Rights and Democracy
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,"...
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...
The Naked Dragnet Emperor
Dancing Around the First and Fourth Amendments
Whether you think spying is OK or not depends on your relationship to the information being collected. If you're on the gathering end, the invasion of someone else's privacy doesn't seem like a big deal. But if you're the one whose private life is being pried into,...
Stripping Detroit of Its Remaining Riches
My old hometown — or, as I like to call it: “The Late Great City of Detroit” — is threatening to add an oak leaf cluster to the badge of humiliation it wears like an Olympic medal. It's bad enough that the city's previous mayor is awaiting sentencing on corruption...
Another Jersey Shore Show
If you see things that really are not there, are you losing it? Maybe not. Maybe the ones who put the non-existent things there for you to see are to blame. Recently, this surrealistic phenomenon of unreal "thereness" appeared in Seaside Heights, New Jersey. This...
Showing Our Caregivers We Care About Them
I am a physician and my husband works in finance. I work early hours and he travels for work. With two sons under the age of 6 and busy schedules, we needed flexible childcare and found this in the au pair program. After phone calls, emails, and exchanged photos of...
Michele Bachmann Bows Out
It looks as though we jackals of the "lamestream media" won't have Michele Bachmann to kick around anymore. With just a hint of Nixonian rancor in her voice, she announced — via a lengthy YouTube rant in the middle of the night a short while ago — she would not seek...
With Americans Moving Forward on Gay Rights, Why Won’t the GOP?
By the end of June, the Supreme Court will decide two related cases involving the right of gay couples to get married. We don’t know what the decisions will be, although it seems likely that gay-rights activists will have something to celebrate that day, even if it’s...
Scandal Season at the Obama White House
It’s not an easy task, defending President Barack Obama from his enemies. The “scandals” keep popping up like dandelions — all of them explainable, after a fashion. Taken together, the explanations begin to sound like “the dog ate my homework.” For example: No one...
