The next time you see one of those yellow “Support Our Troops” ribbons on a passing car think about what happens after the soldiers come home from war. They become veterans, and supporting veterans usually costs more money than a supposedly grateful nation cares to spend. This seems to happen after every war, but now […]

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Out of Town—But not soon enough? Just when we were exclaiming “at last!” as the 109th Congress was fleeing the Capitol for a two-week Easter recess, some hard-line Republican conservatives, led by Representative Tom Delay of Texas, maneuvered themselves into the life-or-death case of Terri Schiavo. She is the 41-year-old Florida woman now in her […]

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After his retirement from the New York Times in 2003, Adam Clymer, our former colleague there in the Washington bureau, where he was an election campaign correspondent and editor, became a political-statistics specialist. He is one of the most probing and even-handed election analysts and is now in charge of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Election Survey. […]

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An Enron Echo—According to the Wall Street Journal the federal tax collectors at the Internal Revenue Service (I.R.S.) have belatedly learned enough about corporate tax chiseling from the infamous Enron Corporation big wigs that they are now cracking down on other “highly compensated executives.” The Journal says that what’s at stake is “a range of executive compensation issues, including […]

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The real-estate market seems to have become so unreal that we asked a clear-sighted interpreter of the economy, Perry L. Weed, to explain what’s happening. Weed is a retired Washington economist and lawyer whose 30 years in the nation’s capital included Senate and House staff assignments and a position at the U.S. Commerce Department. His […]

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