Congrats to my fellow blogger Jason Pye, who was selected for a roundtable discussion on Neal Cavuto’s show on Fox News. Jason was one of the “Tea Party” protesters in Atlanta. Good job! Cavuto was somewhat flippant about the limited nature of these protests. I sincerely hope that future protests grow, because this is an [...]

Ezra Klein, suggesting he’d rather be poorer and more equal than richer and more unequal: Robert Frank explains this well in his book Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class, but a nice way to think about it is through housing: Would you rather live in a land where you had a 4,000-square-foot [...]

Despite President Obama’s assertion that “Nobody messes with Joe” in his speech before congress on Tuesday, Reason.tv does just that in this video entitled Real Man of Genius: Joe Biden Just when we thought that with Bush being replaced by a virtually “parody proof*” Barack Obama would make life difficult for comedians, satirists, humorists, and [...]

What would they call this, then? A new Citigroup deal has finally been announced by the Treasury. The government will convert $25 billion in preferred shares to common shares. The move could give the Treasury close to a 36% stake in the company. The government’s influence is becoming apparent. Citi will eliminate its dividend and [...]

The announcement by Eric Holder that I wrote about yesterday regarding the return of the “assault weapons” ban received this very interesting reception from Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will join Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in opposing any effort to revive the 1994 assault weapons ban, putting them on the [...]

When leftists start arguing about how much laissez-faire capitalism we experienced under the Bush adminstration, I often point out that he was the first President to preside over a $2T budget, and he was also the first to propose a $3T budget (for FY’09). I expected Obama to spend more than Bush — but I [...]

Just in case you were wondering, the War on (Some) Drugs is still on.

Again, this is why I hate politics. Now, I know little about Jindal personally, and not being from Louisiana, don’t know how good of a president he’ll make. I’ve really only seen him on TV for a very short time, in response to Obama’s non-SOTU speech. But I was immediately struck with the same sort [...]

Check in this Thursday night at 8pm ET with your questions for Cheye Calvo, the Berwyn Heights, Maryland mayor who was subject to a violent, botched drug raid last year. Calvo’s pushing legislation that would bring transparency to how Maryland’s police departments use their SWAT teams. I’m hoping to be home in time to participate [...]

Statistics guru Nate Silver posits that public support will be sufficiently strong that marijuana will be legalized by 2022: Firstly, although support for legalization has grown, it remains the minority position. Secondly, although there has been a long, slow-moving upward trend in favor of legalization since roughly 1992, there is no guarantee that public sentiment [...]

Back during the height of the General Election campaign, then-candidate Obama had this to say on the subject of Second Amendment rights: A woman in the crowd told Obama she had “heard a rumor” that he might be planning some sort of gun ban upon being elected president. Obama trotted out his standard policy stance, [...]

This Calvin & Hobbes strip is actually from 1995, but it’s as relevant to modern America as the Dilbert strip that Chris posted yesterday: (Click To Enlarge)

For reasons I have expressed in earlier posts, I am opposed to the death penalty. I simply do not trust our criminal justice system enough to make a life or death decision on the innocence or guilt of an individual (based on recent news concerning Dr. West and others, it seems my distrust in the [...]

This one is more of a personal thing for me (since I homebrew), but Reason’s Greg Beato has a nice story about the legalization of homebrewing. After Prohibition, a little wrinkle in the law allowed home wine making, but not home beer making. As the consolidation of the beer market reached its peak, people replaced [...]

One California Assemblyman is saying it’s time to consider treating marijuana like alcohol: An assemblyman from San Francisco announced legislation Monday to do just that: make California the first state in the nation to tax and regulate recreational marijuana in the same manner as alcohol. Buoyed by the widely held belief that cannabis is California’s [...]

Kevin Drum tells us “the reality is, this is how things get done”. In the below exchange, Kevin is MJ (Mother Jones), and Michael Pollan (Berkeley journalism prof & food author) is MP: MJ: Does WIC [the Women, Infants, and Children program] still specify that you buy dairy? MP: Yes. We had a huge fight [...]

The Rocky Mountain News reports: He may have saved three lives, but RTD bus driver Jim Moffett got a jaywalking ticket anyway, along with broken bones and internal bleeding. Moffett, 58, was driving an RTD bus southbound on Federal Boulevard at 62nd Avenue about 9 Friday night, according to the Colorado State Patrol. A couple [...]

Paul Jacob: When politicians stand on principle, it’s usually so that principle can’t get up.

Last night 60 Minutes ran an interesting piece about the suggestion from some that the drinking age be lowered back to 18: (CBS) Last fall, a group of over 100 college presidents – including the heads of Dartmouth, Virginia Tech and Duke – signed a declaration stating that the 21-year-old drinking age is not working, [...]