Recently, the notorious Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) came to Clayton to protest a local high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance. However, the response from our local community was enormous. The number of people participating in the counter-protest dwarfed the actual five-person contingent of WBC members who came to Clayton.

Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against the United States government for violations of the Freedom of Information Act related to the Obama administration’s refusal to release any sort of information relating to the assassinations of Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, two American citizens who were ranking members of al-Qaida.

In a unanimous decision on Tuesday, the Supreme Court made one of its biggest rulings in recent history regarding Americans’ right to privacy. In the case of United States v.

Last week Attorney General Eric Holder called on us, the citizens of the United States, to report others we may know who could be illegally downloading copyrighted material.

This week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for the case of United States v. Jones. The case deals with the legality of law enforcement officials using GPS tracking devices on American citizens.

Herman Cain’s extremely simplistic 9-9-9 tax plan has drawn a lot of publicity of late, with a flat 9 percent tax for both corporate and residential incomes as well as a 9 percent national sales tax. But, as a recent Huffington Post article pointed out, Herman Cain’s tax plan may have come from the critically acclaimed video game “SimCity 4,” which came out in 2003.

In his recent Student Life column “Crowd dynamics,” Daniel Deibler claimed that the reactions of crowds to the question of a gay soldier and to Rick Perry’s stalwart defense of the death penalty at recent GOP debates were, while reprehensible, also excusable.

During the most recent Republican primary debate, John Huntsman harshly criticized the other candidates for being decidedly anti-science, telling them flat-out: “We can’t run from science.” I can’t help but agree with the former governor.