To the roughly 40 percent of Americans who told pollsters recently they would be willing to sacrifice freedoms in exchange for greater security, the past week has provided a taste of what they could expect.

Power has a natural tendency to confuse legitimate threats to the institution with threats to its own power. And the field glasses it uses to identify those threats aren’t necessarily trained only outside its borders.

The Obama administration has brought more cases against current or former government employees suspected of leaking classified information than all previous presidents combined.

It isn’t even close. The New York Times first reported that statistic more than a year ago, well before the end of the president’s first term.

Now we learn that the Justice Department has secretly grabbed two months worth of telephone records from more than 20 separate Associated Press phone lines. The idea, apparently, was to find out who leaked information to the

1. I hope you did extra laundry last night so you could have a day off today. By the way, where is my blue shirt?

2. Let’s hurry and open your presents so I can watch the game.

3. I’m glad you like it. You know, it was hard to find a hat that would look good with your gray hair.

4. Boy, I sure wish someone would give me a special day.

Charles Ramsey says he doesn’t want an award. He’s a Christian and an American, and he was just doing what was right when he helped three women and a little girl escape a Cleveland house where they had been held captive for years.

We take him at his word and thank him for his service. But, of course, when you do something so integral to a big media story, and when you have a colorful personality, fame flows like a desert arroyo after a spring thunderstorm.

Did Elizabeth Smart say Americans should abandon abstinence-only education? Was this the most important part of her recent speech to a Johns Hopkins human trafficking forum?

That’s rubbish, in my opinion, and an insult to her real message, which had to do with the need to teach children not

C.S. Lewis once said, "We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst."

In a nation where sex has become ubiquitous entertainment and pornography continues to color how men view women, should it be a big surprise when the man who was put in charge of the air Force Sexual Assault Prevention and Response branch at the Pentagon is arrested and

If it is true, as people who study such things say, that proximity feeds addiction, then what will happen to the number of gambling addictions when every laptop and mobile device turns into a traveling casino?

And if, as the London research company H2 Gambling Capital has said, Americans could spend $4.3 billion during the first year alone if online gambling were made legal nationwide, and that this figure would grow to $9.6 billion by the fifth year, when will the nation stop to consider whether this monumental waste of resources provides any net benefits to society; or whether, like cocaine, heroin or other illegal substances it ruins lives, destroys productivity, leads to other crimes and ought to be strictly outlawed?

Is anyone surprised by the results of a recent survey that showed nearly a quarter of teenage drivers admitting they have been behind the wheel while high on something — alcohol, marijuana or prescription drugs, to name a few substances?

OK, I’ll admit to being

“Suicide by cop” is a part of our everyday language now. Wikipedia says that is a fairly recent phenomenon, dating to the early 2000s, although it appeared in headlines as far back as the 1980s.

But it’s likely the act itself has existed for a long, long time. Desperate, suicidal people, sometimes aided by mood-altering substances, lack the nerve to kill themselves but want to goad police into killing them, instead.

This is not the second Great Depression. That much should be clear by now to anyone worried about the painfully slow economic recovery.

They had bread lines. We have long lines at airports and hour-long waits on tarmacs.

It’s a different sort of challenge — one fitting for a more privileged age.

The differences were brought home to me last weekend during a quick trip to Indianapolis. With some time to kill before my flight home,