News & Commentary

When Proposal 2 passed in 2006, it banned race-conscious college admissions policies in Michigan. I was only 16 — too young to vote but old enough to know it would affect the quality and accessibility of education in Michigan. After growing up in a district with a notoriously wide opportunity gap, I felt compelled to find a way to fight this destructive decision.

The New York Times last week had good news for those looking to cut the exorbitant spending associated with the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. According to the paper, the Department of Defense rejected a proposal from U.S. Southern Command for some $200 million in wasteful new construction at the detention camp. But some in Congress want to force the Pentagon to move forward with the costly construction.

Actress Mia Farrow made gossip-news headlines this week when, asked by Vanity Fair whether her former husband Frank Sinatra was the father of her son Ronan, rather than Woody Allen as broadly understood, she replied, “possibly.” She said that no paternity test had been done.

Last month, a web-based service called “Ghetto Tracker” was unveiled. The site’s creator touted it as a travel advice service where users could pin digital maps with safety ratings to enable those new to town to avoid dodgy neighborhoods. While crowd-sourced travel advice is not a particularly novel or noteworthy idea, the site’s suggestive use of the word ghetto to evoke neighborhoods of color and its intention to label certain areas categorically “good/bad,” “safe/unsafe,” in conjunction with its choice of the below stock photo on the homepage, has resulted in an understandable backlash from those who have found the service distasteful. After a storm of negative publicity, the operators quickly renamed the service “Good Part of Town,” the stock photo was replaced with one depicting a black family, and the site dropped all of the references to “ghetto” to refer to a “bad” area. Despite this rebranding effort, the site’s operators decided to take down the site altogether just days after the launch.

Today marks the opening of the health insurance exchanges created under the Affordable Care Act. An estimated seven million uninsured Americans are expected to apply for coverage during this first round of open enrollment; the Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2016, 25 million Americans will register for health insurance through the exchanges. In addition to expanding access to affordable healthcare, the opening of the health exchanges also has the opportunity to dramatically expand access to the ballot.

Disclosure of secrets has been in the air these last few months. We've witnessed a remarkable stream of revelations about the National Security Agency's vast and invasive surveillance apparatus, followed by government disclosures concerning hidden intelligence programs and the secret court opinions that authorized them.

While the two of us were writing this blog post, we called each other twice. Our organizations—the ACLU and Brave New Foundation—paid for the calls via flat monthly payments to our respective phone companies. The rates are reasonable, and if they weren't our workplaces could switch to different companies, which keeps prices competitive. Pretty straightforward.

Today, we filed suit in federal court on behalf of Jennifer Maudlin, a single mother who was fired when her employer learned that she was pregnant. Jennifer's employer – a religiously-affiliated community organization called Inside Out – says that it fired Jennifer for violating its unwritten rule against non-marital sex.