P. J. O'Rourke: They Hate Poor People
The liberals' dirty little secret. On January 1, 2012, Maine became the first state to ban smoking in all low-income public housing. Twelve thousand poor people faced their New Year’s Day hangover without the solace of a Marlboro to accompany their aspirin and coffee. This, of course, was good. Just ask the high-minded, right-thinking progressive elites who, it’s ... MOREJohn Merline: Obama Doing Good Job Creating Dependents
Create a dependent and you have a constituant. If the Republican primaries are any indication, one big debate in the upcoming election will be whether President Obama is pushing the country into becoming a European-style welfare culture. Mitt Romney, for example, argues that "over the past three years, Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based ... MOREEthel C. Fenig: Politically Correct Weather Forecasts
TV meteorologists pressured to sell climate change. The era of catching up on the weather forecast to plan what to wear is over. Now, in addition to watching the Doppler radar circling your area, if the grossly misnamed Forecast the Facts has its way you'll get your forecast learning if the skies in the next few days will be cloudy or sunny with a dose of ... MOREMichael Tanner: A Redistributive State Of The Union
Focus should be on creating wealth, not spreading it around. Shortly after President Obama was elected, NBC News interviewed a young woman from Detroit named Peggy Joseph. She explained that she was excited about Obama’s election because “I won’t have to worry about putting the gas in my car. I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage.” ... MOREEnergy Firms: Regulations Threaten Future Development
A clarion call to end of the Department of Energy. Mid-market energy industry executives primarily from the oil and gas sector are optimistic about the potential for U.S. energy security but are worried that regulations could jeopardize the availability of those resources, according to a report released Jan. 25 by small and mid-market business lender CIT Group ... MOREMonty Pelerin: The Welfare State & Political Self-Interest
It's finally time to sink the Bismark. Otto, that is. The siren song of Socialism contains the seeds of destruction that now threaten the very foundations of civilization. Socialism as a disease progresses slowly, but it has been underway for more than a hundred years. The malignancy is now metastasizing. Unfortunately, ours are the generations that will ... MOREThomas Sowell: A Brass Age?
This may be the golden age of presumptuous ignorance. The most recent demonstrations of that are the Occupy Wall Street mobs. It is doubtful how many of these semi-literate sloganizers could tell the difference between a stock and a bond. Yet there they are, mouthing off about Wall Street on television, cheered on by politicians and the ... MOREJohn Hayward: Buffett Cleans Up After Keystone XL
The Sage of Obama is one lucky guy. When President Obama, who is normally a great proponent of “infrastructure” projects, made his bizarre decision to block the Keystone XL pipeline project, I wondered if he might have been induced to create those thousands of American jobs if the oil could be moved by his beloved high-speed rail. As it turns out, oil ... MORERichard Branson: Time To End The War On Drugs
Findings from the Global Commission for Drug Policy. Just as prohibition of alcohol failed in the United States in the 1920s, the war on drugs has failed globally. Over the past 50 years, more than $1 trillion has been spent fighting this battle, and all we have to show for it is increased drug use, overflowing jails, billions of pounds and dollars of .. MOREVIDEO: State of the Union 2012
CATO Institute scholars respond to President Obama's State of the Union.
Binyamin Appelbaum: Fed Sees Rates Staying Near Zero
Bernanke favors keeping lid on boiling pressure cooker. The Federal Reserve said on Wednesday that it intended to hold short-term interest rates near zero “at least through late 2014,” extending its most basic and longest-running response to the financial crisis by at least another 18 months. The decision means that the Fed does not expect the ... MORE
John Stossel: The Real State Of The Union
Chicken soup for the realist. Has Barack Obama learned nothing in three years? During his State of the Union address, he promised "a blueprint for an economy." But economies are crushed by blueprints. An economy is really nothing more than people participating in an unfathomably complex spontaneous network of exchanges aimed at improving their ... MOREJacob Sullum: How GPS Tracking Threatens Privacy
The Fourth Amendment implications of new technologies. "If you win this case," Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben during oral argument in U.S. v. Jones last fall, "there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movement of every citizen ... MOREVIDEO: John Stossel - Ron Paul And Rational Defense
Ron Paul's defense strategy is challenged by Col. David Hunt.
A Barton Hinkle: Do We Need A Law To Make People Think?
