How The NSA Tampers With US-Made Internet Routers

by Glenn Greenwald.   For years, the US government loudly warned the world that Chinese routers and other internet devices pose a "threat" because they are built with backdoor surveillance functionality that gives the Chinese government the ability to spy on anyone using them. Yet what the NSA's documents show is that Americans have been     ... MORE

Michael Hursh: The Great Police Violence Cover-Up

Most departments refuse to divulge the data.    "Have a 20-year-old son, and I have a 12-year-old son, and I’m so afraid for them. … This is about a war machine. It is us against the [expletive] machine!” —Rapper Killer Mike. Perhaps the saddest thing is: We don’t really know what the truth is. We don’t really know if Killer Mike—his voice breaking  ... MORE

VIDEO: A Discussion About Fairness & Redistribution

Jose Pagliery: Expect Heavy FAA Drone Regulations

Government rapidly seeks to curb new freedom.  Farmers want drones to survey fields. Wedding photographers want them for moving aerial shots. They might soon need a pilot's license. By year's end, the Federal Aviation Administration will unveil proposed rules that apply to anyone flying a small drone that's even remotely for business   ... MORE

Policing For Profit: Who Says Crime Doesn't Pay?

by Gil Smart and Susan Baldrige.     Barbara and Ralph Spring are struggling to raise their two grandsons after their daughter, Jessica Marie Crawford, died from a drug overdose last year. The Quarryville couple wish they had their daughter's Jeep Cherokee to take the kids back and forth to sports events. Or, they wish they could have sold it and  ... MORE

VIDEO: Murray Rothbard - Freedom Of Speech

Minnesota Mom Faces 2 Years In Prison For Saving Her Son

by Matt Agorist.  A mother of two is facing jail time for seeking out life saving cannabis oil to treat her son’s horrifying seizures. This nightmare for the Brown family started 3 years ago, when their son Trey, then 12, was hit in the head with a baseball causing a traumatic brain injury. The brain injury has caused severe tremors and episodes in which  ... MORE

Ed Krayewski: World’s Gone Right

Don't believe the hype.      Islamist extremists on the loose in the Middle East, drug cartels running wild south of the border, Ebola, nuclear proliferation, ubiquitous surveillance, climate disasters, beheadings. It's easy to imagine things are worse than they have been in a long time. We don't have the benefit of hindsight, yet we can take a step back  ... MORE

John Stossel: Thanks, Property Rights!

Prosperity and capitalism.      This Thanksgiving, I give thanks for something our forebears gave us: property rights. People associate property rights with greed and selfishness, but they are keys to our prosperity. Things go wrong when resources are held in common. Before the Pilgrims were able to hold the first Thanksgiving, they nearly ... MORE

Erica Martinson: 'The Most Expensive Regulation Ever'

Obama rolls out a major EPA rule.       The Obama administration proposed a draft air pollution rule on Wednesday that business groups charge could be the costliest regulation of all time — setting up a test of how hard the president will fight for his environmental agenda against a newly strengthened GOP. President Barack Obama has already   ... MORE

VIDEO: Wisdom Of The Constitution

A. Barton Hinkle: End State Monopolies On Liquor Sales

It's time to get the state out of the booze business.    Virginia made a big mistake four years ago when it failed to end the state’s monopoly on liquor sales, and its residents are going to pay the price for that — again. So far in 2014 Virginia has hauled in 6 percent more revenue than it had by this point last year. But lawmakers had planned     ... MORE

Why The Founders Didn’t Give Us A Democracy

by Keith Weiner.    As the famous story goes, when Ben Franklin left Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia had a question she wanted answered. “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” No one today (well, seemingly      ... MORE

VIDEO: Top 3 Takeaways From The Hagel Resignation

Rand Paul Calls for a Formal Declaration of War Against ISIS

by Doug Mills.      Senator Rand Paul is calling for a declaration of war against the Islamic State, a move that promises to shake up the debate over the military campaign in Iraq and Syria as President Obama prepares to ask Congress to grant him formal authority to use force. Mr. Paul, a likely presidential candidate who has emerged as one of the    ... MORE

Loretta Lynch Has No Problem With Asset Forfeiture

by George Leef.    After the tumultuous Attorney Generalship of Eric Holder, what the country badly needs is a replacement who will uphold the law fairly and guard against injustices perpetrated by the government. President Obama’s nominee to replace him, federal prosecutor Loretta Lynch is questionable in that regard because of her enthusiastic ... MORE

Sophia Wushanley: Free speech And Political Correctness

Speak and be judged. Its okay. It’s not easy being mainstream, or so the purportedly oppressed majority would have us all believe. Take, for instance, the recent #Gamergate backlash against feminist gamers. Or the indignation over the fact that a physicist was called out for wearing a shirt covered in sexualized images of women. There’s a general  ... MORE

Thomas Sowell: Beware Of Our Betters

What motivates our self-appointed conservators.   Jonathan Gruber's several videotaped remarks about the gross deceptions that got ObamaCare passed in Congress should tell us a lot about the Obama administration. And the way that the mainstream media hesitated for days to even mention what Professor Gruber said, while they    ... MORE

VIDEO: Tom Woods - Kill The Monster

More Utah Killings By Cops Than By Criminals

Erin Alberty.    In the past five years, more Utahns have been killed by police than by gang members. Or drug dealers. Or from child abuse. And so far this year, deadly force by police has claimed more lives — 13, including a Saturday shooting in South Jordan — than has violence between spouses and dating partners.As the tally of fatal police shootings rises,   ... MORE

