Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:42:30 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Paul Greenberg :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Paul+Greenberg istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/king-stands-as-the-standard/69868/ Mon, 21 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST History is up to its old tricks again. The radical agitator of one generation becomes the conservative icon of another. Martin Luther King Jr. meets the very definition of an American conservative, that is, someone dedicated to preserving the gains of a liberal revolution. Even when he was leading the civil rights movement, what appeal could have been more conservative or more American than his now classic speech before the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963? "I say to you today, my friends, that... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/politics-of-envy/66096/ Thu, 8 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST It's time I faced it. There some things that are just beyond my limited understanding. Like the latest hubbub over the concentration of wealth in American society. It happens every time the economy has a growth spurt. Naturally those at the top, often enough the entrepreneurs and investors who made the growth possible, reap the benefits. As in the 1920s, aka, the Roaring Twenties. Or throughout the late 19th century as the country underwent perhaps its most intense period of economic... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/verdict-on-truman/64291/ Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST The last time I'd toured the Truman Library, as a young graduate student in history at the University of Missouri, the guide was the library's namesake. Always dapper — after all, he'd been a haberdasher in another failed career — Harry Truman was, well, Trumanesque. He was crisp as the white, pointed handkerchief in the breast pocket of his single-breasted dark blue suit. With his natty bow tie and eyeglasses always in place, he could have stepped out of a political cartoon. He was folksy... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/calm-between-two-storms/43164/ Wed, 8 Nov 2006 00:00:00 EST To everything there is a season. There is a time to campaign and, thank goodness, a time to cease campaigning. Maybe you noticed it when you went out for the paper yesterday morning: a peculiar stillness, a momentary return to sanity. Up and down the street, the yard signs still announced their allegiances, but they no longer seemed to shout. It was if they knew their days — no, their hours — were numbered. The campaign had wound down to its last day, its energy spent. The only tremors left... Paul Greenberg http://www.nysun.com/opinion/fight-for-newspapers/41682/ Tue, 17 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST What's this? A publisher who's tired of gutting his newspaper on orders from corporate headquarters? Jeffrey Johnson has been ousted as publisher of the Los Angeles Times, the L.A. subsidiary of the (Chicago) Tribune Co., for refusing to cut his staff back still further. Imagine that — a publisher who believes that the way to save a newspaper is to maintain and expand its quality, not sacrifice it. A new publisher now has been dispatched from Chicago to make sure the troops in L.A. toe the line... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/language-meter-maid/41345/ Wed, 11 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST I now stand accused of committing poetry. The accusation is made by someone who identifies herself only as the Language Meter Maid. Instead of handing out parking tickets, she prowls the prosaic world looking for inadvertent poems. It must be like searching for sprigs of grass in the cracks of the sidewalk. The lady stays on the lookout for found poems — writing not meant to be poetry but that is perceived as such by a reader. She claims to have found such a poem in a column of mine. It seems... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/elevating-public-discourse/41168/ Mon, 9 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST The economists have a term for it: opportunity cost — the benefits forgone when an investor puts his capital into one project rather than another. His choice may prove profitable, but another choice might have been even more so — and so he's lost the difference between the two. That's the opportunity cost, and it can be measured not just in dollars but in time or energy or anything else of value. Politicians, like the rest of us, make much the same mistake when, given a chance to score... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/playing-the-southern-card/39125/ Wed, 6 Sep 2006 00:00:00 EST You may not think of Delaware as a Southern state but Joe Biden, its senior senator, has just redrawn the Mason-Dixon line. The way he describes Delaware, it sounds almost Southern. Why would he want to do that? Maybe because he's one of the many presidential contenders and pretenders already lining up at the gate two years before Aught-Eight. And there are all those Southern presidential primaries to think about. Asked how he would do down South against rivals from there, Joe (Bubba) Biden... