guns in america
Let's go through how that will work out
Feb 25 2018
They were tearful, they were angry, they demanded action and an end to the epidemic of death killing our youngest. It was commendable and cathartic that Donald Trump brought together those suffering from the Parkland shooting to listen to their pleas.
But then came the reveal. When the president began to speak, it became evident that the people who had come up from Florida were props at a staged event for 
Trump to deliver his…
Read More »
Feb 19 2018
Donald Trump @realDonaldTrump

Contributions from the NRA:…
Read More »
elections
May 4 2016
“We've got to end the practice of drawing our congressional districts so that politicians can pick their voters, and not the other way around”, President Obama has said. He was referring to the practice of gerrymandering, of political parties rigging districts so as to assure the election of their candidates. It has been with us for two centuries, is manifestly undemocratic, yet the Supreme Court avoids confronting it, and Congress likes things just as they are.
Once every ten years, based on the population census, each state usually must reconfigure its voting districts, first to conform to the number of congressional representatives that its newly-counted population permits, and then to arrive at approximately equal numbers of voters in each district. That…
Read More »
elections
Crimes against geography
May 4 2016
The contorted shapes that gerrymandering produces are grotesque reminders that our democracy needs an asterisk. The word derives from 1812’s governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, who rearranged election districts to his liking. The shape of one of them
The 1812 cartoon in the Boston Gazette mocking the shape of one of Gov. Gerry's contrivances.
reminded people of a salamander. Hence Gerrymander.
Here is a selection of the most notoriously contrived to make an election outcome a certainty for the party controlling the process.
Maryland's 3rd District: As your eye will bear witness, this bug splat is 
considered the most gerrymandered district in the country. Connected by tiny threads and leaping…
Read More »
congress
Nov 29 2015
Congress lost no time when threatened by refugees. It rushed to pass a law to hobble their admittance, hastily throwing aside Paul Ryan's promise that the House would return to the orderly process of developing legislation in committees.
The President called them out: "Now suddenly they're able to rush in, in a day or two [after the Paris attacks], to solve the threat of widows and orphans and others who are fleeing a war-torn land and that's their most constructive contribution to the effort against ISIL?"
Obama was undoubtedly referring as well to the avoidance by Congress to authorize force in Syria. With much the same motivation for speedily acting against…
Read More »
the press
Worse says former Times general counsel
Nov 14 2013
In the wake of the government shutdown and the threat of the U.S. defaulting on its debt, a report on the Obama administration’s hostility toward the press and its 
reporters went by hardly noticed. The report is a formal statement in support of what the media have contended all along that the Obama regime’s aggressive actions against press freedom has introduced a climate of fear that inhibits both journalists and sources alike. ”The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration”, says the author, former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr.…
Read More »
press freedom
The Constitution professor doesn’t like the First Amendment
Jun 4 2013
As a candidate he had called warrantless surveillance “unconstitutional and illegal”.
In his first inaugural address he said, “My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration”.
On his first day in the Oval Office he commented, “For a long time now, there's been too much secrecy in this city", as he signed executive orders to reverse some of the Bush Administration policies.
And just days ago President Obama said, “…a free press is also essential for our democracy. I am troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism…
Read More »