Reader Ray Eckhart sides with Boja Willy on the prison rape issue, drawing on the authority of no less than Nietzsche: The active, aggressive, arrogant man is still a hundred steps closer to justice than the reactive man; for he has absolutely no need to take a false and prejudiced view of the object before him in the way the reactive man does and is bound to do. For that

Andrea Harris of Ye Olde Blogge dissects so-called human rights groups (an operation for which she will surely receive a stern rebuke in the international press) The reason why you won’t see these same people up to the same antics in countries like China, the Sudan, and so forth, is that they knew that they would be deported, if lucky, or jailed, or they might find themselves becoming the victim

Ted Rall. Angry cartoonist. Idiot scribbler. Hemorrhoid sufferer.

Tunku Varadarajan in today’s Opinion Journal joins protein wisdom and Donald Rumsfeld (and yup, pw gets top billing on this here blog!) in the pleasing parade of pragmatism greeting the news that Chinese intelligence has discovered some of our spook gear: We should take a few lessons from this episode. First, our espionage people are doing what they’re paid for. After Sept. 11, this is rather reassuring. If we only

Douglas W. Kmiec, dean, the Catholic University of America School of Law & former constitutional legal counsel to former Presidents Reagan & Bush, argues that Johnny bin Walker should’ve been tried for treason. Writing in The National Review, Kmiec questions the DOJ’s strategy: But here is the problem with the charges brought: They all depend on Walker Lindh’s statements. There is already an aggressive effort to exclude all of these

Daniel Pipes, writing in The New York Post, reflects on the Bush administration’s strategy for fighting terrorism: How well is the Bush administration conducting the war on terrorism? Overall, it deserves high grades, having shown an impressive seriousness of purpose, discipline, and vision. It made winning the war the guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy and almost flawlessly pulled off the military campaign in Afghanistan. It carefully picked out the

Writing in WSJ’s Opinion Journal, Thomas Bray points to the motives undergirding the conservationalist impulse to rid parks of … well, fun: It’s not exactly a new battle. In the early 1900s, with the advent of the automobile, preservationists (and their allies in the horse and stagecoach industries) opposed allowing cars into the park. Now there are some 280 million visits annually to America’s national parks, most of them by

[�]In many different contexts, people have continued to identify the Other by reference to phenotypical features (especially skin colour) which therefore serve as indicative of a significant difference. Moreover, they have continued to use the idea of �race� to label that difference. As a result, certain sorts of social relations are defined as “race relations,” as social relations between people of different “races.” Indeed, states legislate to regulate “race relations,”

“Afghans may have danced in the street and ripped off their burkhas when the war on terror liberated them from the Taliban. But judging from the latest survey by Human Rights Watch, the world might have been better off had the Taliban liberated Washington, D.C., instead. We exaggerate only slightly.” — the opening lines from “The Human Rights Fraud,” today’s WSJ Opinion Journal feature article. The gist: Human rights are

From the “Screw your thirst, Image is Everything” file… In the February issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Cullen Murphy’s column “Lifosuction” illuminates the contemporary cultural cachet of higher education in the U.S.: Thomas M. Menino, the mayor of Boston, is not a flashy fellow. He gets tongue-tied easily, as many of us do, and he lacks the aura of a Willie Brown or a Rudolph Giuliani. But he is a