Andrew Napolitano: What If We Didn't Have A Constitution?

What if the rule of law is an illusion?    What if we didn't have a Constitution? What if the government were elected by custom and tradition, but not by law? What if election procedures and official titles and government responsibilities merely followed those that preceded them, and not because any of this was compelled by law,    ... MORE

National Contempt For 1st Amendment: 51% Of Democrats & 37% Of Republicans Want “Hate Speech” To Be A Crime

Enough to make lady liberty cry.   Since 1994 people convicted of federal crimes motivated by the 'actual or perceived' identity of victims have faced tougher sentences. Many other states had passed 'hate crime' statutes in earlier years, and in recent years many states have been adopting laws which make crimes motivated by the victim's   ... MORE

VIDEO: Thomas Sowell - Central Planning

10 Great Points In Rand Paul’s Patriot Act Attack

by Matt Welch.     I don't know whether Rand Paul's ongoing Senate talkfest will succeed in running out the clock on the Patriot Act, or (as he is seeking) opening up a debate and amendment process, but I do know that—just like his 2013 exercise—these have been some of the most invigorating hours on C-SPAN in recent memory. Warrants need   ... MORE

Sarah Longwell: A Call To Ditch Sobriety Checkpoints

Big hassle, lots of money and a tiny reward.   Americans should buckle up and brace themselves for particularly heavy traffic this Memorial Day weekend. According to estimates from AAA, more than 37 million vacationers will drive to a destination for the three-day break this year, the most in nearly a decade. Unfortunately, crowded highways  ... MORE

VIDEO: Warsaw's Blinking Lights

Veronique de Rugy: The Tip Of The Regulatory Iceberg

Crippling innovation speeding the growth of government. In 2014, the government issued 2,400 new regulations, including 27 major rules that may cost $80 billion or more annually. They range from forcing restaurants to list the number of calories in food—even though past experiments have revealed that such measures fail to change     ... MORE

The Fancy Way Of Saying State-Sanctioned Theft

by Matt Vespa.      Welcome to the upside down world of civil asset forfeiture. On Monday, FreedomWorks and the Center for American Progress (CAP) joined forces to invite bloggers, writers, and some think-tank analysts for a daylong conference on justice reform. One of the aspects I liked about the conference is that it shows on some     ... MORE

Walter E Williams: The True Black Tragedy

Keeping blacks on the liberal plantation.     Hustlers and people with little understanding want us to believe that today's black problems are the continuing result of a legacy of slavery, poverty and racial discrimination. The fact is that most of the social pathology seen in poor black neighborhoods is entirely new in black history. Let's look   ... MORE

Derrick Broze: Introducing REVERSE DRUG STINGS: The Latest Tool For Creating Criminals In The War On Drugs

More criminal tactics from government.   "The time has come to remind the Executive Branch that the Constitution charges it with law enforcement — not crime creation,” one California judge writes in a damning indictment of the practice, while another describes agents as “trolling poor neighborhoods.” Since Sept. 11, 2001, law       ... MORE

VIDEO: John Stossel - Government's Homeless Programs

Illinois Finds DUI Checkpoints Both Costly And Ineffective

by David Rutter.    When last we visited the unhappy realm of drunken drivers, we were asking a valid question: What if DUI arrests are going down in Illinois because there are fewer sloshed drivers? That was true everywhere but on Lake County's non-municipal roadways where sheriff's deputies made 348 DUI arrests in 2013, the most of any county  ... MORE

John Stossel: Mr. Capitalism

The incentive to keep patients happy and healthy.   For years, my scientist brother Tom was the nonpolitical Stossel. I defended free markets on TV, and he studied blood at Harvard and Brigham and Women's Hospital. Mom asked me when I'd get a "real job" like his. Then the crusade against capitalism reached his world. Medical "journalists"      ...  MORE

VIDEO: Ending Civil Asset Forfeiture Abuse

Thomas Sowell: 'Just Asking'

Obama's class warfare "questions."    In a recent panel discussion on poverty at Georgetown University, President Barack Obama gave another demonstration of his mastery of rhetoric — and disregard of reality. One of the ways of fighting poverty, he proposed, was to "ask from society's lottery winners" that they make a "modest investment"  ... MORE

Greg Markle: Dentist Under Fire For Not Charging Enough

The ugly reason behind licensing laws.     A licensed dentist and orthodontist in Arkansas was told that he would lose his license after offering low-cost teeth cleanings to anyone without health insurance. Dr. Ben Burris runs eleven orthodontist offices in Arkansas. He started offering teeth cleanings for $69 for kids and $99 for adults in 2013, a    ... MORE

