Cal Thomas (Jewish World Review): The death of Life. TIME, INC. has announced it will stop regular publication of Life magazine in May. In the future, Life will appear occasionally to mark "special events.'' Suspended as a weekly in 1972, Life returned as a monthly publication in 1978. Born in 1936 out of Henry Luce's mind, Life was a regular guest in my childhood home and millions of others. (2000-03-21)

Emmett R. Tyrrell (Spectator): Demon Tea. As the American electorate rouses itself to contemplate who might best lead the country over the next four years, the voters find themselves beset by an unanticipated issue. Recent revelations in the Los Angeles Times force voters to ask whether this great Republic, the only superpower left on earth, can risk electing as president a man with a record of bladder problems? (2000-03-17)

Jeannette Walls (MSNBC - Gossip): Dish on Garland, from Garland. The dishy new biography of Judy Garland, excerpted in Vanity Fair and out next month, had an inside source: Judy herself. In “Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland,” author Gerald Clarke reveals such salacious details as how Garland walked in on her husband Vincent Minnelli with another man and how she once went after her young son, Joey, with a butcher knife. (2000-03-21)

Debb Weiss (Drudge Report): Radical Chic Redux. Last Thursday in Fulton County, Georgia, a man named Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin allegedly shot two sheriff's deputies, Ricky Kinchen and Aldranon English, as they attempted to serve him with an arrest warrant. Though Deputies Kinchen and English didn't know it at the time, they weren't dealing with just any old bad guy. (2000-03-20)

George Will (Sacramento Bee): Bush-Powell in 2000. At the Betty Ford Clinic for Recovering McCainaholics, despondent journalists are in a 12-step program for coping with the boredom that is, they believe, their fate, now that their hero has been sidelined. Any journalists capable of being bored when this continental superpower is choosing a chief executive need career counseling more than therapy. However, perhaps they can be stimulated by speculation about "state" or "category" strategies for selecting vice presidential nominees. (2000-03-19)

Copyright © 1997-2000
Andrew Zak