Editorial columnists

11/24/2009

Edward Achorn: The stimulus that didn’t stimulate
It may not have dawned on people in government, to whom money is no object, or many media pundits, who rubber-stamp their ways, but regular Americans are getting mad.

11/22/2009

Irving C. Sheldon Jr.: Getting ready for bio-terror
COLORADO SPRINGS One could be forgiven a little nostalgia for the 1950s and ’60s, when elementary-school students solemnly crawled under their desks in preparation for the impending mutually assured destruction of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. For the journalists here attending a Heritage Foundation conference last week on weapons of mass destruction, they seemed like the good old days.

Froma Harrop: New London’s unrequited love
Amtrak riders passing through New London, Conn., can catch an odd sight in an otherwise picturesque New England setting: a fancy corporate center standing next to a street grid emptied of nearly all its buildings. This used to be the Fort Trumbull neighborhood, a working-class enclave that would have been largely forgotten had it not been central to a controversial 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on eminent domain — the government’s right to take private property for public use, or, in this case, for a private company.

11/20/2009

M.J. Andersen: War is no favor to Afghan women
When I began writing about Afghanistan’s women, in 1996, the figure on their average life expectancy seemed so improbable I had to double check it. How could it be just 44? Today, it is 42.

11/19/2009

David Brussat: Appeal to the Vatican for artistic sanity
The global art world converges on Rome this weekend, but truth and beauty also hope to sneak in to witness, softly, amid the glare.

Maggie Mahar: If conservatives ran health care
WASHINGTON

11/18/2009

Froma Harrop: Calling on grownups to cut the deficit
Nearly every Republican these days calls for tax cuts and lower deficits, and in the same sentence. Point out that these goals clash — that taxes pay for government and not paying for government causes deficits, and the Republican counters, “We must shrink government, instead.”