This issue: August 1, 2011 (Vol. 16, No. 43)

Republican Virtue

BY WILLIAM KRISTOL

O tempora, o mores! O Cicero, if thou couldst be with us now! The corruption of our age is approaching that of your own! Who today speaks for the ancient Roman—and modern American—virtues of civic duty and personal responsibility?

Here’s who: the House Republicans.

The federal government has a problem. It’s hitting a debt ceiling limit passed into law last year by the Democratic Congress, and signed by President Obama. It’s doing so because of appropriations passed by ...

He Can’t Help Himself

Obama would rather pander than win.

BY FRED BARNES

The path to ratification by Congress was greased after President Obama renegotiated trade treaties with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama. Obama would supply Democratic votes.  Republicans were already on board, President Bush having put together the treaties in the first place. It had the look of a done deal.

It wasn’t. In May, the White House suddenly insisted the treaties be accompanied by roughly $1 billion in Trade Adjustment Assistance, or TAA as it’s known in Washington. Organized labor was demanding TAA funds be set aside for workers whose jobs might be lost as a result of the treaties. Obama took up the cause. 

Rolling Back the Nanny State

One red-light camera at a time

BY JONATHAN V. LAST

Last March the city council in San Bernardino voted 5-0 to kill their red-light camera system. Since the cameras were installed in 2005, the program had brought them little but grief. In 2008, the city was caught shortening the timing of yellow lights in order to gin up more citations. Later that year a California appellate court ruled that the city’s contract with the red-light camera service American Traffic Solutions (ATS) was in violation of state law. And in 2010, a county court ruled that images from red-light cameras were inadmissible hearsay. The cameras were such a debacle for San Bernardino that in the end the city paid ATS $110,000 to get out of a contract that would have kept the cameras in place until 2014.

What Price Tenure?

Pretty high, unless you have it.

BY HELEN RITTELMEYER

Until it was amended in 1994, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act included an exception for universities, permitting them to set a mandatory retirement age of 70 for tenured faculty. Out of all America’s employers, universities were among the handful that Congress worried would be overburdened with seventysomethings not exhausted by decades at their jobs, not enticed by the relaxations of retirement, not removable by some sort of performance review, and yet nowhere near valuable enough to justify their salaries. It’s possible that Congress suspected what Naomi Schaefer Riley has tried to prove: that tenured professors have ...

For the Record

David Skinner, Witness

BY DAVID SKINNER

Walking around the block recently, looking at the foundation of a new house going up, I remembered one of the most important days of my life. I was five years old. My parents had purchased a house—this was in Queens in 1978—on a double lot. They split the property in two and were building a second house on the empty half. The plan was for us to move into the new house when it was finished and sell the old house.

My father, an architect, had designed the new house, which at this point was only a cement foundation—what would soon be our basement floor, some 10 feet down, with walls that rose to ground level. It looked like a huge open cement box ...

Headache Hysteria

The Scrapbook was amused last week when it was revealed that Republican representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota suffers from migraines and occasionally takes medication for them. Not amused by the migraines, of course—from which The Scrapbook occasionally suffers, too, and which are no fun—but by the fact that Bachmann’s rivals and detractors should have resorted to such a transparent, not to say sexist, device to undermine her presidential candidacy.

On the matter of migraines, at any rate, it didn’t work. The congresswoman was obliged to release a letter from the attending physician of the House, attesting to Bachmann’s good health ...