Bob Williams
Bob Williams is an emeritus professor (UCLA). He and his wife live on their ranch in California where he writes as an essayist and news/opinion columnist.
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Articles by Bob Williams
July 14, 2007
Dick Cheney has redefined the role of the Vice-President. Many observers have noted that Cheney plays a more prominent role in the administration than any Vice-President in history. Even so, few knew just how much power he has wielded until the data were pulled together and documented in a four-p...
July 02, 2007
President Bush has, for the second time, vetoed a bill which would provide federal funds for expanded stem cell research. As he vetoed the legislation on June 20 Bush said, "America is a nation founded on the principle that all human life is sacred. And our conscience calls us to pursue the possib...
June 15, 2007
The primo shock-jock of our day, Don Imus, has lost his podium, at least for now. He went too far with his thoughtless and often cruel smears of decent people. But that was not why he was fired. He was fired because the advertisers on his show felt the public heat. So only the public felt moral ...
June 15, 2007
I suppose that any columnist is pleased to find an earlier prediction confirmed by later developments, and I confess to feeling the same way. In a column entitled “The making of a neoconservative” which appeared in August of last year I suggested that the formerly liberal Connecticut senator, Joe ...
May 21, 2007
We know that governments can become bloated. We know that governments can become onerous. Therefore we all desire a government as small, efficient and unobtrusive as possible while still carrying out the functions we desire. This shared view has been corrupted, beginning in the 1980s, into an ext...
May 11, 2007
We like to think that the man at the top knows what he is doing and is in control. It’s dismaying to find that this is not always true. We have two cases, and perhaps a third case developing, where the American President became ineffectual with dangerous consequences.
In his recent book, Nixon ...
May 04, 2007
Our best estimate is that as many as 30 more countries will join the nuclear energy club and have the capability of producing nuclear weapons within the next ten to thirty years. Shall the eight to ten countries now having this capability wait and, as each new country comes up, play the nuclear rou...
April 28, 2007
A constitutional crisis is brewing in Washington. The crisis is over who can start a war and who can end a war, and it’s a replay of a crisis we’ve been through before. The House and Senate have passed legislation that would fully fund the war effort for now but would impose a time limit on our co...
April 18, 2007
Trickle-down economics is the informal name of a misbegotten economic theory whose proponents preferred calling it supply-side economics; some called it Reaganomics. The supply-side idea is that the government should structure taxes to reward the corporations and the wealthy more than before. This...