Florida Senate Panel Votes To Ban Spying With Drones
One state's stand for citizen privacy. A Florida Senate panel says police should be banned from using drones to spy on citizens. A bill (SB 92) that would prohibit law enforcement agencies from gathering evidence or other information flew through the Criminal Justice Committee with a unanimous vote Tuesday. It also would ban ... MOREJohn Stossel: First, The Bad News
We in the media rarely lie to you. But that leaves plenty of room to take things wildly out of context. That's where most big scare stories come from, like recent headlines
about GM foods. GM means "genetically modified," which means scientists
add genes, altering the plant's DNA, in this case to make the crop
resistant to pests. Last week, ... MOREWalter E Williams: Are Guns The Problem?
Moral values, not laws, make a civilized society. When I attended primary and secondary school — during the 1940s and '50s — one didn't hear of the kind of shooting mayhem that's become routine today. Why? It surely wasn't because of strict firearm laws. My replica of the 1902 Sears mail-order catalog shows 35 pages of firearm ... MOREJeff Stier: Obesity Police Launch A Needless War
The relentless effort of regulators to reduce options. If there’s agreement about anything in our hotly-politicized environment today it is that while we work to find sensible and principled solutions to real-world problems, we also need to do a better job coming to consensuses. But when it comes to addressing obesity, the most prominent public ... MOREPolice Chief Seeks To Nullify Unconstitutional Gun Control
by Alex Newman. While the Obama administration and some Democrat lawmakers plot ever more extreme assaults on the Second Amendment,
state and local officials across the country are working just as hard
to find ways to protect the gun rights of law-abiding citizens in their
jurisdictions. One local Pennsylvania police chief is helping to lead
the way, asking ... MOREThomas Sowell: Liberalism Vs. Blacks
Evidence can be a real inconvenience. There is no question that liberals do an impressive job of expressing
concern for blacks. But do the intentions expressed in their words
match the actual consequences of their deeds? San Francisco is a classic example of a city unexcelled in its
liberalism. But the black population of San Francisco today is less ... MOREA. Barton Hinkle: Spending Cuts Are Mostly Fiction
Would you like to save $20,000 this year? Of course you would. Here’s how: Plan a month-long vacation to Disneyland, and budget $20,000 for the trip. Then don’t go. Presto! You just “cut” your family budget by 20 grand. This sounds absurd—because it is. Yet that is precisely
how Washington operates. A couple of weeks ago, ... MORE
Biden: White House Eying 19 Executive Actions On Guns
Obama prepares to deploy tyrannical measures. The White House has identified 19 executive actions for President Barack Obama to move unilaterally on gun control, Vice President Joe Biden told a group of House Democrats on Monday, the administration’s first definitive statements about its response to last month’s mass shooting at Sandy Hook ... MORERobert Anderson: Gun Control And Political Correctness
Gun rights are not about hunting. Silence rarely conveys knowledge, especially when it’s the result of intimidation. There are moments when it’s prudent to remain silent, but hardly when you’re in the midst of a gun ownership debate. The political class, and its anti-gun proponents, are today engaged in a massive legal assault on ... MOREGary Becker: Have We Lost The War On Drugs?
Monetary costs and human costs are too high. President Richard Nixon declared a "war on drugs" in 1971. The expectation then was that drug trafficking in the United States could be greatly reduced in a short time through federal policing—and yet the war on drugs continues to this day. The cost has been large in terms of lives, money and the ... MOREMichael Barone: Is The Entitlement Era Winding Down?
Are we on the threshold of a new period in U.S. history. It’s often good fun and sometimes revealing to divide American history into distinct periods of uniform length. In working on my forthcoming book on American migrations, internal and immigrant, it occurred to me that you could do this using the American-sounding interval of 76 years, ... MOREVeronique de Rugy: Get States Off The Federal Dole
Stop the growth of government. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy and the havoc it wrought on New
York, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) said
they would ask the federal government to cover at least 90
percent—and perhaps all—of the cleanup and recovery costs. New
Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) asked the same for the Garden State. ... MORE
Sheldon Richman: Against Government Debt
What Thomas Jefferson's favorite economist would say. The last time the debt-ceiling controversy arose, it occurred to
me that if the raising the "ceiling" is a mere formality—if in fact
the sky's the limit to government borrowing—it's no ceiling at all.
