Archive
Fantasy Budgeting Won’t Make Us Safer
The watchword in Washington has been "cut" for some time. But the House of Representatives headed in the opposite direction when it adopted its version of the National Defense Authorization bill. The bill authorizes $552 billion in military spending next year. That's...
A Deceptive Win on Plan B for Women
Good news for advocates of sensible birth control policy: The Obama administration announced that it's dropping the fight to impose an age restriction on sales of Plan B One-Step, the emergency contraception pill. Reproductive rights advocates are celebrating this...
Uncle Sam’s Vast Dragnet
In 1929, Secretary of State Henry Stimson dismantled the department charged with breaking codes and learning other nations' secrets. Asked why, he said: "Gentlemen don't read other gentlemen's mail." Some sources quote him less elegantly as saying "each other's mail,"...
Snooping Makes an Easy Road to Riches
Only 23 percent of Americans, a new Reuters poll says, consider former National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden a "traitor" for blowing the whistle on the federal government's massive surveillance habit. Many Americans clearly do find the idea of government...
Eat Real
Is it just my friends, or is nearly everyone on an absurd diet these days? One friend says she's on a "primal" diet. She's trying to eat like cavemen and will devour wild game when she can get it. Another goes on a month-long "detox" fast each year. Somehow, he...
Metadata Mining Is Mega Awful
It's good to know that our friendly, über-secret National Security Agency is out there every day, protecting our freedom. By violating it. A whistleblower has blown the lid off the NSA's super-snoop program of rummaging electronically through about a billion phone...
Locking Up Our Future
Finally, there's a sign that our national passion for locking up more and more Americans could be subsiding. Our "correctional population" is gradually shrinking after decades of robust growth. We had 2.9 million people behind bars in 2011, down from 3.2 million in...
The Naked Dragnet Emperor
Don’t Squat in Your Spurs or Be an Idiot
June is the month of the summer solstice and America's biggest blizzard. I don't mean a weather event blowing in from the Arctic, but a merciless storm of words blowing from the mouths of commencement speakers at high school and college graduations. This year, I was...
The War on Terror Has Not Made Us Safer
Two days after the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001, I was sitting in front of my institute's office around the corner from the White House. We had just been evacuated again. The police patrolling the streets didn't have a clue what was going on. So we sat on...
