Commentary - Archive 2012

December 25, 2012
A Voice of Calm in Debate on Guns

In “Living With Guns” Craig R. Whitney, a former correspondent and editor for The New York Times, writes that he is motivated by the belief that “Americans on both sides of the debate about guns can and must find common ground.” He hopes to defuse the prevailing “hysteria” by establishing that both sides are correct in at least one fundamental assertion.
December 24, 2012
The NRA's Vision of "Genuine Monsters"

With Friday's defiant statement, the National Rifle Association massed its troops along familiar fronts in the culture war -- and even opened some new battle lines. But it also squandered an opportunity to participate in reasonable dialogue with an America that has begun losing its appetite for political extremism.
December 24, 2012
Gun Point

In the massacre in Sandy Hook Elementary School of Newtown, Connecticut, a 20-year-old man killed 20 young children and six adults before turning one of his guns on himself. Earlier he had shot his mother at the home that they shared. This event is the latest and most horrific mass murder in the United States during 2012, which has been a very bad year in that respect. Is it possible to make sense of these events? Is it possible to do anything about them?
December 21, 2012
Rallying for Gun Reform

After the massacre of 20 Connecticut schoolchildren and six women who died trying to save them, plans are afoot for a parents' protest for stricter gun laws. More than a decade ago, we had such an event — the Million Mom March — and the lessons are instructive.
December 19, 2012
Can Public Education as We Know it Survive?

Americans are now confronted with two radically different visions of public education. Which vision ultimately prevails will go a long way toward determining the quality of the education available to future generations of children.
December 10, 2012
Evaluating the Quality of Charter Schools and Tertiary Care Hospitals

If Americans judged the quality of hospital care the way Newsweek judges high schools, we would soon be inundated with “charter hospitals” that only treat healthy patients.
December 4, 2012
Jobs Program Would Raise Revenue

The "fiscal cliff" is a rhetorical device designed to hijack the inauguration of new federal programs that would address our nation's mass unemployment crisis. It distracts us from alternatives to reducing the federal budget deficit by other means than massive federal spending cuts.
November 30, 2012
College Football Fans Are Devoted, Right to the End

As another college football season winds down, there is nearly as much talk of conference realignment and television packages as there is of wins and losses. The Big Ten, already earning more than $240 million a year from its own TV network, last week added two more media markets by inviting Maryland and Rutgers to join the conference.
November 26, 2012
Good Neighbors, Bad Border

AT a time when territorial disputes over uninhabited outcrops in the East China Sea have led to smashed cars and skulls in China, a similar, if less dramatic, dispute over two remote rocks in the Gulf of Maine smolders between the United States and Canada.
November 16, 2012
Climate Change a Focus for President in Second Term

In his first press conference since being re-elected, President Barack Obama acknowledged he'll focus on climate change in his second term. "I am a firm believer that climate change is real, that it is impacted by human behavior, and carbon emissions," Obama said at a televised news conference on Wednesday. "And as a consequence, I think we've got an obligation to future generations to do something about it."

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