Republicans increased money for one thing: privatizing public housing.

The experience with a similar program in the UK shows that this can lead to a shortage of public housing, while what was sold off ends up in the hands of people with some amount of money.

Robert Mercer funded a group that stirred up fear by showing Islamist conquest fantasies, targeted at US voters likely to be manipulated by them. The group seems to have omitted this spending from its tax return, too.

When Russia manipulates US elections, that adds an extra factor of foreign intervention. However, this sort of manipulation is an attack on the fairness of the electoral system no matter who does it.

Facebook has announced a system of labeling political ads and verifying the official identities of their purchasers. This labeling may do some good, but (as the article explains) it won't be hard to create an intermediary to hide the real identity of the real purchaser.

Companies that implement targeting of ads should be required to show the public all the ads that each customer has placed, collected in a place easily found from the name of the customer, and the whole collection should be easily searchable.

Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah work on their right-wing extremism together. The American Museum of Natural History should recognize this as one more reason to remove her from its board.

Phoenix, Arizona, is slowly but surely running out of water as global heating dries up the whole region.

A non-Muslim white man in Wisconsin tried building a bomb, which killed him. He had white-supremacist material in his apartment. But officials and media don't want to "jump to the conclusion" that he was a would-be terrorist.

Indeed, that is not proven conclusively. He might have had some other motive for making a bomb, perhaps murder based on a grudge. But since we are not trying him for the crime, we need not demand proof beyond a reasonable doubt when considering plausible inferences.

The crucial point is to contrast this with what happens when a crime of violence might possibly be associated with some Muslim. There is little hesitation in those cases to jump to the conclusion and say "terrorism".

Don't Let School Lockdown Drills Become the New Normal.

Better to make a nuisance for every American gun owner than for every American.