Pot Prohibition: Unscientific, Unconstitutional & Unjust

by Jacob Sullum.       A few days before the House of Representatives passed a federal ban on marijuana in June 1937, the Republican minority leader, Bertrand Snell of New York, confessed, “I do not know anything about the bill.” The Democratic majority leader, Sam Rayburn of Texas, educated him. “It has something to do with something that is   ... MORE

Radley Balko: The Ongoing Criminalization Of Poverty

Many police departments have inappropriate goals. A series of reports over the last few weeks have shed more light on the increasingly predatory enforcement of misdemeanors across the country, and how this trend disproportionately hurts the poor. The first report comes from an area familiar to readers of The Watch — St. Louis County,      ... MORE

VIDEO: John Stossel - Another Government Housing Bubble

Conor Friedersdorf: The Injustice Of Civil Asset Forfeiture

The government's highwaymen.   Joseph Rivers left his hometown of Romulus, Michigan, boarded a train, and headed for Los Angeles, California, where he hoped to become a music-video producer. The 22-year-old says he’d been saving money for years to make the trip and that his mother had scraped together some additional cash to help   ... MORE

What Would James Madison Do? New Book By Charles Murray Tells Citizens How To Fight Government Tyranny

by Jay Cost.      Charles Murray’s By the People: Rebuilding Liberty without Permission is an important book that advocates of constitutional government should consider carefully. While Murray overstates the case, his book articulates a novel argument, replete with insights on the nature of political corruption and how to fight it. Murray’s book    ... MORE

VIDEO: Bulk Collection Of Phone Data Should End

Ron Hart: The Court Vindicates Edward Snowden

Who watches the watchers?      “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” -Ben Franklin, 1759.  Those of us who defended Edward Snowden in his efforts to expose our government’s illegal data collection activities were vindicated last week, as was Mr. Snowden. In essence,     ... MORE

Regulations Cost U.S. Businesses $1.88 Trillion A Year

by Clayton Browne. Just about everybody agrees that businesses need some degree of regulation to assure public safety, but people with different political perspectives often vehemently disagree on how much regulation there should be, the form of the regulation and who should be doing the regulating. A recent report from the Competitive   ... MORE

John W. Whitehead: The Government Is On The Warpath

Time for ‘We the People’ to circle the wagons.     In an age of overcriminalization, government officials are constantly telling Americans what not to do. Yet it used to be “we the people” telling the government what it could and could not do. Indeed, the three words used most frequently throughout the Bill of Rights in regards to the         ... MORE

Pamela Geller’s Critics Are Proving Her Point

by David French.     Let’s be clear: The great freak-out over Pamela Geller’s “draw Muhammad” contest isn’t about love for Islam or for robust and respectful religious pluralism. Indeed, many of those expressing anguish over blasphemy against Islam show no such concern over even the most vile attacks on the Christian faith. Beyond that, they’re     ... MORE

VIDEO: Walter E Williams - On Immigration

The Lights Of Times Square Are A Beautiful Thing

by Michael J. Hurd.  The dimmer could be turned on the bright lights of New York City as the Big Apple is facing pressure to remove its iconic oversized billboards from Times Square. A 2012 federal transportation law designated Times Square an ‘arterial route’. It means that the famous Broadway and 7th Avenue intersection falls under the 1965   ... MORE

Steve Chapman: The Democrats Abandon Free Trade

What happened to bipartisan consensus?   For a long time, there was a bipartisan consensus for free trade. President George H.W. Bush, a Republican, negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement, and Democrat Bill Clinton got it passed. It prevailed in the Senate in 1993 with the support of 27 Democrats and 34 Republicans. The consensus  ... MORE

VIDEO: Why You Should Pay Attention To Bitcoin

Josie Wales: IRS Continues SWAT Raids For Evasion While Hundreds Of Thier Agents Avoid Paying Any Taxes At All

Government's tax cheats are low priority.  The Associated Press has reported that over 1,600 IRS employees have willfully committed tax evasion in a 10-year span; most still employed in spite of a 1998 law calling for termination in such cases. Even worse, it has been reported that many of the tax-evading agents were active in enforcing the federal  ... MORE

Gary North: The Global Warmers Have Lost The War

The ultimate inconvenient truth.   It’s always nice to see a leftist outfit finally fess up to a lost cause. The global warming crowd has clearly lost, and this Mother Jones article makes this clear. The governments of the world have not implemented the Kyoto treaty of 1992 or its 1997 update. The whole thing lapsed on December 31, 2012. It’s over.  ... MORE