This week, the State of Connecticut made progress in the right direction on the criminal justice front on two issues I care deeply about: the right of individuals to record the police in public and abolishing the death penalty. Earlier today, the Connecticut Senate passed a bill 42-11 that would hold the police liable for [...]

FreeMarketAmerica.org has released a great video (above) called “If I Wanted America to Fail.” It’s a pretty decent list of policies one would want to implement to cause America to fail but it’s far from complete. Here are a few suggestions of my own: If I wanted America to fail, I would want congress to [...]

The AP, lamenting the fact that so many new college grads are having trouble finding work: College graduates who majored in zoology, anthropology, philosophy, art history and humanities were among the least likely to find jobs appropriate to their education level Actually, like the guy interviewed with a “creative writing” degree who now works as [...]

Is the forensic science used in the courtroom reliable? The PBS documentary series Frontline makes an attempt at answering this question in an episode entitled: “The Real CSI.” I cannot recommend this episode enough. Watch The Real CSI on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE. Also, the producers of this episode hosted a live chat for [...]

From M.S. @ The Economist’s Democracy In America blog: To say that most American political discourse takes place at the intellectual level of baboons would be an insult to baboons. Baboons are capable of handling two-factor reasoning problems: if I eat all the bananas now, I’ll have none left for later; better eat enough to [...]

On August 14, 1990, Milton Friedman gave a speech at the International Society for Individual Liberty’s 5th World Libertarian Conference on the subject of libertarianism and humility. There are many adjectives which can be ascribed to libertarians but “humble” usually isn’t one of them. Among the quotable parts of the speech, Friedman said the following: [...]

From Steven Greenhut, writing at Reason: Americans suffer under the delusion that transportation systems are just that—systems for transporting people from one destination to another. What most of us fail to recognize is that the politicians, activists and planners who play the greatest role in creating those systems have far different goals than improving the [...]

Last Tuesday, a federal judge in the 5th Circuit, Jerry Smith, blasted a DOJ lawyer on an ObamaCare case in the wake of Obama’s comments on judicial activism. The Judge assigned the lawyer a three-page, single spaced homework assignment to draft a position on whether the judiciary has the legitimate right to overturn Unconstitutional legislation. [...]

Arnold Kling, on the “gotcha” mentality of partisanism: If your goal is to accumulate a fan base and fire them up, then of course calling intellectual fouls on the other side is the way to go. However, I claim that if your goal is to contribute to a discussion in which fair-minded people will consider [...]

You may remember Wayne Allyn Root as the sports betting “expert” cum political commentator who ended up being Bob Barr’s running mate on the 2008 Libertarian Party Presidential ticket. In 2010 he was elected to a position on the Libertarian National Committee and, while many had figured he’d be running for the Presidential nomination this [...]

Over at Reason, Mike Riggs responded to President Obama’s former Green Jobs czar Van Jones’ tirade about “so-called libertarians” at an Occupy rally in L.A. In case you missed it, Van Jones said that libertarians “say they love America but they hate the people, the brown folk, the gays, the lesbians, the people with piercings.” [...]

Reading the point/counterpoint posts on the question of how the supreme court would decide on Obamacares constitutionality, was quite disturbing to me in several ways. On the one hand I was heartened, because clearly both Brad and Doug are sane and rational folks with a reasonably solid background in both law and politics, and a [...]

Earlier this week, Brad Warbiany started out the latest in our occasional series of Point-Counterpoint exchanges by arguing that the Supreme Court will ultimately uphold the Constitutionality of the Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate. I’ll start off by saying that this is not an all implausible. Indeed, I’ve argued myself in the [...]

This is part of The Liberty Papers’ continuing Point/Counterpoint series, where two contributors (or a contributor and a guest) argue competing sides of an issue. In this installment, I will argue that the Supreme Court has a realistic defensible argument to find the Individual Mandate in ObamaCare Constitutional. Tomorrow, Doug Mataconis will respond with a [...]

Sen. Arlen Specter was last Friday’s guest for The Jason Lewis Show to promote his new book. The interview started casually enough, discussing topics such as the Trayvon Martin case and various policies Sen. Specter supported while in the senate. Sen. Specter’s main complaint in his book, as he explained in the interview, was that [...]