Columns

Oh, to be transported back to a more innocent time, just a few weeks ago, when the greatest problem with the exercise of federal power seemed (merely) to be the Internal Revenue Service’s selective targeting of a handful of political organizations. Compared to what we’ve learned since, the IRS scandal seems a passing trifle.

By Greg Dobbs

By Paul Belanger
I too read Sandy Barnes’ article about the Mike Nelson-Jim White presentations on global warming. I was dismayed to read Howard Sperry’s May 14 reply claiming simplistic, one-sided “beliefs.”

If you took a social studies class in the past 30 years, there’s no way you could avoid knowing chapter and verse about McCarthyism, J. Edgar Hoover’s abuses at the FBI, and President Nixon’s “enemies list.”

 The paranoid abuse of government power in the latter half of the last century led to a healthy skepticism of federal leadership, and justifiably so. While corruption itself is nothing new, it became more visible in the television era. Today we rightfully look at those events as low points in American history.