Hence, I dubbed this charade the "debt sky." Those who favor automatic increases in the "limit"—or no limit ... MOREKinsley Guy: Time To Re-Think Our War On Drugs
Rampant crime caused by drug war, not drugs. Now that Colorado and Washington have legalized recreational use of marijuana, it's time for Floridians to start talking seriously about doing the same. Legalization won't come overnight. A recent Quinnipiac University
poll found only 42 percent of Florida voters think recreational ... MOREObama Says Gun Control For Thee; A Virtual Army For Me!
Obama gives self Secret Service protection for life. President Obama signed a law today granting lifetime Secret Service protection to former presidents and their wives. As it stands now, the measure affects only two presidents -- Obama and predecessor George W. Bush. The bill approved by Congress reversed a 1994 law that had ended Secret ... MOREAugusta Chronicle: The Moral Face Of Capitalism
Preserving America. Conservatives are only starting to feel their way around the wilderness. Even in a horrible economy, and facing an administration beleaguered by scandals on the Mexican border, in Libya and in crony “green energy” failures that cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, the conservative message was rejected at the polls in ... MOREJoel F. Wade: Phony Vs. Earned Self-Esteem
Self-esteem is a result, not a vehicle. A study by Jean Twenge of San Diego State University, published in the current issue of Social Psychological and Personality Science, is getting a lot of news this week. Twenge found that college kids today are more likely to call themselves gifted and driven to succeed, while their test scores and hours ... MOREJoe Biden's Political Posturing On Gun Control Measures
by J.D. Tuccille. We'll have to wait until
Tuesday to see the details of Vice President Joe Biden's
2016 presidential
campaign platform gun control recommendations, but already
we know that it's likely be heavy on pandering to the gun-averse
political base, and light on anything that might leave the
administration dangling in the breeze when it ... MORE
EBT Abuse: Government's Cash-For-Drunkards Program
by Michelle Malkin. From New York to New Mexico and across the dependent plains, welfare recipients are getting sauced on the public dime. Drunk, besotted, bombed. But while politicians pay lip service to cutting government waste, fraud and abuse, they're doing very little in practice to stop the EBT party excesses. Where's the compassion for taxpayers? ... MORESales Of Guns Soar In U.S. As Tougher Laws Threatened
Citizens react as government plots against them. As Washington focuses on what Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will propose next week to curb gun violence, gun and ammunition sales are spiking in the rest of the country as people rush to expand their arsenals in advance of any restrictions that might be imposed. People were crowded five deep ... MOREThe Need For Semi-Automatic "Assault" Weapons
By Katie Pavlich. By now, we’ve heard the argument about semi- automatic "assault" rifles: nobody needs one. We’ve heard the only reason why someone would obtain this kind of weapon is so they can kill people, which is far from the truth. We’ve also heard the argument from both the Left and the Right that a pistol is how someone protects their ... MOREGovernment Unable To Define 'Homeland Security'
David Kravets on government's blank check for tyranny. What is “homeland security?” The federal bureaucracy doesn’t know,
and that’s problematic for a government that has been fighting the
ill-defined “war on terror” following 9/11, according to a new report
from the Congressional Research Service. In short, “homeland security” is whatever the ... MORE
Nit Ghei: Higher Wages, Lower Employment
Misguided government makes matters worse. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday laid out a wide-ranging agenda for the year. The first-term Democrat wants gun control, casinos and higher pay for teachers. Perhaps his most economically perilous proposal is an insistence on raising the state’s minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $8.75. ... MORETop 10 Most Dangerous U.S. Government Agencies
The danger within. We have chosen to highlight United States agencies; however, this top 10 list has global impact, as the U.S. has now proven to be the enforcement division of the overarching globalist agenda of centralized control. One could argue that every government agency serves the purpose of stifling freedom and wasting ... MOREJohn Stossel: Government Handouts Foster Dependency
