Author: Marc Jampole

The best analogy I can find to characterize the 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court to strike down part of the Voting Rights Act is to imagine a patient with high cholesterol, probably because of poor nutrition. The doctor gives the patient a cholesterol-lowering drug and the cholesterol goes down to a safer level. The […]

Read More… from Bad Supreme Court decision in voting rights case won’t make difference in real world

The New York Times headline this morning should have read “Charter Schools Continue to Underperform Public Schools.” Instead the Times headline writer went with “Charter Schools Are Improving, a Study Says.” Both are true, but the first is truer because it isn’t taken out of context. Someone could infer from “Charter Schools are Improving…”  that […]

Read More… from Charter schools continue to underperform public schools

An organization that for almost 40 years has tried to turn gays into heterosexuals with prayer and psychotherapy announced earlier this week that it is disbanding because its executives and many board members no longer believe that sexual orientation can be changed.  I suppose Exodus International and its leadership started paying more attention to facts […]

Read More… from Who’s next to tell truth after org. admits it can’t turn gays straight? Global warming deniers? Creationists?

The Obama Administration is rightfully taking a lot of hits for government surveillance programs that track data related to every phone call of every U.S. citizen and for demanding data that the computers of Google, Apple and other information technology companies collect from everyone. Now we’re learning that the government isn’t the only one that […]

Read More… from It’s not just the federal government that wants to spy on us

Maybe now we know what happened to the Snowdens of yesteryear. Or at least to one of them. “Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?” is Joseph Heller’s wonderful pun on Francois Villon’s famous poem, “Ballade des dames du temps jadis,” with its refrain of “Ou sont les neiges d’antan,” which has been translated into English for […]

Read More… from Edward Snowden is a hero who deserves our praise and thanks

Have the American people just had a Joseph Welch epiphany?  A sudden realization that this time, they have gone too far, that we have let them go too far? Welch was the lawyer who was questioning the rabidly anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy during McCarthy’s 1954 hearings to investigate communist infiltration of the Army. McCarthy told […]

Read More… from American people have “Joseph Welch” moment about government snooping

Everyone is saying that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie acted in his self-interest when he scheduled a special election to replace the recently deceased Frank Lautenberg in the U.S. Senate for three weeks before the general elections this coming November. The estimates for the additional cost to hold two elections in one month have run […]

Read More… from Did Chris Christie ruin his chances for the Republican presidential nomination?

My natural instincts were to disapprove of the Supreme Court decision allowing police to collect DNA evidence at every arrest. But when I thought about it more, I saw that taking DNA is no different from taking fingerprints or mug shots. Fingerprints and photographs are routinely taken at every arrest at the discretion of the […]

Read More… from What’s the difference between DNA and fingerprints? Both can be used and abused

The title of the article is “Why the rich don’t feel rich,” but the true subject of the recent piece by U.S. News & World Report’s chief business correspondent Rick Newman is why we should have sympathy for the economic problems facing rich folk. Newman finds four reasons why we should “cut some slack to wealthy […]

Read More… from Another journalist finds time from covering real news to feel sorry for the rich

With the acceptance of gay Boy Scouts, the mainstreaming of gays is almost completed.  It won’t be long before the Scouts take the next step and allow gays to be Scout leaders and it won’t be long before gay marriage is legal in virtually every state, or at least in every northern and western state. […]

Read More… from Thumbs up to Boy Scouts. Thumbs down to parents who pull their boys from the Scouts