George F. Will
- Washington Post Writers Group Updated: 07/04/08 6:38 AM
MECKLENBURG COUNTY, N. C. — The impatient patriots here had splendidly short fuses in 1775. Those who tilled the startlingly red clay or who lived in the town named for George III’s wife Charlotte might have been bemused had they foreseen the annual hoopla that commemorates July 4, 1776.
David Ignatius
- Washington Post Writers Group Updated: 07/04/08 6:38 AM
WASHINGTON — Here’s a crazy idea that’s being discussed by the rulers of the Persian Gulf city-state of Dubai: What if they were to invite Barack Obama and John McCain to come to the desert oasis for a presidential debate?
Nothing symbolizes American independence so much as the routine, often predictable, sometimes infuriating way the country acquires its president. Its citizens decide.
The second woman to ascend to the highest level of the nation’s largest physicians’ group, the American Medical Association, not only brings a Buffalo-area background to the post but promises a strong voice on national health care reform — a voice that should be heard, during this presidential election year.
Clarence Page
- Tribune Media Services Updated: 07/03/08 7:01 AM
As if our military didn’t have its hands full in Iraq and Afghanistan, the head of the Minuteman Project border security group seems to think its members might also make good narcotics cops.
Froma Harrop
- Creators Syndicate Updated: 07/03/08 7:01 AM
Paris was hardly empty of U. S. visitors last week. But there were far fewer American voices than in past years, and the ones you heard were saying things like, “It’s so ex-PEN-sive!”
Robert Samuelson
- Washington Post Writers Group Updated: 07/03/08 7:01 AM
WASHINGTON — Tired of high gasoline prices and rising foods costs? Well, here’s a solution. Let’s shoot the speculators. A chorus of politicians, including John McCain and Barack Obama, blames these financial slimeballs for piling into commodities markets and pushing prices to artificial and unconscionable levels. Gosh, if only it were that simple. Speculator-bashing is another exercise in scapegoating and grandstanding. Politicians either don’t understand what’s happening or don’t want to acknowledge their own complicity.
There. It’s done. With Monday’s enthusiastic approval by state Health Commissioner Richard F. Daines, Erie County Medical Center and Kaleida Health are operating under the authority of a new board. With the easy part out of the way, the member hospitals of the Western New York Healthcare System can now get down to the real job: the critical, long-term task of delivering top-quality hospital care to Western New Yorkers.
Trudy Rubin
- Philadelphia Inquirer Updated: 07/02/08 6:38 AM
Dick Cheney was angry. He was answering questions at a meeting of foreign policy experts in Washington last week. Then he got a query about the U. S. decision to de-list North Korea from the terrorism blacklist.
Robert Mugabe remains in power. There is absolutely no surprise in that, following an exercise in democracy that was anything but democratic. The election that returned him to the presidency of Zimbabwe, which he has held ever since that nation separated from Great Britain, was a sham.
The Supreme Court dealt an unfortunate, but perhaps not crippling, blow to the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law last week, striking down an ancillary component known as the Millionaire’s Amendment.