Section 8 recipients become comfortably dependent. The Obama administration now proposes to spend millions more on handouts, despite ample evidence of their perverse effects. Shaun Donovan, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban
Development, says, “The single most important thing HUD does is
provide rental ... MORE
A. Barton Hinkle: The EPA Pushes The Envelope, Again
An institutional culture that sees the law as an impediment. In accusing the Environmental Protection Agency of trying to regulate “water itself as a pollutant,” Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is not showing an excess of exactitude. But his looseness is rhetorical and harmless. The EPA’s is neither. Last week federal judge ... MOREAndrew Napolitano: Guns And Freedom
Who is it that seeks to take freedom by force? The right of the people to keep and bear arms is an extension of the natural right to self-defense and a hallmark of personal sovereignty. It is specifically insulated from governmental interference by the Constitution and has historically been the linchpin of resistance to tyranny. And yet, the ... MOREM. Housel: 3 Economic Misconceptions That Need To Die
Regarding goods from China and Middle East oil. At a conference in Philadelphia last October, a Wharton professor noted
that one of the country's biggest economic problems is a tsunami of
misinformation. You can't have a rational debate when facts are so
easily supplanted by overreaching statements, broad generalizations, and ... MORETom McClusky: Fiscal Cliff Deal Penalizes Married Couples
Politicians vote incentive against marriage. When the “marriage penalty” first appeared in the tax code in 1969, most families had only one member working, and the tax provision was designed to give a tax cut to one-income families. Unfortunately, the tax failed to envision the growing number of women in the workforce. Today in most families, ... MORE
Ronald Bailey: The Promised Land Of Fracking
Environmental and economic benefits outweigh the costs. Matt Damon’s new film Promised Land is
stoking the controversy over fracking, the shorthand for natural
gas production using hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling.
The film pits a big natural gas production company against
economically stressed farmers in a Pennsylvania ... MORE
3 Troubling Ways TSA Punishes Passengers Who Opt Out
Intimidation, harassment and retaliatory wait time. If you don't want to walk through a poorly tested full-body scanner or have a TSA agent belittle your anatomy before your next flight, then you still have the right to opt out and submit to an "enhanced" pat-down. That's exactly what I did on a recent trip from Orlando to Atlanta. ... MOREBarry Farber: American Exceptionalism? Off The Charts!
Why hide from the facts? More than half of the American population believes the best days of this country are behind us. That might be depressing if America’s best days were less than they truly were. As it stands, it’s about as depressing as Bill Gates crying “Poverty!” if his fortune were to dip from 100 billion dollars down to around, say ... MORE
Sally Pipes: ObamaCare Guarantees Higher Premiums
Health insurance to go up $3,000 + higher. President Obama will deliver a second inaugural address later this month. He’ll no doubt reflect on what he’s done during his first four years in office — and on his signature healthcare law in particular. Let’s reflect with him. During his first campaign for the presidency in 2008, the president promised ... MORE
Richard Fausset: Mexico Considers Legalizing Pot
Bolstered by U.S. ballot wins. Forgive the Mexicans for trying to get this straight: So now the United States, which has spent decades battling Mexican marijuana, is on a legalization bender? The same United States that long viewed cannabis as a menace, funding crop-poisoning programs, tearing up auto bodies at the border, and deploying sniffer dogs, ... MOREAmy Payne: Uproar Over Bloated Sandy Aid Package
Bloated governor decries selfishness. Leaders from New Jersey and New York blew up yesterday after House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) postponed a vote on an aid package related to Hurricane Sandy. But the bill is so loaded with pork projects that these officials should consider directing their anger at the Obama Administration, which is ... MOREIra Stoll: Obama's Crony Capitalism
Granting favor to the few. On the Friday before Christmas, President Obama announced that
he was appointing Mohamed A. El-Erian, the CEO of Pacific
Investment Management Company, as the chairman of his Global
Development Council. The announcement didn’t get much attention, but it should. It
exemplifies what’s wrong with Obama’s approach to ... MORE
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