The picture painted of some legislators is grotesque. “I think people should make informed choices, and I think this bill would accomplish that.” So said Del. Mark Cole the other day about his bill to force anyone seeking a firearm or concealed-carry permit in Virginia to look at autopsy pictures of shooting victims. Autopsy pictures of gunshot wounds ... MORE
Jon Entine: Killing Drilling With Farcical "Science"
Recognize this as a debate between science and ideology. The academic face of the anti-fracking movement — Cornell marine ecologist Robert Howarth — increasingly looks like he’s willing to turn science into farce. Last spring, the once-obscure professor became the go-to expert for anti-fracking journalists and lawmakers when he published a report ... MOREWalter Russell Mead: The Once And Future Liberalism
Beyond the dysfunctional ideals of liberalism. Writing about the onset of the Great Depression, John Kenneth Galbraith famously said that the end had come but was not yet in sight. The past was crumbling under their feet, but people could not imagine how the future would play out. Their social imagination had hit a wall. The same thing is happening today ... MORECharles Kadlec: Gingrich And The Gold Standard
Did you know Newt wants to get back to sound money? The biggest under-reported story of the South Carolina primary is winner Newt Gingrich’s campaign promise to convene a gold commission to “look at the whole concept of how do we get back to hard money.” The only job of the Fed should be to “maintain the stability of the dollar because we want a ... MOREJesse Weed: Obama's Social Justice Capitalism
Obama is not just motivated by kickbacks. Unlike the mercy-killing "vulture" capital firms, venture capital firms invest in start-up companies. Take a quick look at a venture capital firm like Atlas Venture Capital and you see a list of firms that are not exactly household names. The sole criterion venture capital firms use to select start-ups for initial financial ... MORESteve McCann: Self-Destruction Of The Mainstream Media
A welcome sight to behold. For the past forty years the mainstream media has become increasingly liberal and more overt in promoting the policies of the Democratic Party. This evolutionary process reached its zenith in 2008 when the media were instrumental in Barack Obama being elected President. Many journalists dropped any pretense of objectivity and ... MOREWilliam Tucker: Environmentalism And The Leisure Class
Keystone Cop Obama protects his environmental flank. This week President Obama handed down what may prove to be one of the most fateful decisions of his entire administration when he rejected the plan to build the Keystone XL Pipeline carrying oil from the tar sands of Canada to the refineries of Houston. The decision did not win him one new ... MORERon Paul: TSA Part Of An "Out-Of-Control" Police State
Candidate calls to abolish liberty-violating agency. Republican Senator Rand Paul was stopped at an airport on Monday for setting off an alarm and refusing a patdown, prompting his father, U.S. presidential candidate Ron Paul, to accuse security officials of being part of an "out of control" police state. In a harshly worded attack on the Transportation Security ... MORE
Walter E Williams: Schools Of Education
Time to get rid of academic slums. Larry Sand's article "No Wonder Johnny (Still) Can't Read" — written for The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, based in Raleigh, N.C. — blames schools of education for the decline in America's education. Education professors drum into students that they should not "drill and kill" or be the "sage on the ... MORESupreme Court Delivers Government Surveillance A Hit
Warrant needed for GPS tracking. We finally have a victor in one of the most talked-about court cases of 2011. The Supreme Court issued its opinion [PDF] Monday in U.S. v. Jones, a case that asked whether the government needs a warrant to slap a GPS tracker on a suspect’s car. The Supreme Court was unanimous in its decision: The government lost. Privacy won. ... MORE
Andrew Foy & Brenton Stransky: 3 Problems With Ron Paul
Ron Paul does not have the smile of Obama, the folksy likability of Romney or the carving wit of Gingrich. In fact, Ron Paul looks (and sounds) nothing like a Washington elitist. In our visual society we too often pick our politicians based on hair line and pearly whites and too seldom on the content of their character or value of their platform. No one who ... MORENeil Snyder: An ObamaCare Warning To Seniors
You might not get that procedure. While I taught at the University of Virginia, I served for a while as associate dean. My dean at the time, Bill Shenkir, used a phrase that I thought was particularly helpful when we were contemplating major decisions: "Let's reduce the fog factor." By that he meant that we should always examine the ramifications of our ... MOREStephen Dinan: Arizona To Investigate Fed Gun-Running Op
Heavy-handed feds get payback from state. Arizona's state legislature will open its own investigation into the Obama administration's disgraced gun-running program, know as "Fast and Furious," the speaker of the state House said Friday. Speaker Andy Tobin created the committee, and charged it with looking at whether the program broke any .... MOREGary North: Victory On SOPA: Lessons Learned
"When we feel the heat, we see the light." - Senator Everett Dirksen. On Wednesday, January 18, the forces of liberty grained a major political victory over the entrenched meddlers in Congress. The owners of a handful of popular Internet sites joined together to protest SOPA/PIPA. They blacked out their sites and provided information on the threat to Internet ... MORESteven Greenhut: Jerry Brown's Failed Vision
Fires cannot be extinguished with more flames. Years ago, after starting to report and editorialize on news events in an old factory city in Ohio, I was quickly dubbed a “negative” for pointing out the disastrous government spending, housing, and tax policies embraced by city leaders—policies that were keeping a nice place wretched. Anyone who made ... MORE
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