Cleaning up in the wake of the 2010 Iowa State Fair will be daunting this year. In addition to the mess left by nearly 1 million visitors and thousands of farm animals, we have a continuing saga of news coverage that told of possible racial assaults and then, in Saturday Night Live fashion, appears to [...]

(Editor’s note: The incidents described here have become part of a developing story, as this Google link shows.) The Des Moines Register’s reluctance to identify criminal suspects or victims by race has turned into an outright refusal to do so. The closing night of the Iowa State Fair was marked by an observance not exactly [...]

I got this note from a friend and colleague a little while after Roger Clemens was indicted by a federal grand jury on Aug. 19th: “And meanwhile, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, CIA officials and others who lied to Congress in sworn testimony about Iraq go free. If we can ‘look forward, not backward’ on torture, [...]