In less than a week it will be over; a year and a half of maneuvering, jockeying, speechifying, electioneering and speculating will thankfully draw to a close, and the U.S., which once was a sort of free republic, will crown a new king, who promises to reward the innocent and punish the guilty. In less [...]

Over at Reason, Ryan Sager tries to figure out where the libertarians who used to vote for Republicans have gone, and why: [The] coalition between social conservatives and economic libertarians (who tend to be socially moderate to liberal), served the GOP well from 1964 to 2006. It gave the party eight years of Ronald Reagan [...]

Ed Schafer, US Secretary of Agriculture, seems to think we need to bail out the ethanol industry: Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer’s statement on Oct. 17 that the U.S. Department of Agriculture could provide ethanol companies that got into trouble by speculating on corn with up to $25 million per company in refinancing has caused a [...]

In what seems to be a follow-up to yesterday’s kerfuffle about Barack Obama’s comments about the Warren Court and redistribution of wealth, there’s now an audio clip of him from the same radio program discussing what he called a “fundamental flaw” in the Constitution: I think it’s a remarkable document… The original Constitution as well [...]

40 years of corruption down the drain. Might as well have joined the f’in Peace Corps: Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens was convicted of seven corruption charges Monday in a trial that threatened to end the 40-year career of Alaska’s political patriarch in disgrace. The verdict, coming barely a week before Election Day, increased Stevens’ difficulty [...]

If you think the “bailout from hell” is going to be painful to taxpayers, wait until the bill comes due for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. According to Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher, the unfunded liability for Social Security and Medicare sits at an incredible $99.2 trillion. This figure does not account for the myriad [...]

Found via Michelle Malkin UPDATE: The campaign retaliates by denying the TV station access for the rest of the campaign. WFTV-Channel 9′s Barbara West conducted a satellite interview with Sen. Joe Biden on Thursday. A friend says it’s some of the best entertainment he’s seen recently. What do you think? West wondered about Sen. Barack [...]

A Federal Judge in Pennsylvania has, not surprisingly, dismissed a lawsuit attempting to remove Barack Obama from the ballot on the ground that he is not a natural born citizen: A federal judge in Philadelphia last night threw out a complaint by a Montgomery County lawyer who claimed that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was [...]

Today’s Wall Street Journal notes that the world’s financial problems go well beyond a credit crisis: The original bubble was in housing prices and mortgage-related assets, which the Federal Reserve helped to create with its negative real interest rates from 2002 into 2005. This was Alan Greenspan’s tragic mistake, not that the former Fed chief [...]

The following motion was filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on October 22nd, and entered earlier today. This is an amended filing from the earlier motions (as is clear from the text); based on the state of the case as of the 22nd. Earlier, the Obama campaign filed a motion [...]

I just received my mail-in ballot a week or so ago. The ballot, with multiple choices with arrows to be filled out next to each choice, reminds me of taking standardized tests back in the day. Some tests were easier than others but I knew that if I did not study, one of two things [...]

Earlier today, I participated in a conference call with Missouri governor Matt Blunt, on the subject of gun rights, John McCain, and Barack Obama. You may recall that recently, the Obama campaign worked directly with democratic party elected officials in the state of Missouri; engaging prosecutors and county sheriffs, to intimidate local media outlets, and [...]

A question was asked of me recently: “Why don’t libertarians and real conservatives win elections”. Simple really. True libertarians and conservatives share the same electoral disadvantage: True libertarians and real conservatives, CANNOT win electorally, in a climate where everyone is allowed to vote; and that “everyone” includes the huge politically created classes (both underclass, and [...]

Steve Chapman, writing for Reason, pontificates on California’s Proposition 8, the question of whether gays in California should be officially allowed the right to marry. California already grants legal recognition to same-sex civil unions, but a recent court decision expanded that to open the name “marriage” to those agreements. Chapman suggests that such a decision [...]

This one has been making the libertarian rounds for a day or two now, and with good reason. A story about Jeffrey Goldberg, a writer who has taken security expert Bruce Schneier’s proclamations about ineffectiveness of security measures at airports and gone and proven them. Unfortunately, I don’t have much time to devote to this, [...]

In case, like me, you missed it when it aired on Friday’s here is John Stossel’s Politically Incorrect Guide To Politics: Part I: Parts 2 through 6 are below the break

This has to be John McCains Best Speech Ever Seriously, McCain delivers what is certainly the best speech he’s ever given… and it’s a comedy routine. Part 1: And part 2:

Some surprisingly cogent wisdom from the Editoral Page of The Washington Post: IS THIS the end of American capitalism? As financial panic spread across the globe and governments scrambled to contain the damage, reality seemed to announce the doom of U.S.-style free markets and President Bush’s ideology. But this is wrong in two ways. The [...]

According to Jacob Weisberg in Slate: A source of mild entertainment amid the financial carnage has been watching libertarians scurrying to explain how the global financial crisis is the result of too much government intervention rather than too little. One line of argument casts as villain the Community Reinvestment Act, which prevents banks from “redlining” [...]

Recently I had an interesting conversation with someone who leveled the following accusation: “You libertarians don’t care if people die from lack of medicine, or if someone can’t afford a doctor.  Libertarianism is the freedom to die from a cold while the doctor who could treat you is doing a checkup for a rich guy [...]