On her NY Times Blog:

The question is what this shift in public attitudes might mean for the courts, the Supreme Court in particular. The Supreme Court operates inside the mainstream culture — which is, after all, where the justices live — influenced not by the “weather of the day” but by the “climate of the age,” as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg likes to say, quoting the great constitutional scholar Paul Freund. So does it matter, for example, that recent polls have found a decided movement in public opinion toward protecting privacy and civil liberties and away from the government’s anti-terrorism priorities? In cases concerning GPS searches and drug-sniffing police dogs, the justices have been expressing increasing skepticism about law enforcement tactics that evade the traditional warrant requirement. During the new term, the court is likely to take up a case on warrantless searches of cellphones, a case that could gauge the justices’ readiness to recalibrate the balance between privacy and security.

Rights shouldn’t depend on the country’s prevailing opinion, unless that opinion is expressed through an amendment to the Constitution.  As far as GPS and drug sniffing dogs are concerned, the recent opinions addressing them should have been, as they were by Thomas and Scalia, decided based on the Fourth Amendment’s original intent.

Money – The Crisis Washington’s Ignoring

Since Bernanke became Fed chairman, the price of an average gallon has soared 54 percent to $3.52, even while the value of the gallon of gas has plunged nearly 33 percent to 1/372nd of an ounce of gold.

In other words, it’s not the gas price that is going up, but the dollar that’s going down.

Writing in the Daily Beast:

“The Republican Party is destroying America. Harsh words, yes. But inescapably true.”

“There isn’t even a feint toward decency. In what has become a recurring nightmare,”

And she quotes Norm Ornstein, approvingly, who apparently believes that the government operates at peak efficiency, thus meaning that any cuts, per the sequester, are destined to kill Americans, destroy the wilderness and lead us back into the stone age:

If sequester continues … it is a cancer eating away at national parks, food safety, basic research … it’s a terrible situation. No matter how much [Republicans] talk about how it was Obama’s idea … the whole idea was to create such awful consequences that no sane person would accept it. But these aren’t sane people.

Of course, since Obama signed the sequester it would seem natural to ask what role he has in this nuclear bomb going off, but that part is left unexplored.

Daniel Gross at the Daily Beast has a column about Moo Cluck Moo, a fast food joint in Detroit paying $15 an hour.  The column lauds the chain for its wage rate, which is well and good.  However, Gross can’t resist some editorializing at the end, which would be fine (the whole column is an opinion piece), except for its logical inadequacy.  The last line of the column is:”Every day Moo Cluck Moo is open, it stands as a rebuke to an industry that says it can only function by paying crappy wages.”  This comes immediately after Gross points out that the restaurant has one location and has been open less than a year.  Thus, he ignores his own evidence when he arrives at the conclusion that Moo Cluck Moo’s existence proves anything regarding the entire fast food industry.  Unless there is some basis for extrapolating from one restaurant, in one location, open less than a year to a $160 billion industry, operating 160,000 restaurants and serving 50 million people per day, Mr. Gross should quit writing one sentence before he thinks he is done.