(Source: AP) Rest easy. Your metadata is safe, as are the private telephone conversations of foreign leaders (deemed to be friendly to the United States). But you still might one day find yourself on the receiving end of a national security letter. The Times Peter Baker mentioned national security letters in an article anticipating the […]

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(Source: Khalil Bendib for OtherWords) It seems like almost every week brings news about Wall Street’s latest sins. “JPMorgan Is Penalized $2 Billion Over Madoff,” blared one recent New York Times headline, when the paper explained that Bernie Madoff, the infamous Ponzi scheme con artist, wheeled and dealed via accounts at the bank. Wall Street […]

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(Source: Demos) Today’s progressive coalition—the one that elected Obama twice and just put Bill de Blasio in power—looks a bit like a barbell: Lots of poorer voters on one side and lots of highly educated professionals on the other. Obama won the high school dropout vote by a landslide and also won post-grads by 13 […]

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In 1920 the New Republic ran “A Test of the News,” a special supplement to the magazine (published soon after as the book Liberty and the News) by Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz showing that in the three and a half years since the Bolshevik revolution, the New York Times had reported “not what was, […]

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(Source: Getty) For almost 40 years, Republicans have pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy intended to convince working-class whites that the poor were their enemies. The big news is it’s starting to backfire. Republicans told the working class that its hard-earned tax dollars were being siphoned off to pay for “welfare queens” (as Ronald Reagan decorously dubbed […]

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