FIRST Truman went to war against Korea without Congress, and I didn’t speak up because the communists had to be stopped. THEN Clinton passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, and I didn’t speak up because innocent people don’t need habeas corpus. THEN Bush passed the USA PATRIOT Act, and I...
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Here is a hilarious, prescient, classic skit with Christopher Walken and Tim Meadows from NBC TV’s Saturday Night Live on the “Census Bureau.” The skit originally aired during the previous Census on April 8, 2000. HT: Paul Theroux

I will be taking a short business trip in a few days, and some time ago I made reservations with a Sheraton Hotel at my destination. Today I received via e-mail a confirmation notice from the hotel, along with a weather forecast and some boilerplate about the hotel’s facilities. Quickly scanning this message, I was struck by something in a section labeled...
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Last week I wrote about Rachel Hoffman’s death as she was being used in a sting operation by the Tallahassee Police Department to try to arrest two men on drug charges. As I noted last week, the sting operation was more successful than the TPD had originally envisioned, and rather than drug convictions, the...
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