ILF POST

By Nicholas Johnson
Compassionate Maturity
President George Bush has characterized himself a “compassionate conservative.” However appropriately you may think that label applies to our president, we’ve had some evidence recently that the phrase, compassionate conservative, is not the oxymoron many Democrats believe it to be.
As general semanticists were trying to get us to understand [...]

By Nicholas Johnson Twenty-five or thirty years ago the FCC came to a fork in the road. Baseball’s Yogi Berra advised, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” And so they took it.
In fact we were all taken.
Taken down the fork of deregulation that ultimately led to a [...]

By Nicholas Johnson President Bush’s authorization of NSA spying on American citizens raises issues more deserving of books than a column. Topping the list are potential political abuses that would make President Richard Nixon’s bungled burglary of the Democratic Party’s Watergate offices look like a kindergarten prank.
Other issues abound.

By Nicholas Johnson Our university’s departing president, David Skorton, concedes, ‘When the median family income in Iowa is around $45,000 and I make over $300,000, it’s hard to argue that is not a lot of money. It’s very generous.
When I ran for Congress I pledged my personal pay would be set by my constituents’ median [...]

By Nicholas Johnson To claim that “Spending money to further political views is freedom of expression, pure and simple,” states both too much and too little.
My commitment to the First Amendment began with a clerkship to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black, and only intensified since. But the more one [...]

By Nicholas Johnson** Perspective on Military Murder and the Mission at Hand* Murder is wrong, whether during wars abroad or breaches of the peace at home.
Moreover, as Israeli soldier Haim Watzman writes in the New York Times, “morality in combat is not just an abstract principle. It is an [...]