Articles and Op-Eds: 2002

Not every New Year's resolution is kept. The year 2002 began with America hunting for Osama bin Laden, and it ended with America aiming for Saddam Hussein. In between has come the inconvenient nuclear news from North Korea -- but that's been pushed way down on the "to do" list. Indeed, the last half-century shows that the low-prioritizing of Pyongyang has been the norm. Yet one year, maybe next year, Uncle Sam is going to regret his irresolution.

Paul Veryser's steel-parts company, Stampings Inc., is in big trouble. Tariffs on steel imports, imposed by President George W. Bush in March, have pushed the cost of steel up by more than half on the American spot market, and this has added a whopping 25 percent to the cost of the air-bag, seat-belt and steering-wheel assembly parts his company makes.

It was probably inevitable that one day people would start suing McDonald's for making them fat. That day came this summer, when New York lawyer Samuel Hirsch filed several lawsuits against McDonald's, as well as four other fast-food companies, on the grounds that they had failed to adequately disclose the bad health effects of their menus. One of the suits involves a Bronx teenager who tips the scale at 400 pounds and whose mother, in papers filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, said, "I always believed McDonald's food was healthy for my son."

Whatever happened to the youth culture? It got old. And so here we are, overrun by a bunch of seventy-somethings who are making the news.

On Monday, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, age 70, caused more than a ripple when he declared that the United States could fight a war against Iraq and North Korea simultaneously.