Let's try not to make this political, but... perhaps a little refresher on the First Amendment is in order.

    The news in the past ten days has been full of reports of the Justice Department targeting journalists with subpoenas and/or, worse, characterizing their investigative work as "crimes." First came a report that the email logs of some 20 Associated Press employees had been targeted, and then, on May 20, came the report that the actual contents of electronic messages of three Fox News staffers had been accessed by Justice officials. One Fox reporter, James Rosen, was specifically - and, by all reasonable legal interpretations, wrongly - accused of criminal activity by the Justice Department for the act of seeking information on North Korean political and military activity.

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This seems to be "scandal week" in Washington, D.C., with three major controversies roiling the national political waters. What's interesting is that while conservatives and liberals disagree on the significance of the scandal involving the September 11 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya and the one involving Justice Department monitoring of phone records of the Associated Press, virtually everybody, including ordinarily partisan Democrats and even President Obama, seems to agree that the IRS' targeting of conservative groups is an unforgivable violation.

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A new bombshell has dropped in an ongoing controversy in Alabama about whether the state should officially align itself with the national "Common Core" standards for education. Legislators and state school board members who refuse to disassociate from Common Core may not know until too late just what a political hit awaits them.

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Has President Obama suddenly “lost his juice,” as one prominent reporter asked at Obama’s April 30 press conference?

Or is there some other explanation for the stalling, on almost every front, of Obama’s legislative agenda in these first months of his new term?

A fair-minded assessment falls somewhere in between the “no juice” and “other reasons” alternatives. Within that assessment lies a good civics lesson - as we shall see.

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