[Continuing our series on deception in politics and public policy.] The world of public policy is full of messes created by government. During World War II,…
In 1980, I was a political reporter in Alabama, covering the U.S. Senate race. The candidates were Jim Folsom Jr., son of a former governor, and Jeremiah Denton,…
[Continuing our series on deception in politics and public policy.] Google is considering ways to rank websites by “trustworthiness” rather than by (relatively) objective standards such as frequency…
[Continuing our series on deception in politics and public policy.] I was a child in Alabama at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. One day in 1961, a bus…
[Continuing our series on deception in politics and public policy.] When the writer Lillian Hellman was buried, America's elite turned out for her funeral. Katherine Graham, chairman of the board…
[Continuing our series on deception in politics and public policy.] “I was born a poor black child.” Steve Martin (as Navin Johnson), The Jerk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qtmi4Nc-3dE ) The…
[Continuing our series on deception in politics and public policy.] People with Asian ancestry have to be careful when they fill out their college applications. As noted by the Boston…
[Continuing our series on deception in politics and public policy.] But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were…
[Continuing our series on deception in politics and public policy.] In public policy, one the major sources of error is taxonomy. Taxonomy (or systematics): Classification into categories based on presumed…
For a while yesterday, many on the Left were jubilant at the shooting (falsely reported, it turned out) of George Zimmerman, a Latino who, one day in 2012, dared defend himself…