George Will

Columns

• Paul Ryan: charting our way to solvency - 2/7/2010

  In 2013, when President Mitch Daniels, former Indiana governor, is counting his blessings, at the top of his list will be the name of his vice president: Paul Ryan.

• Obama's budget: a future rooted in the past - 2/4/2010

  On Day One of his vow to take "meaningful steps to rein in our debt," Barack Obama asked Congress to freeze portions of discretionary domestic spending.

• State of the union: A brain divided will not stand - 1/31/2010

  Barack Obama tiptoed Wednesday night along the seam that bifurcates the Democratic Party's brain. The seam separates that brain's John Quincy Adams lobe from its Sigmund Freud lobe.

• A campaign finance 'reform' wisely struck down - 1/28/2010

  Last week's Supreme Court decision that substantially deregulates political speech has provoked an edifying torrent of hyperbole.

• Massachusetts gives Obama a mandate to moderate - 1/24/2010

  Churchill's wife said that his being turned out of office by British voters in July 1945 — the war in the Pacific still raged, and he had just returned from the Potsdam conference — might...

• Congress prepares to jump off the constitutional cliff - 1/17/2010

  You know the foreboding you feel while watching the steamier Greek tragedies, when dynasties are falling and sons are marrying their mothers and everyone is behaving badly and you are thinking:...

• Health reform legislation raises constitutional questions - 1/14/2010

  Although Democrats think their health care legislation faces smooth sailing to implementation, there is a rock dead ahead — a constitutional challenge to the legislation's core.

• California: Liberalism's laboratory is golden no longer - 1/10/2010

  Dalton Trumbo (1905-1976) was a hero to the American left, partly because of his 1939 anti-war novel "Johnny Got His Gun."

• College football: the pigskin piggy bank that keeps giving - 1/7/2010

  In 1957, Queen Elizabeth, attending a Maryland-North Carolina football game, asked Maryland's governor, "Where do you get all those enormous players?" He replied, "Your majesty, that's a very...

• Not-so-eminent domain: A blight grows in Brooklyn - 1/3/2010

  BROOKLYN — On Aug.

• Since the dawn of time, out of catastrophe, renewal - 12/31/2009

  Already 99.9 (and about 58 more 9s) percent of the universe — it is expanding lickety-split — is beyond Earth's atmosphere.

• The Catholic Church's courtship of Anglicans may have consequences - 12/24/2009

  Late in life, the mother of the Rev. Thomas Reese, S.J., began attending mass at a Southern California church, the congregation of which soon became Spanish-speaking.

• Climate and health care: a pair of dubious achievements - 12/22/2009

  It was serendipitous to have almost simultaneous climaxes in Copenhagen and Congress. The former's accomplishment was indiscernible, the latter's was unsightly.

• Film brings to life the lifelessness of the laid-off American worker - 12/20/2009

  "Last year," Ryan Bingham says, "I spent 322 days on the road, which means that I had to spend 43 miserable days at home."

• Congress is out of its league on the BCS debate - 12/13/2009

  Two Saturdays ago, the nation was one tick of a Texas clock away from a cultural crisis.

• Why Ron Paul is wrong to play politics with the Fed - 12/10/2009

  They all laughed at Fulton and his steamboat, Hershey and his chocolate bar ...

• The Copenhagen summit: Earth's next last chance - 12/6/2009

  With 20,000 delegates, advocates and journalists jetting to Copenhagen for planet Earth's last chance, the carbon footprint of the global warming summit will be the only impressive consequence of the...

• Obama's Afghanistan 'surge': This will not end well - 12/3/2009

  A traveler asks a farmer how to get to a particular village. The farmer replies, "If I were you, I wouldn't start from here."

• Rocky Mountain medical high - 11/29/2009

  DENVER — Inside the green neon sign, which is shaped like a marijuana leaf, is a red cross.

• The Christmas calculations of Scroogenomics - 11/26/2009

  Another huge value-destroying hurricane is about to slam America, destroying billions of dollars of value. Another Katrina? No, another Christmas.

• Environmentalists ignore oil's expanding frontiers - 11/22/2009

  What city contributed most to the making of the modern world? The Paris of the Enlightenment and then of Napoleon, pioneer of mass armies and nationalist statism? London, seat of parliamentary...

• Fighting a coercion clause in health care reform - 11/19/2009

  PHOENIX, Ariz.

• A picture can lie — and it matters when one does - 11/15/2009

  The 20th century was 100 years of amplitude.

• The U.S. is setting a gold standard on debt - 11/13/2009

  One of the many television commercials exhorting viewers to buy gold says solemnly that it is an asset whose value "has never dropped to zero," a boast that surely sets a record for minimalism.

• Despite alarm, no climate for a change treaty - 11/8/2009

  Intelligent people agree that, absent immediate radical action regarding global warming, the human race is sunk. That is a tautology because those who do not agree are, definitionally, unintelligent.

• Hamid Karzai: relying on our stranger in Kabul - 11/4/2009

  Actress Cate Blanchett, who has played Queen Elizabeth I, is performing here, portraying someone less than regal — flurried, anxious Blanche DuBois, in Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named...

• When public disclosure becomes liberal coercion - 11/1/2009

  SEATTLE — Conservatives here, a droll minority, say that under this city's quota system, when a conservative enters the city, one already here is required to leave.

• Kerlikowske could inject a dose of realism into drug war - 10/29/2009

  During his immersion in his new job, Gil Kerlikowske attended a focus group of 7-year-old girls and was mystified by their talk about "farm parties."

• Michele Bachmann: the GOP's new lightning rod - 10/25/2009

  When Marcus Bachmann came home that Saturday evening in 2000 he checked the telephone answering machine and was mystified by the many messages congratulating his wife for something.

• An entitlement to which seniors are not entitled - 10/22/2009

  Three years before Rep.