Alt-weeklies get some pretty weird-looking mail–highly creative promotional items, letters scrawled on brown paper and the like. These days many editors and publishers say their staff are opening all the mail with latex gloves and locking doors they used to leave open. One editor bucks the trend by organizing a charter trip to New York, and a publisher quips, “We've notified the local TV stations that we're ironing all our mail while wearing Tyvek suits, and invited them to come and film the process.”
Attorney General John Ashcroft now demands the very federal powers he opposed as a Missouri senator, Ray Hartmann points out in the Riverfront Times. "As for today's Ashcroft, whatever happened to the Fourth Amendment and the 'indivisible American value' it contains? To borrow a phrase (his), 'apparently innocent citizens are expected to trust the bureaucracy not to abuse them.'" For Ashcroft, that was then, Hartmann writes.
