George F. Will

Perhaps Prohibition II is being launched because Prohibition I worked so well at getting rid of gin. Or maybe the point is to reassure social conservatives that Republicans remain resolved to purify Americans' behavior.

Seattle--as the comprehensive and sustained attack on Americans' freedom of political speech intensifies, this city has become a battleground. Campaign-finance "reformers," who advocate ever-increasing government regulation of the quantity, timing and content of political speech, always argue that they want to regulate "only" money, which, they say, leaves speech unaffected.

Republicans regret, or say they do, that there are no more "Truman Democrats" --Democrats as hardheaded about national security as was the president who formulated the cold-war policy of containment.

A dragonfly flitted in front of me and stopped on a fence. I stood up, took my cap in my hands, and was about to catch the dragonfly when ...--From "Children of the Atomic Bomb: Testament of Boys and Girls of Hiroshima"HIROSHIMA--"When" was the first time in history that thousands of people were killed in an instant. "When" was 8:15 a.m., 61 summers ago.

Cascading events in the middle east call to pessimistic minds one of the reasons for modern pessimism--the events that caused the guns to roar in Europe 92 Augusts ago.

The Sunday before the 2004 election, some Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Russia living in the Cleveland area gathered at a suburban party center to eat deviled eggs and dark bread and hear Russian-language exhortations to re-elect George W.

Hartford, Conn.--Ned Lamont, who is 52 and looks younger, is the reason Joseph Lieberman must be feeling all of his 64 years. Lamont wants Lieberman's U.S. Senate seat because he opposes Lieberman's support for the Iraq war.

It was hot on July 20, 1944, at Hitler's headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia, so his meeting with staff was moved out of the underground bunker, which would have contained the explosion's force, to a flimsy cabin that did not.

The unbearable boredom occasioned by most of today's talk about race is alleviated by a slender, stunning new book. In "White Guilt," Shelby Steele, America's most discerning black writer, casts a cool eye on yet another soft bigotry of low expectations--the ruinous "compassion" of a theory of social determinism that reduces blacks to, in Steele's word, "non-individuated" creatures.That reduction is the basis of identity politics--you are your (racial, ethnic, sexual) group.

Twelve days before the 2004 election, James Carville was feeling his oats. In a Beverly Hills living room, he told a cohort of Hollywood liberals they could begin savoring a happy ending to the movie "John Kerry Runs for President":"If we can't win this damn election, with a Democratic Party more unified than ever before, with us having raised as much money as the Republicans, with 55 percent of the country believing [the country is] heading in the wrong direction, with our candidate having won...

Norwood, Ohio--in this town, which is surrounded by Cincinnati, there is a field surrounded by a high chain-link fence. Across a street on one side of the field is a residential neighborhood of modest homes.

Michael Bourn needs to get out more. A database programmer in Nashua, N.H., he created the Web site plunkbiggio.blogspot.com that tells everything -- really, everything-- about the 273 times that Craig Biggio of the Astros has been hit by a pitch, the modern major-league record.On average, Biggio's plunks have occurred 493 feet above sea level, up 36 feet after two plunkings last year in Denver.

March madness, indeed. College basketball's version adds to the public stock of harmless pleasure. That cannot be said of what the political class has been up to.

Last week the Supreme Court heard arguments for and against the proposition that "entrepreneurial federalism" is unconstitutional. No one used that phrase, but it captures what the court is pondering: When states compete to attract businesses by offering tax and other incentives, are they violating the Constitution's Commerce Clause?

The electorate's dyspeptic mood about the nation's politics reflects the fact that, as is frequently the case, the party in power in Washington has done much to earn a rebuke but the opposition party has done nothing to earn a reward.

One thinks twice, even thrice, before using in a magazine as decorous as NEWSWEEK the four-letter F word that causes so much discord. But words should not be minced.

For many months the nation has reverberated with the clanging certitudes that swirl around today's process of confirming Supreme Court justices. Last week the first major decision handed down by the Roberts Court demonstrated the problematic nature of the simplifying categories by which justices and rulings are characterized.

Seeking the serenity that a sense of history confers in testing times, Mike Cameron, a Mets outfielder in 2005, said in defense of a teammate who lost a fly ball in the sun, "Stuff is going to happen sometimes.

Attacks on freedom of political speech are becoming more brazen. Because the attackers aim to enlarge government's control of the political campaigns that decide who controls government, the attacks advance liberalism's program of extending government supervision of life.Some liberal senators have filed a brief urging the Supreme Court, in a case concerning Vermont's speech restrictions, to affirm that people like the seven senators--"elected representatives and seasoned participants in the...

While gambling at the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, Ayhan Hakimoglu chose to accept from the casino many free drinks. That, he said, was why he lost "substantial" sums and why he sued the casino, charging that it "intentionally and maliciously enticed him" on numerous occasions.

On Jan. 26, 1983, phone service through-out area code 205, which then included all of Alabama, crashed from overload. Was the cause a natural disaster? Yes.

For a few conservatives, the accumulation of discontents may have begun building toward today's critical mass in December 2001 with the No Child Left Behind law, which intruded the federal government deeply into the state and local responsibility of education, grades K through 12.

The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 and included a number of "emergency" provisions that were set to expire as early as 1970 but were extended and amended in 1970, 1975 and 1982.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer's new book is more interesting than its author probably intended. "Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution" demonstrates how a posture of judicial "modesty"--Breyer's word--can empower a judge to wield immodest power in cutting down constitutional impediments to a--his--political agenda.Breyer begins by asserting a distinction between what he considers two kinds of liberty--"modern liberty," meaning freedom from government coercion, and...

Dearborn, Mich.--A suitable venue for contemplating organized labor's current disarray is here, at the footbridge over Miller Road. In 1937 it led to the main entrance of the foremost example of America's manufacturing might--the Ford Motor Co.'s River Rouge plant, then the world's most fully integrated car-manufacturing facility, from blast furnaces to assembly line.

Matthew Scully, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, is the most interesting conservative you have never heard of. He speaks barely above a whisper and must be the mildest disturber of the peace.

John Scopes attended high school in Salem, Ill., where his commencement speaker was the town's most famous native son, William Jennings Bryan. Their paths would cross again.Eighty years ago Scopes, 24, a high-school football coach and general-science teacher, attended a meeting in Robinson's drugstore in Dayton, Tenn.

Florida's Supreme Court last week was the latest venue for the movable feast of meretricious arguments by which public-school teachers unions wage war in any city or state where families of poor children try to escape from failing public schools.

In 1988, the arrival of the religious right and social conservatism as formidable and entwined forces in the Republican Party was signaled when Pat Robertson received 25 percent of the vote in the Iowa presidential nominating caucuses, second to Bob Dole's 37 percent.

Invited by the University of Miami to address members of the class of 2005, the columnist repaid this courtesy by telling them that even though they surely had showered before donning their caps and gowns, each of them had about a trillion bacteria feeding on the 10 billion flakes of skin each of us sheds in a day.