Monica Potts

While D.C’.s chattering class is preoccupied with the journalism scandal that isn’t, and while Andrew Breitbart continues to deny responsibility for posting a heavily edited video that resulted in Shirley Sherrod losing her job, there is an actual freedom of the press story going unreported. In May, four reporters were banned from Guantanamo Bay after […]

Matthew Yglesias links to a post from Arnold Kling from the Library of Economics and Liberty in which Kling talks about how much better the days were in which school districts were smaller, and how we were more free then. Amen. I live in one of those mega-school districts, which gives unbridled power to the […]

A MetaFilter post yesterday linked to a month-old story from Orlando, Florida, about an “epidemic” of false rape allegations that led police to start a crackdown on those making false reports. According to the post, the United Kingdom is likewise so concerned it’s considering anonymity for defendants and ending anonymity for their accusers. As Emily […]

A British man with locked-in syndrome is seeking permission to end his life. But since he can’t move, he wouldn’t really be able to do so without his wife’s help (unless he just let himself starve). Tony Nicklinson wants to know that his wife can help him without being prosecuted for murder. I have no […]

I’m from one of those states in the South that voted heavily against Obama (though I hesitate to call it a red state, because it’s just not that simple), and I often find myself in political arguments with friends and family members on Facebook. These are not arguments about divergent political philosophies but arguments over […]

At the Christian Science Monitor, Clayton Jones points out an important benefit of the BP Oil Spill: It has dimmed the chance that the natural-gas lobby will convince legislators that replacing coal-burning power plants with natural-gas plants is a good environmental move. Gas does release about half the carbon dioxide as coal does, and there’s […]

The Vatican issued a “new” set of rules yesterday in response to the clerical abuse scandals of the past few decades, and critics say it’s just a polished version of the old rules that don’t address the systemic cover-ups of abuse of which many accuse of the church. But one new thing it added was […]

A West Virginia doctor, William Neal, is recommending that almost all children should have their cholesterol levels tested, according to NPR. The test is currently only conducted for children who have a family history of early heart disease. But Neal found that, when all children were tested, many more children had problems than had bad […]

A federal appeals court struck down a Federal Communications Commission ruling finding that single, “fleeting expletives” in live broadcasts amount to indecent language and can be fined. This comes amid the FCC’s indecency crackdown in the wake of the Janet Jackson Super Bowl incident. The court ruled that the FCC’s practices had an unreasonable chilling […]

At Colorlines, Julianne Hing points to a study at the Chronicle of Higher Education that found many more students default on their government loans than was previously reported. Twenty percent of government loans that began in 1995 have been in default; 31 percent of those to community college students; and 40 percent of those for […]