Lachlan Markay on an inconvenient truth. A new film starring Matt Damon presents American oil and natural gas
producers as money-grubbing villains purportedly poisoning rural
American towns. It is therefore of particular note that it is financed
in part by the royal family of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates. The creators of Promised ... MORE
Test-taking frauds. Nearly two years ago, U.S. News & World Report came out with a story titled "Educators Implicated in Atlanta Cheating Scandal." It reported that "for 10 years, hundreds of Atlanta public school teachers and principals changed answers on state tests in one of the largest cheating scandals in U.S. history." More than three-quarters of the ... MORE
Big Brother is in the building. TechDirt notes: In a radio interview,
Wall Street Journal reporter Julia Angwin (who’s been one of the best
at covering the surveillance state in the US) made a simple observation
that puts much of this into context: the US surveillance regime has more data on the average American than the Stasi ever did on East Germans. ... MORE
The gutting of the Fourth Amendment. Until 1990, sobriety checkpoints were illegal
in California and the United States. But a Supreme Court decision
overturned 200 years of protection from illegal search-and-seizure. The Supreme Court case Michigan Department of State Police vs. Sitz changed how we party and how we view the police. ... MORE
The New York Times comes on strong. For three years running, I've closed the Old Year with a
seasonal burst of bile, my annual Five Worst Op-Eds column. As before, this year's malicious listicle rewards bad arguments and bad writing, with extra points for warped values. 5. Eric Posner, "The World Doesn't Love the First Amendment," ... MORE
Congress needs to order a slice of wisdom. This week, as a new Congress was being sworn in, the Food and
Drug Administration
released two sets of controversial and long-delayed food-safety
rules. Another FDA rule that’s been long in the making is the agency’s proposed menu-labeling rule. The purpose of that rule, first proposed
in 2010 as ... MORE
Lawmakers pay lip service to liberty while trampling it. This year’s Rose Parade in Pasadena, California featured the Department of Defense’s “Freedom Isn’t Free” float. While nothing is close to free when DOD is involved—the B-2 bomber that made a fly-by as parade-goers cheered cost more than twice its weight in gold—the rose- ... MORE
A lesson in political double-talk. Do a Google search for the term “subsidies for oil companies” and you’ll get more than 600,000 results. Try a search for “subsidies for Big Oil” and you’ll get almost 700,000 results. The term “tax breaks for Big Oil” has almost half a million results. Then do a Google search for “tax breaks for green energy”
and you’ll only ... MORE
by Grace-Marie Turner. The third wave of ObamaCare taxes began on January 1, the latest
blitz before the tsunami of changes from the health overhaul law hit in
2014. These new and higher taxes are being levied to partially pay
for ObamaCare’s massive new subsidies for private health insurance and
expansion of Medicaid. The most controversial of ... MORE
A populace designed to serve. In the sub-discipline of economics known as public choice, an important concept is the theory of "rational ignorance." First articulated by political scientist Anthony Downs in the 1950s, and expanded upon by economist Gordon Tullock and others, the theory of rational ignorance holds that it is perfectly rational for ... MORE
See: Eye-opening Feinstein wants to ban guns video. Politician after politician have joined the television talking heads in calling for a new “assault weapons ban” patterned after the ten-year Clinton ban that was allowed to lapse in 2004 after Justice Department and private studies concluded it had no impact whatsoever on murder and violent ... MORE
A tax increase for everyone but the favored few. In praising Congress's huge new tax increase, President Obama said Tuesday that "millionaires and billionaires" will finally "pay their fair share." That is, unless you are a Nascar track owner, a wind-energy company or the owners of StarKist Tuna, among many others who managed to ... MORE