Autry Pruitt: Civil Forfeiture Is Tyranny By Another Name

No place for such in a free society.   At the core of the American founding is protecting the civil rights of the people. The list of “repeated injuries and usurpations,” by King George III, as delineated in the Declaration of Independence, were never far from the minds of those who drafted the Constitution and for good reason.  They wanted a    ... MORE

VIDEO: America's 3 Most Fee-Ridden Cities

Elite Contempt For Ordinary Americans

by Walter E Williams.       Jonathan Gruber, MIT economist and paid architect of Obamacare, has shocked and disgusted many Americans. In 2013, he explained to a University of Pennsylvania audience: "This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure (the Congressional Budget Office) did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate  ... MORE

Emily Elkins: Why Police Officers Keep Claiming Their Unarmed Victims Had Guns, and What We Can Do About It

The undue influence of stereotypes.  Police officers keep claiming that they genuinely thought their unarmed victims had lethal weapons. Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, who shot unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, claims in his grand jury testimony that Brown put his right hand “under his shirt in his waistband” and then lunged at   ... MORE

Another Federal Grant To Fund Warrantless Searches

Cops get seed money to troll for violators.  Taxpayers fund their own harassment. The California Highway Patrol (CHP) has received a federal “Reducing Impaired Driving” grant, which will fund 150 sobriety checkpoints, 75 DUI task force operations, proactive DUI enforcement patrols through September 30, 2015, and at least 100 safety      ... MORE

The Bad Policy That Created The Great Chocolate Shortage

by Tim Worstall.  The last few days have seen us regaled with a serious of stories about how the world is going to run out of chocolate. That would be, I think we can all agree, almost as bad as running out of bacon. So it’s worth thinking through the reasons as to why we might be running out. After all, cocoa, from which chocolate is made, is a plant,   ... MORE

VIDEO: John Stossel - Laboratories Of Democracy

Wendy McElroy: The New Gun Suspect: Every School Child

If only there was zero tolerance for nitwittery.     Five-year-old Elizabeth of Mobile, Alabama learned two new words last month in kindergarten: suicide and homicide. After drawing what resembled a gun, she pointed her crayon at another child and went "pew, pew." Horrified by the outburst of violence, the school required Elizabeth to fill    ... MORE

Too Many Federal Regulations Stifling Economic Recovery

by Thomas J. Donohue.    How do regulations stifle innovation? Let me count the ways. Across our economy, and in sector after sector, regulations put a stranglehold on innovation – in some cases stopping advancement in its tracks and in others preventing it from happening in the first place. Overregulation is a millstone around the neck of  ... MORE

VIDEO: Economics Of The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre

Lawmakers Should Protect Property Rights

What a conservative Congress should do.    Property rights are a fundamental value of political conservatives, and the new conservative majorities in Congress and the state Legislature have early opportunities to enhance those rights. Those rights most often have become controversial in eminent domain cases, where governments   ... MORE

Another White House Mouthpiece Joins Up With MSNBC

Propaganda repository gets new blood.  MSNBC: The place where ex-White House aides go to be unbiased. Or, well, something like that. There was a time, years ago, when MSNBC was still pretending to have straight news reporting by not letting hosts like Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews anchor election coverage. But that’s clearly a     ... MORE

Republicans Fail To Protect Citizens From NSA Snooping

from the Washington Times.      Invoking the Constitution is the common rhetoric of many politicians who swore to follow and defend it, but a lot of them have obviously never read it, or if they have, didn’t understand it. The Founding Fathers wrote it in plain English, simple enough for even a lawyer to understand, but some politicians    ... MORE

Surveillance Sneaking Its Way Into The Cities

by Steven Greenhut. In 1966, the then-Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas warned about an "alarming trend whereby the privacy and dignity of our citizens is being whittled away." Each step is imperceptible, he wrote, "but when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a… society in which government may intrude into the secret regions  ... MORE

VIDEO: Inside Civil Asset Forfeiture

American Idol: The Death of America’s First Black Father

by Kira Davis.   American pop culture is filled with darlings. “America’s Sweetheart” has been everyone from the original 1920’s Sweetheart Mary Pickford (actually a Canadian) to Sandra Bullock to Jennifer Lawrence. “America’s Little Sister” was precocious Laura Ingalls. “America’s Mom” was ever-kind and tidy June Cleaver. But it was “America’s Dad”  ... MORE

Are ‘We The People’ Useful Idiots In The Digital Age?

by John W. Whitehead.  Is this really a government of consent? “Who needs direct repression,” asked philosopher Slavoj Zizek, “when one can convince the chicken to walk freely into the slaughterhouse?” In an Orwellian age where war equals peace, surveillance equals safety, and tolerance equals intolerance of uncomfortable truths and       ... MORE

VIDEO: Economic Freedom In Action - Changing Lives

Obama: US Taxpayers Must Pay For Illegals’ Children

by Neil Munro.      A redistribution from citizens to non-citizens. Illegal immigrants will receive huge payments from American taxpayers under rules now being imposed by President Barack Obama’s unilateral amnesty. The illegals will get work-permits and Social Security cards, and will be required to pay taxes, according to Cecilia Munoz, the former    ... MORE

Net Neutrality Compromises the Internet’s Future

by Donald Rieck and Wayne Winegarden.     Perhaps President Obama envisions that the Internet is operated by Ernestine, the condescending telephone operator played by Lily Tomlin on Laugh-In. Otherwise, it is difficult to justify why he would want to hobble the 21st century broadband industry with regulations designed in the    ... MORE