Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper recently appeared on Fox News’ Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld. Stamper belongs to an organization of current and former police officers called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP).

Just a little musing I had… From the little I know about the workings of the illicit drug market, marijuana is one of the main crops. Pretty much everybody — at least everyone in my generation — knows at least one pot-smoker in their lives. Far fewer know people who use (or admit to the [...]

From Ezra Klein: Over the weekend, I asked Henry Aaron, an economist at Brookings, whether it would be fair to say that the definition of fiscal responsibility had changed. Where once it meant entitlement cuts, now it meant an attention to health reform. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s exactly right.” Ahh, I see… Instead of trying [...]

From the Governator: “You’ve got to listen to the people. If the nation is screaming out loud, ‘We need health care reform. We want to have universal health care. We want to have everyone insured. We want to bring the costs down. We want everyone to have access.’ I mean, that’s what they want; that’s [...]

David Blankenhorn and Jonathan Rauch, who come from totally opposite sides of the same-sex marriage debate, offer this compromise in a New York Times Op-Ed this morning: It would work like this: Congress would bestow the status of federal civil unions on same-sex marriages and civil unions granted at the state level, thereby conferring upon [...]

Over at Ezra Klein, the yuppies are in a tizzy: But Matt misses the neighborhood effects. It’s a pretty sure bet that if you live near a Starbucks, you also live near a $8 sandwich shop. And probably another $8 sandwich shop. You’re not far, I’d imagine, from frozen yogurt, or maybe an artisanal chocolate [...]

There’s been much discussion among the right-side of the blogosphere about this case out of Oklahoma: OKLAHOMA CITY — A handmade anti-abortion sign in the back of an Oklahoma City man’s pickup truck prompted a traffic stop and a visit from the Secret Service. However, a police supervisor acknowledged Thursday that confiscating the man’s sign [...]

This might be the best rant about Obama’s $75 billion dollar home mortgage bailout plan I’ve heard so far broadcast by the MSM. Get ready to stand up and cheer this man!

$42B in budget shortfalls. A new budget raising taxes statewide by $12B. Is this a good time for a giveaway to the entertainment industry? Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a former movie actor, has been trying for years to get tax credits to keep California’s signature industry at home. He got his wish early Thursday when the [...]

Katherine Mangu-Ward, discussing beer vending machines in the Armed Forces Retirement Home: I hear rumors from the old folks that you used to be able to get cigarettes this way as well. But that’s probably just the Alzheimer’s talking. Sometimes it’s lines like this that remind me just how much things have changed — in [...]

Václav Klaus gave a speech that U.S. politicians would do well to listen to: The citizens of the Czech Republic feel that the European integration has an important and needed mission and task. It can be summarized in the following way: – removing unnecessary – and for human freedom and prosperity counterproductive – barriers to [...]

Much to my delight and surprise, the news of Nadya Suleman (a.k.a. Octomom) giving birth to 8 children in addition to her other 6 children she could ill afford to support has not been well received by a large portion of the American public. Octomom seemed to go into this undertaking with the idea that [...]

The Obama administration, having retained the basic elements of Bush’s disastrous n ational security policies, and having applied a similar political approach to the economy, has set the stage for the collapse of the U.S. The number of laws that tangle us all continues to multiply. At this point it is probably impossible for us [...]

Maybe he should have driven there in a hybrid car: The head of the Drug Enforcement Administration spent more than $123,000 to charter a private jet to fly to Bogota, Colombia, last fall instead of taking one of the agency’s 106 planes. The DEA paid a contractor an additional $5,380 to arrange Acting Administrator Michele [...]

Over at Reason, Radley Balko has published a damning article and video of Dr Michael West attempting to murder a man named Jimmie Duncan. In 1993,  [Dr Michael West and Dr Steven Hayne]  conducted an examination on a 23-month-old girl named Haley Oliveaux of West Monroe, Louisiana, who had drowned in her bathtub. The video [...]

From Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged: “When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in [...]

Matthew Parris has an interesting argument in The Spectator that is worth quoting at length: [A]mid all the doom-mongering and recanting, I have an assertion to make. The market has not failed. The present collapse is evidence that the market is working. Confidence bubbles are an inherent feature of a free market system. Panics — [...]

Typical… It takes years of schooling and a series of hard exams to become a doctor or a lawyer, but just about anyone, with enough tenacity, can become responsible for billions of dollars. Pretty much anyone can call themselves an economist and opine about fiscal policy. Perhaps even more troubling, there exists no uniform set [...]

Later today, President Obama will unveil his plan to help homeowners in mortgage trouble and revive the housing market: Seeking to stabilize the foundering housing market, President Obama is offering a plan to help as many as nine million families refinance their mortgages or avoid foreclosure, according to a summary released by the White House [...]

Over at The Truth About Cars, Ken Elias looks at the latest requests for an autobailout: This is bad craziness. Never mind the cost. Or the fact that the bailout is doomed to failure. Government money provided to private enterprise on this basis completely distorts the function of the marketplace. It rewards incompetence. It perpetuates [...]