The Record, Bergen County, NJ

Your Views

Feeling impact of 'invisible foot' Syndicated columnist E. J. Dionne's "Democrats' new 'moral majority'-" (Other Views, Jan. 13) illustrates two of the most fundamental errors underlying current liberal thought.

Reasonable Safeguards for Home-Schooled Children

FROM THE MOMENT the four starving Jackson boys were discovered in South Jersey last year, their bodies shrunken, their teeth rotting, the same question was asked over and over again: What about their teachers? Didn't anyone at school notice they were emaciated? The answer was almost as shocking as the discovery of the boys: Local schools didn't know they existed. They were supposedly being home schooled, and New Jersey law regarding home schooling is so lax that parents can do whatever they w...

How Bush's Immigration Plan Will Play in Campaign

LAST WEEK, President Bush stepped forward and announced "We should have immigration laws that work and make us proud." He proposed a new program and struck a mighty blow - for his own reelection chances. The president outlined a plan that would offer illegal immigrants the opportunity to obtain legal status as temporary workers in jobs that "American citizens are not filling." The three-year worker visas they received would not grant them amnesty, he said, but would ensure for them wage and w...

Bush Bashers Are Off the Mark

THE BREATHLESS REVELATION from former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill that the president was disengaged at Cabinet meetings - like "a blind man in a roomful of deaf people" - reinforces the old stereotype that George W. Bush is a taco or two shy of a combination platter. And, in a way, the charge is warranted. Bush definitely must have been asleep on the job to have hired a whiny back-stabber like the former Alcoa chief as his Treasury Department secretary and have waited two whole years befo...

Wrong Message ; High Court Allows Secrecy in Detention Case

THE U.S. Supreme Court has let stand a decision that upholds the Bush administration's policy of secret detentions for hundreds of Arab and Muslim men taken into custody after Sept. 11, 2001. That gives the White House a green light on its use of secrecy in this case - and the wrong message in its conduct of the war on terror. Many of the illegal immigrants, who have since been deported, were held at county jails in Passaic and Hudson counties. Most were never charged with a crime, yet their ...

Who's Watching the Kids? ; Separate Sentences for Enron Mom and Dad

IT'S heartwarming that Andrew and Lea Fastow want to serve their prison terms for their role in the Enron scandal at separate times so that one of them can be home with the children. The couple pleaded guilty yesterday in a deal with prosecutors. Mr. Fastow, the company's former chief financial officer, is expected to serve 10 years in prison, and Mrs. Fastow, a former assistant treasurer at Enron, may serve about five months. They have two young sons. But it would have been even more heartwa...