Lawyers notice the creeping coup. From an American Bar Association task-force preliminary report issued August 8 on the treatment of U.S. citizens detained as “enemy combatants” (www.abanet.org/leadership/enemy_combatants.pdf): “The Administration has not yet attempted to explain what procedures it believes should be required to assure that detentions are consistent with Due Process, American tradition, and international law. It cannot be sufficient for a President to claim that the Executive can detain whomever it wants, whenever it wants, for as long as it wants as long as the detention bears some relationship to a terrorist act once committed by somebody against the United States. Short of such a claim, what are the limits?”
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“We want to encourage streets for strolling, shady green spaces, window shopping, very private and quiet spaces at home, daylight, and other elements that are known to enhance urban life,” says architect Diane Legge Kemp, who serves on the city’s Zoning Reform Commission. “To achieve this requires an urban sensitivity on the part of architects and a zoning ordinance that will allow us to do the right thing…. Good architects will not have to change anything” (“Focus,” newsletter of the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects, September).
Why do children who live with cohabiting couples have more problems than those living with single parents or married couples? It’s not a lack of money, but it may be how cohabiting couples spend theirs, explain Thomas DeLeire and Ariel Kalil in an April paper from the Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. “Our results indicate that cohabiting couples with children spend a far greater share of their income on alcohol and tobacco–73% to 90% more controlling for observable characteristics [such as income] in a cross section–than married couples with children spend. How do these couples pay for this excess consumption of alcohol and tobacco? The results suggest that they spend less on health care and education than married couples with children spend….It is not the legal status of cohabitation that is the key issue, but rather it is something about the men who are cohabitors–alcohol and tobacco expenditure does not decrease when cohabitors marry.”
