For the last forty years, our government has catered to the wealthy and to corporate America while largely ignoring the needs of the middle class and the poor. Since Reagan was elected in 1980, taxes have been lowered for the rich and raised for the middle class. Unions that once fought for and protected workers’ […]
On January 20, 2009, the day Obama was inaugurated, twelve Republican lawmakers gathered in a private dining room of an exclusive Washington restaurant. The meeting lasted for four hours. Before they parted, each of the Senators and Representatives
“Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” unless religion goes off a cliff. When that happens, secular law trumps religious law. History is full of examples
During the 2009 health care debate, fundamentalist congressmen inserted language that eliminated public funding for abortions. They are now proposing legislation that would make it impossible for a woman to buy private insurance with her own money, if that insurance includes coverage for abortion
When WikiLeak hackers took down MasterCharge, Visa, and PayPal after the arrest of Julian Assange, I thought of Stieg Larsson’s book, “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.” It’s a crime thriller. Fiction. Made up stuff, some would say. Yet the similarities between what happens in this last of the Millenium series and the headline-grabbing […]
Three years ago I was on a shuttle bus headed into downtown London from Heathrow airport. I felt awful. When you’ve spent the night in a cramped seat on an overnight flight from the U.S., you’d kill for a few hours sleep. But you know you have to stay awake for the next 12 hours; […]
Dressed in camouflage and bristling with high-powered weapons, a police SWAT team, looking for illegal drugs, broke into an apartment in Columbia, Missouri. The family dog got up from his spot on the rug and began to bark. They shot him dead. While the man, his wife, and small son watched, the police shot a […]
No one wants to serve on a jury. You especially do not want to serve if it’s a murder case. But that’s where I found myself last week, sitting on a jury in a criminal case against a man charged with eight felonies, one of them felony murder. By the time I was called, both […]
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