Author: William L. Anderson

In the late 1980s, as federal prosecutors in Manhattan (where Rudy Giuliani was the U.S. Attorney) were leaking information to the media about the alleged misdeeds of investment banker Michael Milken, the Milken team asked to meet with federal officials. Milken and his lawyers believed that what Milken was doing was legal but perhaps misunderstood, and their stated purpose for meeting was to help “clear up” any misconceptions that federal agents and the media, which already had received illegal leaks from prosecutors about grand jury testimony, might have had. After the meeting began, however, Milken’s team quickly realized that the … Continue reading →

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A century ago this week, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia ushered in a century of mass murder, starvation, summary execution of millions of people, destruction of ancient social institutions, wars, a vast network of death camps, and the evisceration of liberty, at one time, of a third of the planet. According to the New York Times, we should be mourning the passage of this era and all of its promises of a better life for all. You read that correctly. For the past few months, leading up to the centennial of when the followers of Lenin and Trotsky overthrew the … Continue reading →

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When Candice Jackson was appointed as a deputy director in the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education, I knew she would be a lightning rod for her libertarian views – and she was. That most people on the left hate libertarianism (or any kind of civil liberties at all – a far cry from the leftists of yesteryear) was driven home to me when Annie Waldman of Pro Publica and Edwin Rios of Mother Jones contacted me for interviews – and I accepted. More than a decade ago, Jackson and I co-authored a number of articles … Continue reading →

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Once upon a time, the Great and Learned People of our society believed that we could have our own form of communism without all of the starvation, mass executions, and imprisonment that marked the establishment of communism abroad. When Leonard Silk, economics editor of the New York Times, wrote The Economists in 1978, he named his chapter on John Kenneth Galbraith, “Socialism Without Tears.” Yes, “American Exceptionalism” also extended to the imposition of socialism that would bypass the death and chaos that marked the communist “experiments” in the USSR, China, and Southeast Asia. Galbraith believed that the Soviet economy would … Continue reading →

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Having become a fan of Michael Lewis’ The Big Short (after watching the movie on DVD), I am fascinated at how some savvy Wall Streeters found a way to short mortgage bonds which were on their way to becoming toxic securities. Granted, anyone with a brain should have known that the go-go mortgage market of a decade ago was unsustainable, but I’m not sure that many people with brains, economically speaking, still reside in the United States. (For the record, I told members of the Allegany County, Maryland, board that assess houses for property tax purposes in May 2006 that … Continue reading →

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When Congress passed the Higher Education Amendments of 1972 as an addition to the Higher Education Act of 1965, many of us cheered, and we especially cheered Title IX of the act which stated: No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. At the time, I was a member of the all-male University of Tennessee track and field team and we were treated quite well. Our squad was scholarship-laden and we … Continue reading →

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When I first saw the accusations against Duke University lacrosse players a decade ago, my first reaction was the reaction of most people who read about the story: horror and disgust. “Was there any limit to how far drunken college athletes will take awful behavior?” I wondered. As a former collegiate athlete myself at a high-powered Division-I program in the early 1970s, I was well-aware that male athletes and alcohol often made a combustible mix that could easily run someone off the rails into activities that clearly broke the law. According to the accusations, which in a short time moved … Continue reading →

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The recent death of Harper Lee, author of the popular 1960 book, To Kill a Mockingbird, once again has put that book and its storyline into public discussion. Lee’s story – that a black man in a small Alabama town during the Great Depression is falsely accused of raping a white woman and is defended by attorney Atticus Finch – depicts things that were good and bad about life in the 1930s South, and also has made Finch into a timeless hero. Lee based her story, in part, on the infamous Scottsboro Boys Case in Alabama during the 1930s, which … Continue reading →

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The Washington Post now KNOWS why Peyton Manning “sexually assaulted” former University of Tennessee athletic trainer Jamie Naughright: She “may have” accused him of cheating in class. Scoop! Well, maybe not. We don’t know, since there are a few pages of Naughright’s lawsuit that the Post claims could be cheating accusations that are not released to the media, but since Al Jazeera recently claimed that Peyton Manning used steroids during the year he recovered from neck surgery in 2011, why, everyone KNOWS that Manning is a cheater. (Google searches tell me that the Post has taken upon itself to be … Continue reading →

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Shortly after Super Bowl 50 ended with a humiliating defeat for the heavily-favored Carolina Panthers, led by quarterback Cam Newton, Newton and Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning shook hands on the field and exchanged greetings and comments, with Manning (who has suffered his own humiliating losses in previous Super Bowls) offering encouragement, then each went his own way. Unfortunately for Newton, he later would have an infamous press conference in which he showed up wearing a “hoodie,” mumbled some answers to questions, and then would walk out after three minutes, leaving the press astonished. Not surprisingly, the sports media jumped … Continue reading →

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Once upon a time in a faraway place known as Cambridge, Massachusetts, a young economist named Paul Krugman used to do research and analysis like other young economists. As young Krugman advanced in his career, however, he found that doing good research had its problems, the first of which is that research, when done correctly, tends to go against the grain of what the political classes and their media allies want people to believe. Economic analysis especially is troublesome for the political and media classes because good economists insist on invoking the Law of Scarcity and Opportunity Cost, and such … Continue reading →

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In the early morning hours of May 21, 2015, more than 10 FBI agents with guns drawn invaded the home of prominent physics professor Xiaoxing Xi, the chairman of the physics department of Temple University, and arrested the highly-honored scientist for allegedly spying for his native country of China. Agents handcuffed Xi in front of his wife and two children and paraded him for the television cameras and held him under $100,000 bond. The massive show of force, at least to the local journalists, was “proof” that this mild-mannered physicist was nothing but another Chinese spy, and that, thank goodness, … Continue reading →

Accused: My Fight for Truth, Justice, & the Strength to Forgive, by Tonya Craft with Mark Dagostina, BenBella Books, 2015, 348 pages, Hardback. To give a brief synopsis of Accused, Catoosa County, Georgia, authorities in 2008 charged Craft, then a kindergarten teacher, of 22 counts of child molestation, with the three accusing children being two daughters of former friends, along with her own daughter. Not surprisingly, she lost her job, her two children, her home, and was vilified in the local media. Craft endured a five-week trial in April and May of 2010, and in the end, the jurors declared … Continue reading →

Scott S. Powell, a fellow of the Discovery Institute, has written an excellent essay on how the radicals of the hard left have captured the Democratic Party. As one whose working colleagues mostly fit the stereotype of the leftist Democrats, I can see firsthand that Powell was correct about what Democrats have become. While Powell pretty much is right about the Democrats, he misses almost everything about the modern Republican Party and its intellectual forebears, whose ideas in many ways mirror those of the political opposition and, more important, provide a means for establishing a brand of American totalitarianism that … Continue reading →

On Tuesday, July 14, Mark Weiner exited the regional jail in Charlottesville, Virginia, having been incarcerated there for a crime he never committed. He was facing nearly a decade in prison after being falsely accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a woman in Charlottesville, a woman who had requested a ride, and then proceeded to lie to police and the courts about what happened. The case was bizarre from the beginning, and the entire story is told masterfully by Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick, a Charlottesville resident who was skeptical about the case from the beginning, and whose July 16 account pretty … Continue reading →