Retired diplomat Dan Simpson is an ardent supporter of civilian disarmament. He is quite candid in describing what this would entail. In an April 25 opinion column entitled ?The Disarming of America,? Simpson calls for enactment of federal and sta… more »

April is a month crowded with significant anniversaries. Very few are aware of a letter written on April 3, 1777 by British statesman Edmund Burke to the Sheriffs of Bristol, England, a city Burke represented in Parliament. Revered by conservatives… more »

Thomas Hays is an activist whose politics are not to everyone's taste. Born and raised in Missouri, Hays now lives in Seattle, where he's involved in anti-war and anti-globalization protests. In February, Hays applied for a US Passport in order to t… more »

Riyadh Lafta is an Iraqi doctor who participated in a controversial study reporting that the US-led invasion has cost hundreds of thousands of civilian lives. Invited to take part in an April 20 medical conference in Washington State, Dr. Lafta was deni… more »

Taner Akcam, a Turkish refugee, is a well-respected historian teaching at the University of Minnesota. Through diligent research of official Turkish archives, Professor Akcam has documented the horrific slaughter of over a million Armenians by the go… more »

While last week's slaughter of 32 people at Virginia Tech was carried out by a deranged student, the atrocity can reasonably be considered a case of death by government. This is not because the murderer was acting on behalf of the State, but rather b… more »

Were it not for a quirk in his genealogy, the despot born 118 years ago today would have been named Adolf Schickelgruber. This may have aborted the Austrian-born demagogue's political career, since it would have deprived his followers of the percussive… more »

Fourteen years ago today, roughly eighty people ? including seventeen small children ? burned to death at the Mt. Carmel religious retreat outside of Waco, Texas. This occurred after FBI operatives in tanks had pumped an enormous volume of CS gas i… more »

Anybody who has been a teacher or nursery worker understands the difficulty of dealing with defiant children, particularly when the children come from broken homes. Still ? isn't it just a tad excessive to handcuff a six-year-old girl, fingerprint… more »

During George W. Bush's first term, Paul Wolfowitz played a key role maneuvering our nation into the disastrous Iraq war. Like Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Wolfowitz was rewarded for his failures by being appointed head of the World Ba… more »

With the arrival of Tax Day each year, the organs of the prestige press resound with pious talk about the civic duty to pay ?our fair share? of the costs of government. Clergy often get into the act , misapplying the Biblical injunction to render… more »

An Iowa jury has found former Dallas County Sheriff Brian Gilbert guilty of stealing $120,000 in cash seized as suspected drug profits. But this did nothing to stop the routine highway robbery authorized by the federal government as part of the so-calle… more »

Judging by the performance of the Bush administration, one could reasonably conclude that conservatism consists of nothing more than perpetual war, endless deficit spending, consolidation of power in the presidency, and an unflagging hostility to due pr… more »

What does it take to wind up on the Transportation Security Administration's no-fly list? Ask Walter F. Murphy, a professor emeritus at Princeton University. On March 1, Professor Murphy ? a retired Marine Colonel and Korean War veteran ? disco… more »

Four years ago today, US-led forces captured Baghdad. In the city's Fardus Square, a Marine draped an American flag over the face of a huge statue of Saddam Hussein, which was torn down amid cheers from what we were told was a huge throng of jubilant Ir… more »

By the time he was freed on April 3, 24-year-old blogger Josh Wolf had spent seven months in a California federal prison for refusing a federal subpoena. Citing the California journalist shield law, Wolf insisted that he didn't have to provide prosec… more »

If you were asked to write a script for a hostage scenario involving schoolchildren, whom would you cast as the villains? Obvious choices would include Middle Eastern radicals, urban gang-bangers, or demented misfits like the killers from Columbine, Col… more »

In his April 3 press conference, President Bush issued what has to be considered a blackmail threat against Congress in an effort to extract funding to continue the war in Iraq. Congress has passed a funding measure larger than the one Bush requeste… more »

Article 1, Section 2 of the United States Constitution authorizes the federal government to conduct an ?enumeration? of the US population every decade in order to allocate congressional seats and electoral votes. This is the only legitimate and auth… more »

As a military prosecutor at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, Lt. Col. Stuart Couch confronted a poignant dilemma. Couch was assigned to prosecute Mohammadeou Ould Slahi, accused of organizing the hijacking of United Flight 175. That was the pl… more »