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To a generation beaten down by skyrocketing unemployment, plunging retirement savings, and mounting home foreclosures, 'Mad Men' offers the schadenfreude-filled message that their predecessors were equally unhappy - and that the bleakness meter in American life has always been set on high.
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The minimum wage can play a vital role in lifting hard-working families above the poverty line.
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It is hard to imagine an area in which Congress has more express constitutional authority to act than in protecting the right of minorities to vote.
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Patents have a place in medical science - for new inventions that advance the state of knowledge.
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The gap between being a bad person and being a criminal is often wide.
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If the courts regarded tweets and other social media information as private, it would not prevent the law enforcement from getting information it really needs. But the government would have to get a search warrant, which requires it to show that it has probable cause connecting what is being searched to a crime.
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Regency romances end in marriage; zombie stories end in the zombies being vanquished. 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies' delivers both.
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It's tempting to engage in anti-gun polemics and hope that popular opinion will dramatically shift, but it is also likely a mistake. The smarter course for those who want stronger federal gun-control laws anytime soon is legislative stewardship and compromise.
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As much as possible, location-specific information should not be collected in the first place, or not in personally identifiable form.
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A publicly run health care program could compete with private insurance companies, which have a record of overcharging and underperforming.
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'Hard Times' does not romanticize the Depression, but at least a few of Mr. Terkel's subjects managed to find silver linings.
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A Reagan appointee, Justice Kennedy is no liberal, as he has shown on issues from affirmative action to corporate campaign spending. But he has repeatedly sided with gay litigants before the court.
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For technology companies, information about what people do online is extremely valuable - it can be used to sell targeted advertising or sold to data clearinghouses.
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Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets have a great deal of information about all of us - and the government wants to be able to see it.
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Vampires are sleek demons for good times. They suavely leech off society - like investment bankers who plunder outsize shares of deals for themselves or rapacious fund managers.
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Serving up ads based on behavioral targeting can itself be an invasion of privacy, especially when the information used is personal.
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One of the great debates about the Internet is whether it is making people more or less free.
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The whole New Deal was in a sense just a series of public options, some more optional than others, that offered government as an alternative to the often-flawed private market.
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With increased awareness should come greater caution about how confessions are used at trial - and a greater willingness to overturn convictions when it becomes clear that a confession was untrue.
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Mississippi's loose campaign finance laws allow lawyers and companies to contribute heavily to the judges they appear before. That is terrible for justice, since the courts are teeming with perfectly legal conflicts of interest.
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There is no need for neighborhood informants and paper dossiers if the government can see citizens' every Web site visit, e-mail and text message.
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There is no room on the federal bench for a judge who does not treat all people as equal before the law.
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The civil rights and antiwar movements taught Americans to question authority.
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Federal law should hold organizations like the League of Women Voters harmless if they make good-faith mistakes while registering people.