Can the state of Arizona require people to prove they are citizens when they register to vote? That’s the question the Supreme Court considered on Monday, when it heard oral arguments in a lawsuit challenging Arizona’s Proposition 200, a ballot measure adopted in 2004.

Imagine yourself being arrested for a crime. You are summoned before a judge. Presenting the case against you is a prosecutor, who represents the government and its immense power and legitimacy.

The 911 call last month that led to an emergency dispatcher begging workers at a Bakersfield, Calif., senior living facility to perform CPR on a woman captured the attention of the public. A staff worker told the dispatcher it was against the facility’s policy to intervene. The woman, Lorraine Bayless, died.

Rural cleansing. That will be Steve Woods’ economic plan, should he be elected governor. You may remember Woods as an independent candidate who dropped out of the U.S. Senate campaign in its final days last year.

If last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference were a papal conclave, black smoke would be billowing from the chimney at the Gaylord Convention Center.

Mariska Hargitay, better known as “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” Detective Olivia Benson, is the human intersection of life and art.

In announcing his wrongheaded proposal to increase the minimum wage to $9 per hour, President Barack Obama spoke in lofty terms: “In the wealthiest nation on earth,” he said in his State of the Union address last month, “no one who works full time should have to live in poverty.”

In choice of both topic and foil, Rand Paul’s now legendary Senate filibuster was a stroke of political genius. The topic was, ostensibly, very narrow: Does the president have the constitutional authority to put a drone-launched Hellfire missile through your kitchen — you, a good citizen of Topeka to whom POTUS might have taken a dislike — while you’re cooking up a pot roast?

Nearly 8 million Americans go to work every day yet still live below the poverty line. That is in part because the federal minimum wage is too low.

The other day I was talking to some University of Southern Maine folks about our budget challenges in future years and how we would deal with them, when a member of the group brought up Clayton Christenson’s work about disruptive innovation.