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/sophocles-at-fenway/38643/ Mon, 28 Aug 2006 00:00:00 EST BOSTON — The function of baseball at its best is that of any high art: to take us out of ourselves, to recall us to life, to disrupt the normal unhappiness. It breaks up what Walker Percy called the malaise of everydayness, and reintroduces us to the sublime. That's why I'm in this milling crowd inching its way toward storied Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox and field of too-often broken dreams. Sunday in the park with Ramirez and Papelbon and Youkilis is a kind of high holiday. The crowd... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/judge-taylor-confuses-the-constitution/38378/ Wed, 23 Aug 2006 00:00:00 EST Who is Anna Diggs Taylor and what does she have against national security? The answer to the first question is: a U.S. district judge in Detroit.The answer to the second is as mysterious as the decision she handed down Thursday. In her 44-page ruling, Judge Taylor ordered the National Security Agency to stop monitoring international calls to and from this country, aka "domestic spying" in New York Times style. The judge found the practice not just illegal but unconstitutional. And also... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/big-mistake-2006-08-16/37966/ Wed, 16 Aug 2006 00:00:00 EST A columnist in the Washington Post has figured out the big problem in the Middle East: the state of Israel. Yep, it should never have opened for business. It's an historic mistake. To quote Richard Cohen: "The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians)... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/ending-wars/37031/ Mon, 31 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EST Is the current unpleasantness in the Mideast now approaching the endgame? On the contrary, this doesn't even look like the end of the beginning. With no desire to occupy the south of Lebanon again, and no clear alternative in sight to Hezbollah's rule there, the Israelis might have preferred to conduct a guerrilla war, striking and withdrawing, much like the one Hezbollah has been waging against them. But such a war could go on approximately forever. Now the Israelis are talking vaguely about... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/bleeding-chess-pieces/36581/ Mon, 24 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EST Every war, as a practical-minded American general named Eisenhower once noted, will surprise you. Cry havoc, let slip the dogs of war, and whom they will turn on is never as clear as the armchair generals, or even the real ones, may imagine. And this Arab-Israeli war may be different from all the others. For one thing, it isn't an Arab-Israeli war, not yet, but an Islamist-Israeli war. Surprisingly, the Arab League withheld its automatic stamp of approval for any and all assaults on Israelis... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/back-in-force/36202/ Tue, 18 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EST If not all Hell, then a lot of it is breaking loose in the Middle East. The tempo of terror and counterterror has been mounting for weeks, and is now headed for a crescendo. First came Hamas' attack and seizure of a hostage on an Israeli army outpost a couple of weeks ago, which had been preceded by a steady rain of rockets on the Israeli town of Sderot. Result: Israeli forces are now in and out of Gaza again, and hunting down Hamas leaders. The word from Hamas headquarters in Damascus is that... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/low-ebb/35913/ Wed, 12 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EST American conservatism is at one of its low ebbs. Conservatives seem divided, dejected, and drifting, caught between anger and indecision. The polls and pundits tell us that the political party we've made ours is headed for setbacks in the congressional elections, and further defeats loom ahead. Of course, I'm talking about the state of American conservatism in 1958, when the Grand Old Party took a fall in that year's midterm elections. That's when Whittaker Chambers wrote a letter to his young... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/taxation-without-respiration/34215/ Fri, 9 Jun 2006 00:00:00 EST "The old maxim says that there are only two things in life that we can't avoid, death and taxes, but why pile on by combining the two?" - Edward C. Prescott, 2004 Nobel laureate in economics This is what it comes down to in the end: We want their money when they die, or at least a lot of it. After all the fanciful rationalizations in favor of the estate tax, aka death tax, have been held up to the light and found wanting, it's hard to think of any other reason for this kind of confiscatory... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/parallel-presidencies/33962/ Tue, 6 Jun 2006 00:00:00 EST A stubborn president, determined to end a war that has bogged down, watches his standing in the polls slip month by month, year by year. His dramatic victory in the last presidential election now seems long ago; his popularity sinks to historic lows for an American president. He has become an object of derision and even a little pity. As one wit put it, "To err is Truman." And yet, confident that he had chosen the right course and that he would be vindicated by history, Harry Truman struggled... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/stillness-on-memorial-day-morning/33485/ Fri, 26 May 2006 00:00:00 EST It's 7:20 on a sunny Tuesday morning here in Arkansas, 10 minutes before the polls open all across the state for this year's primary elections. Half a dozen voters drift into the neighborhood fire station to wait, exchange greetings, look at the sample ballots posted on the wall and catch up with old friends they haven't seen in a while. We talk in muted tones, as if waiting to enter a church. Election Day is a kind of democratic communion, in which each citizen rises from his place in the... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/coming-to-america-2006-05-24/33311/ Wed, 24 May 2006 00:00:00 EST They keep coming to America, legal and illegal, by hook or crook, and every couple of decades Congress fixes what is known as the immigration problem. But of course it doesn't stay fixed - because America keeps attracting new waves of immigrants who keep finding new ways to make it in. If immigration is a problem, a greater one would be if America were no longer worth coming to, if people were desperate to get out rather than get in. There are countries like that in the world, lots of them. So... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/waving-a-red-flag/33090/ Fri, 19 May 2006 00:00:00 EST "The indignation shown by many people today at the mention of the very word profits indicates how little understanding there is of the vital function that profits play in our economy." - Henry Hazlitt, "Economics in One Lesson," Chapter XXII: The Function of Profits It was a futile effort, but a game try. The other day, the president of Murphy Oil, whose worldwide headquarters are located at El Dorado, Ark., tried to explain why the oil companies shouldn't be blamed for seeking a "reasonable... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/medal-for-hayden/32747/ Mon, 15 May 2006 00:00:00 EST Some of the honorables in Congress are shocked — shocked! — that George W. Bush would nominate a military man to head the Central Intelligence Agency. To quote Saxby Chambliss, a Republican congressman from Georgia, Gen. Michael Hayden's military background would be a "major problem." How's that again? Wasn't Stansfield Turner, an admiral, head of the CIA back in the Carter administration? Indeed, at last count, 13 of the 19 directors of the agency had served in the military at some time before... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/confessions-of-a-word-addict/29522/ Tue, 21 Mar 2006 00:00:00 EST "There is a disease which consists in loving words too much. Logophilia first manifests itself in childhood and is, alas, incurable." - Peter Ackroyd in The Times of London, March 20, 2002. The letter got my attention from the first. It might have been typed on an old Remington, or maybe a Royal portable, giving it the authority of a time past. And not only did the note evoke the feel of an old-time country newspaper, but it mentioned my alma mater: "Back when I was editor, publisher... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/age-of-arrogance/28608/ Mon, 6 Mar 2006 00:00:00 EST "Declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future; practice these acts. As to diseases, make a habit of two things — to help, or at least to do no harm." — Hippocrates, "Epidemics" The most revealing obituary in the paper the other day was that of a 44-year-old man many must have thought as good as dead for almost a decade — since December of 1995. That's when a burning roof collapsed over the head of the Buffalo, N.Y., firefighter, leaving him blind, brain-damaged, largely mute and... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/amnesiac-america/27013/ Fri, 3 Feb 2006 00:00:00 EST It was ages ago - namely, September of 2001 - when the president of the United States went before Congress and a nation still in shock to ask for the full panoply of wartime powers. Remember? "We will direct every resource at our command," the president vowed, "every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every weapon of war - to the destruction and to the defeat of the global terror network." Every tool of... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/her-kind-of-majesty/26956/ Thu, 2 Feb 2006 00:00:00 EST Democracies have their queens, too. They don't wear crowns; they don't need to. Their crown is their presence among us. And when they pass on, it is as though a landmark in time had been erected. A landmark that reminds us to number our own days, and ask if we have been loyal to her majesty. Such will be the days of mourning for Coretta Scott King, who not only stood by her husband but by her country, by which she meant what it might yet be. Stood by? No, not just stood by, but walked ahead... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/when-domestic-spying-isnt/25173/ Fri, 30 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EST The slam-bang, thumb-in-the-eye, name-calling, head-butting process known as civil discourse in this country continues unabated, punctuated by the usual terms of endearment: Domestic Spying! Impeachable Offense! Betrayer of the Constitution! DICTATOR! Trying to peer through all the fuss and fustian in order to make some sense of this debate while dodging the flying crockery can be something of a challenge. In those first few days after The New York Times broke this story - or rather only a part... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/darwin-himself-might-be-censored-today/25062/ Wed, 28 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EST It was about time for another monkey trial. For it's been a while since the big one in Dayton, Tenn., starring Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan. Talk about your Clash of Titans! And the color commentary was provided by H.L. Mencken, whom some of us in the newspaper game have been trying to imitate ever since. That splendid cast has never been topped, not that successive generations of litigants haven't tried. Now the same old show is back on the road. It seems a school board in Dover... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/great-and-small/24376/ Tue, 13 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EST 'Be strong and of good courage ..." - Joshua, 1:6 "Stranger, go tell the Spartans that here we are buried, obedient to their orders." - Herodotus, quoting the epitaph for the Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae, 480 B.C. "Fix your eyes on the greatness of Athens, as you have it before you day by day, fall in love with her, and when you feel her great, remember that this greatness was won by men with courage, with knowledge of their duty, and with a sense of honor in action. ... For the whole... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/sowing-the-seeds/24166/ Thu, 8 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EST What's this? The Pentagon is planting pro-American, anti-terrorist stories in the Iraqi press? It's even paying Iraqi papers to print them - either as advertisements or editorials, and sometimes without revealing the source. There are even reports that foreign journalists might be on the American payroll! Shocking. To quote John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee: "A free and independent press is critical to the functioning of a democracy, and I am concerned about any... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/we-like-ike-2005-12-02/23895/ Fri, 2 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EST They've finally chosen a site for the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, and it's in the right neighborhood: just across from the National Mall near the monuments to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR. Who would have thought, when his two terms in the White House ended in 1961, that Ike would be classed in that company? Wasn't he just an amiable duffer in politics, the popular general who muddled through while the country marked time in the conformist 1950s? That was pretty much the gist of... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/crossed-wires/23402/ Tue, 22 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EST On Tuesday, November 15, the U.S. Senate was presented with an opportunity to give the enemy in Iraq just what it would love to have: a timetable for the withdrawal of American forces there. That way, Saddam's holdouts and their terrorist allies could know just when to launch their big offensive against Iraq's new government without fear that it would be crushed by American forces. We live in times when it is necessary to point out the folly of such a move. If you're in any doubt about that... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/realists-who-arent/23106/ Wed, 16 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EST Is there a less realistic school of American foreign policy than the one whose leaders go by the name realists? Again and again, these realists tend to be ambushed by reality. Which is what happens when you try to formulate a foreign policy for a country based on certain ideals - like all men having been created equal with certain unalienable rights - without taking those ideals and their universal appeal into account. Tyrannies collapse, freedom buds, yet the realists are always surprised... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/is-paris-burning-tonight/23011/ Mon, 14 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EST Stories. They can shed a light on the news, even the news to come, like nothing else. One story can be worth a thousand pictures, graphs, statistics, analyses, at least if Theodore Dalrymple, the best social critic writing today, tells it. In part because he knows how to tell the one story that sums up a whole social trend, tragedy or crisis to come. No one who read Dr. Dalrymple's brief but prescient essay, "The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris" three years ago in "City Journal" could have... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/katrinas-cold-comfort/21527/ Fri, 14 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EST Poor, stricken New Orleans could use a comforting friend right now, but instead it seems to have drawn a prosecutor in Franklin (Son of Billy) Graham. Speaking of the disaster that struck the Crescent City, the evangelist threw in a reference to its "satanic worship" and "sexual perversion." Like cause and effect? He wasn't saying New Orleans deserved what it got - not in so many words. But the connection was hard to miss. In short, it's hard to imagine his older, wiser father putting it that... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/next-little-step/21173/ Fri, 7 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EST Once again the ethical markers are being moved. What was once the stuff of sci-fi novels - the creation of human life in order to experiment on it - is being described as a moral imperative. How can that be? Because it's being done for a greater good. That way (and only that way!) lies the cure for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and diabetes and athlete's foot and who knows what other ills. This kind of human cloning is billed as "therapeutic" as opposed to "reproductive" cloning, which is the... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/madame-x/21124/ Thu, 6 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EST This president is just full of surprises. Which can be great fun. It's a deeply satisfying experience to watch the punditry mystified, or even pretend not to be, by his latest nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States. At this point, there may be no better description for Harriet Miers than Unidentified Woman in Background. Madame X may not remain a mystery for very long, but the 15 minutes of non-fame she's enjoying makes for a delicious break from the 24/7 over-exposed world that... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/in-the-wake-of-katrina/19625/ Tue, 6 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EST You can hear it even now, the words of this generation to a future one: "You just can't imagine what New Orleans was like before Katrina. ..." And will never be again. That's not to say the next New Orleans won't be brand new and shiny. That's not to say it won't be bigger and better. It just won't be the same. Not that it would have been the same even if Katrina had passed the city completely by, even if the levees had held, even if there had been no hurricane, no flood, no disaster. For... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/katrina-syndrome/19561/ Fri, 2 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EST Some of us can remember when a Hurricane meant one of those potent drinks you ordered at Pat O'Brien's in the French Quarter - if you had some sufficiently sober escort to prop you up on the way back to your hotel. Just one of those concoctions was enough, probably for a lifetime - or until the souvenir hurricane glass they came in eventually disappeared, or got knocked off the knick-knack shelf in a periodic housecleaning fit. Something else crashed this week besides a lot glassware - the... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/growing-desperate/19414/ Wed, 31 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EST On some public officials, The Honorable isn't just a title but a description, and this John Roberts is starting to look like a combination of Mr. Clean and Judge Parker. Day after day during the August congressional recess, the president's nominee for next associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court has been the target of one jab after another. And not a one has landed. Or come close to landing. Some have boomeranged, like that awful anti-Roberts commercial from NARAL Pro-Choice America. It... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/gaza-disengaged-once-more-without-feeling/18857/ Thu, 18 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EST To paraphrase Dr. Johnson on the subject of second marriages, what the world is witnessing in Gaza is a triumph of hope over experience. Once again the Israelis are pulling back, much as they did after the Oslo Accords of 1993. And once again the Israeli withdrawal is supposed to be the first step toward peace with an Arab neighbor, this time a nascent Palestinian state. It's not the first time. Back in the '90s, the Israelis agreed to pull out of Gaza on the Mediterranean and Jericho on the... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/law-is-the-law/18359/ Wed, 10 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EST The law is the law. And deserves respect. Let that much be said at the outset of this discussion. And at the end of it, too. At least that much should be clear. But everything else about a raid on a poultry-processing plant at Arkadelphia, Ark., the other day is a swirl of moral confusion. Not to say personal chaos and community disruption. A total of 119 workers were picked up and arrested by the feds. At last count, 30 of their children were left behind, some just babies, one only 3 months... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/any-excuse-will-do/18002/ Wed, 3 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EST It's not likely anybody is going to find anything serious to question in the only 40 or so opinions that The Hon. John G. Roberts Jr. has handed down in his still brief tenure as a federal judge; he's known, and respected, as a craftsman in his profession. The reflexive opposition to any nominee of this president who looks suspiciously like a conservative will have to try some other tack. For example, the loaded question. As in: "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Federalist... