False balance — giving crackpots equal prominence with real experts — gives the crackpots even more influence than presenting them alone.

This is what makes the theocrats' scheme of "teaching the controversy" about evolution so harmful. The fossil fuel companies' paid global heating deniers use it too.

Some US towns created by wealthy people to cut their taxes tried outsourcing the entire town government to a company. Of course, they got shafted.

Privatizing government services is generally harmful, since the company has to mistreat someone in order to make a profit. The main exception is when the privatization results in giving the public a competitive market with a considerable number of providers.

Although these towns have stopped outsourcing their whole governments, they continue to abandon the rest of their county, and the rest of their country, with the typical callousness of the rich, who wish poor Americans would crawl away to the cemetery and drop dead, after extracting from them whatever useful labor can be got from them.

Those rich people deserve to be slapped down. When non-plutocrats retake control of the Georgia legislature they should put those towns back into the counties they have tried to abandon.

Everyone: call on Coca Cola and Pepsico to stop buying sugar from land grabbers.

What Obama can't stand about Snowden is Snowden's patriotism. It's the same patriotism that compelled other whistleblowers to act.

Dear President Obama, What Have You Fixed by Meeting Malala?