We all have tasks we try to get done before the end of the year, and Kim Jong Un's is amping up the crazy. Last December, the North Korean despot approved the execution of his uncle for allegedly plotting against him. This December, his agents hacked Sony Pictures computers over a comedy depicting his assassination.

It's enough to make you forget what he does to his real enemies: the people of North Korea. In February, a United Nations task force found his "crimes against humanity" to be "without any parallel in the contemporary world."

But he did have rivals for that honor in 2014. One of them is the self-proclaimed Islamic State, a radical organization (also known as ISIL and ISIS) that proclaimed a caliphate in territory spanning large swaths of Syria and Iraq. Beheading American journalists was only its most visible atrocity. "The array of violations and abuses perpetrated by ISIL and associated armed groups is staggering," said Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, the U.N. high commissioner for...

For a long time, the U.S. ostracism of Cuba has been like the vintage American cars on the streets of Havana: obsolete but imperishable. It didn't topple the Castro government, didn't force human rights progress and didn't unite the world behind us. Yet failure was no enemy of longevity.

There are many reasons for its endurance. But if you're parceling out responsibility, you have to start with a curious invention of the Founding Fathers that we know as the Electoral College. Without it, our Cuba policy never would have persisted for so many years — which is a reminder that our Cuba policy is not the only thing that needs changing.

Shortly before the 2000 election, I was invited to be part of a local TV panel that included an Illinois state senator I had never heard of: Barack Obama. The topic was the novel possibility that George W. Bush might win the popular vote but lose in the Electoral College.

We were on to something, but we had it backward: On Election Day, it was Al Gore who...

The 1994 federal law banning "assault weapons" was a high point of the gun control movement and Bill Clinton's presidency. Signing the bill, he said it was the beginning of "our effort to restore safety and security to the people of this country." But something happened that he and his allies had not predicted: nothing.

Duke University scholars Philip Cook and Kristin Goss, who are generally sympathetic to gun control, assessed the ban in a book published this year and concluded, "There is no compelling evidence that it saved lives."

A 2004 study led by Christopher Koper of the University of Pennsylvania agreed: "We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation's recent drop in gun violence."

Homicides did decline after the ban became law — but they fell as well in the years after its 2004 expiration. From the standpoint of the safety and security of the American people, the prohibition was a non-event.

But gun control advocates, with a heroic disregard for real-world experience...

Plenty of people who go on wild drinking binges end up with sound reasons to avoid repeating the experience: painful hangovers, lasting embarrassment, ruined relationships, encounters with police. But that doesn't stop some of them from doing it again. Maybe these are the same people running the federally backed mortgage companies.

The possibility comes to mind because these two entities, known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have decided to lower the down payment they require on some mortgages from 5 percent to 3 percent. The horrific lesson of what results from encouraging marginal borrowers to buy homes has somehow vanished from their memories.

"Our goal is to help additional qualified borrowers gain access to mortgages," said Andrew Bon Salle, an executive vice president for Fannie Mae.

The goal is one that a few years ago would have sounded uncontroversial: making it possible for more people to buy houses. Homeownership has long been taken to be a civic virtue, an economic boon and...

Anyone skeptical about entrusting ambitious tasks to the government was not stunned by the dismal rollout of the Affordable Care Act. It featured technical snafus, cost overruns and false advertising ("If you like your plan, you'll be able to keep it."). Things got so bad that President Barack Obama apologized and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius resigned.

This epic fail occurred even though the administration had more than three years to prepare for the launch and $840 million to spend developing the website. It was a textbook case of government bungling.

Truth be told, a rocky start should have been expected. When the government adopted a new Medicare program covering prescription drugs in 2005, after all, it encountered similar problems.

Faced with the conflicting claims about the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation" methods on suspected terrorists, most of us have neither the time nor the expertise to sift through all the evidence to make a definitive judgment...

The most illuminating thing ever said about the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” to combat terrorists came in 2005, in response to a question posed by Notre Dame law professor Doug Cassel to John Yoo, who held a high post in George W. Bush’s Justice Department.

“If the president deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?” asked Cassel. Yoo did not gasp, retch or wail in horror. No, he replied with perfect equanimity, “I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that.”

Yoo is not alone in finding ways to justify inflicting grotesque agony on the off chance it might yield helpful information. Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz wants to cloak it in legality by authorizing judges to approve torture warrants.

But relax – it won’t be that bad. “The warrant,” he explained in 2002, “would limit the torture to nonlethal means, such as sterile needles, being inserted beneath...