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/english-resolve-under-fire/17057/ Fri, 15 Jul 2005 00:00:00 EST "As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me." That sentence will be familiar to any Orwell fan. Those are the opening words of the essay, pamphlet, and love letter to his country ("England, Your England") that George Orwell wrote in the winter of 1940 at the height of the Blitz, when Britain stood alone against the whole weight of the Nazi war machine. The words came back on reading about the Blitz of 2005 and the typically British response to it: quiet... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/sons-story-recalls-life-lessons/15618/ Fri, 17 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST It happened in one of those interlocking hallways in the maze that connects the parking garage with a downtown office building in Little Rock - one of those in-between spaces where nothing is supposed to happen. You're on your way from one point, one appointment, one event to another. You're not really there except physically. Your mind is already ahead of yourself, or back at your last stop. In short, you're In Transit. That's when a neat, pleasant-looking gentleman stopped me, and wanted to... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/filibustering-bolton/15349/ Mon, 13 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST John Bolton may finally get his up-ordown vote in the U.S. Senate this week. Or next week. Or the week after. Or maybe never, depending on how long the Democrats can maintain their filibuster against his nomination. Now an undersecretary of state, John Bolton is the president's pick for the next American ambassador to the United Nations, an organization that long has needed a severe talking-to, not to mention a thorough investigation, fumigation, and general overhaul. The oil-for-food scam may... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/respect-and-disrespect/15233/ Fri, 10 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST What do these names have in common - Alice Walton, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Albert C. Barnes, and Charles Robertson? Each of these American philanthropists set out to make a difference - a distinctive, personal difference that would shape the future. Alice Walton's striking vision, to be called Crystal Bridges, is to be built in Arkansas. The plans for it have just been unveiled, but it's already clear that it'll be an American landmark. Miss Alice's splendid collection of American art will be... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/logic-of-mccain-and-kennedys-solution/14870/ Fri, 3 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST It's unlikely, it may even be impossible, to put aside all the feelings evoked by the phrase and red flag Illegal Immigration. Wave those words around often enough, and loudly enough, and you'll produce a debate just as confused as the one in the U.S. Senate over the filibuster - but one that's a lot more volatile. Because this is a subject that excites the people, not just the politicians. Each side has its own banner - "Illegal Aliens" versus "A Nation of Immigrants!" But a slogan is not an... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/art-world-in-a-tizzy/14754/ Thu, 2 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - Michael Kimmelman is unhappy with us here in Arkansas. I know how deeply that piece of news will disturb folks in these parts. Indeed, their first, alarmed reaction may be: Who the heck is Michael Kimmelman? Well, Michael Kimmelman, I'll have you know, is the art critic of the once august New York Times, and, to be accurate, which always takes some of the fun out of things for a journalist, Mr. Kimmelman is not so much upset with us in Arkansas as he is with the venerable... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/great-compromise/14468/ Thu, 26 May 2005 00:00:00 EST Oh, the grand old Duke of York He had ten thousand men; He marched them up to the top of the hill, And he marched them down again. Believe it or not, there are a couple of positive things that have come out of this long march up Filibuster Hill and then down again: (1) The principle of the filibuster has been preserved, which is assuring. A minority should be able to stall the majority but not thwart it. The earlier and better definition of the filibuster - extended debate rather than sheer... PAUL GREENBERG http://www.nysun.com/opinion/war-on-religion/12890/ Wed, 27 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EST Mark Pryor, the junior senator from Arkansas, may not make the news very often, but when he does say something newsworthy, it's a doozy. The other day, he strongly objected to those religious fanatics (fa-nat-ic - anyone who disagrees with you strongly) who have been campaigning against the never-ending filibuster that is denying the president's judicial nominees a straight up-or-down vote in the United States Senate. Mark Pryor wasn't so much challenging these folks' political views but their...