Rights and Democracy
An Endangered Species Up in Arms
As many of you already have intuited, I don't know everything. Nobody does, I suppose. More importantly, I don't know everything about anything. I'm what used to be called "a generalist," someone whose knowledge in any direction is a mile wide and a quarter-inch deep....
Fair Elections, RIP
Voting rights are under attack again — this time it's the Supreme Court's turn. The majority's ruling in the Shelby County vs. Holder case gutted key Voting Rights Act provisions at a time when minority access to the polls faces new obstacles. As Justice Ruth Ginsburg...
A New Education Debate
You may have seen stories about the poor quality of Washington, D.C.'s public schools. You probably have also heard about how Michelle Rhee was brought from near-obscurity to take over the city's schools, overnight becoming a national symbol of dramatic education...
Failing a Test of the Emergency Broadcast System
In the early morning hours of April 19, some residents of Watertown, Massachusetts, received an automated phone call telling them to "shelter in place" while the suspected Boston marathon bomber roamed the neighborhood. The system worked — to a degree. One homeowner...
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...
