The American Spectator

Frederick News-Post

The New York Times of Frederick, Maryland, plots the excruciating development of a new constitutional right along Carroll Creek while executives of the Porta Potty industry can only wait:

The recent Occupy Frederick camp on Carroll Creek provided a reminder that the city didn’t have a camping ordinance—and needed one.

Occupy Frederick was well-planned and organized, and it worked with local officials to ensure the encampment was safe, orderly and didn’t run afoul of law enforcement or become a genuine nuisance to users of the city’s linear park [sic].…

But Occupy participant Robert Fisher argues that being in some out-of-the-way park defeats the purpose of organized protests. If people don’t see and/or hear the message, what’s the point?

Creating overly stringent or prohibitively expensive requirements involving, for example, sanitary conditions could also have a stifling effect. Occupy Frederick used creekside restaurant and bar bathrooms until their owners asked them to stop. That’s understandable, but Fisher asks, “If I’m not spending money in some capacity, does that mean I don’t have the right to speak out?”

A restaurant might counter that he or she has the right to reserve bathrooms for paying customers. OK, but does this mean the new law must require that campers on Carroll Creek rent portable toilets?
(February 14, 2012)

In These Times

A very personal public appeal by columnist Miss Suzie Douglas to Mr. Jon Stewart and Mr. Steven Tyler to Get Naked:

I have a love/hate relationship with Rolling Stone, which isn’t surprising given that I never was, and certainly am not now, part of the magazine’s desired demographic. On the one hand, nearly every woman who appears on the cover must be dressed like a stripper in the final stages of her act. By contrast, Jon Stewart, Steven Tyler and other men on the cover actually wear clothes.
(February 2012)

New York Times

Columnist Paul Krugman makes another obscure point about something that Rick Santorum did or did not say that can be heard on the Internet or it cannot, and then there are the Crusades, which—oh the hell with it. Krugman is an acquired taste:

[S]omething has clearly gone very wrong with modern American conservatism.