Rights and Democracy
Protect the Public Schools’ Whistleblowers
It seems like new reports of scandalous cheating schemes or other wrongdoing at public schools emerge every week. From New York City to Tulsa, Oklahoma, the problem of school corruption is widespread.
What can be done? There’s no surefire solution. Teachers and administrators alike are under pressure to see that an increasing number of objectives are met. The pressure to achieve results can be unbearable. Waste, fraud, and abuse can happen in any bureaucracy — and public schools aren’t immune to those scourges.
The Great Local News Heist
If you turn on your local evening news, you may not notice anything out of the ordinary. But if you change the channel, you’ll think you’ve entered a parallel universe.
GOP Debates are More Entertaining than GOP Policies
I was out of the country for a couple of weeks and came back to be greeted by yet another Republican presidential debate. I was so pleased.
Prison Nation
The United States has more citizens behind bars, per capita, than any other nation. No, this quirk doesn’t reflect an especially felonious gene in our national DNA. Rather, it exposes embarrassing shortfalls in our public policy.
Dispatch from Occupy Wall Street
America needs a new phenomenon every once in a while. Now it has one: Occupy Wall Street.
Missouri’s Troy Davis
People who had never heard of Davis or had never thought much about the death penalty suddenly confronted Georgia’s senseless act of brutality. They asked themselves: how could the state kill someone in the face of so much doubt about his guilt?
Newspaper Nostalgia
It’s been a little more than 50 years since I first walked into the Des Moines Register newsroom to begin a career in journalism. It was a beat-up scruffy place filled with beat-up scruffy people, almost all men. They worked in a big room lined with gray steel desks piled high with newspapers, stacks of books, notebooks, and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette stubs. They wrote on manual, black typewriters. The phones, also black, had rotary dials.
How to Achieve Transparency for the Supercommittee
Come December, the priorities and role of our government could be drastically and fundamentally altered. Are your views and concerns being heard?
Mitt Romney Believes in Corporate America
At an Iowa campaign stop in August, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney made a startling assertion. Asked about his refusal to raise taxes on corporations while millions of Americans are struggling to make ends meet, he replied, “Corporations are people, my friend.”
Gridlock and Bedlam
My friend Richard is a little crazy and very smart. He spends his days filling the Internet with screeds and rants on his favorite subject — the continuing collapse of our society. I’d tell you his last name, but if you wrote him, you’d get his scary emails too.
