In the era of Fast and Furious, nothing should come as much of a surprise with how incompetent and reckless federal agencies can be but here, the DEA reaches a new low. The Houston Chronicle reports: The phone rang before sunrise. It woke Craig Patty, owner of a tiny North Texas trucking company, to vexing [...]

In the aftermath of the senseless killing that occurred last Friday in Aurora, CO at the premier of the latest Batman movie, the question on most people’s mind is how this kind of violence can be prevented. What is the appropriate public policy that will prevent something like this horrible event from ever happening again? [...]

The Rule of Law, theoretically at least, is superior to the arbitrary Rule of Men. For most of human history, the law has been subject to the whim of a head of state be s/he a monarch, czar, dictator, emperor, etc. James Madison and the framers of the U.S. Constitution wisely determined that the document [...]

As Quincy notes below, the Supreme Court upheld the Constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act today by relying upon an argument that most people had not been paying attention to: WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday left standing the basic provisions of the health care overhaul, ruling that the government may use its taxation [...]

Judge Andrew Napolitano wrote an excellent article in yesterday’s Washington Post entitled: Killing vs. Squealing. The judge laments that the Republicans in the congress aren’t so much concerned about the fact that President Obama is acting as a third-world warlord thug killing individuals he picks out from a deck of “baseball cards” in Yemen, Pakistan, [...]

Brad has posted a version of this comedy routine by Doug Stanhope before. This version has been edited to include images and video by Fr33 Agent Beau Davis with a more honest than the traditional “pledge of allegiance” at the close. I thought that since today happens to be Flag Day, this video would be [...]

This is one of the most encouraging polls I’ve seen in a long time. Honestly, I didn’t think that Amendment 64 [full text here] would have much chance of being approved by the voters, especially since a similar measure, Prop 19 failed in California in 2010. The Huffington Post reports: The survey of 500 of [...]

Today, I had the joy of observing an officer of the Newton Police force take a bad situation and make it worse.  The incident showed much that is wrong in the relationship between the common citizen and the government that is there to protect him or her. An elderly person had fallen and a police [...]

Michael Tomasky penned a sickeningly ignorant and immoral piece in the Daily Beast… even more sickening than he considers sodas and 1/2 pound hamburgers. The most stomach-turning part: We have this “liberty” business completely backward in this country, and if Bloomberg can start rebalancing individual freedom and the public good, God bless him, I say. [...]

There it is again. That damned conspiracy theory about Barack Obama being born not in Hawaii but Kenya. An honest question for you birthers out there: even assuming that everything you believe about the birthplace of Barack Obama is true, do you really think that even if you could prove it 100% that people who [...]

What troubles me about this… I think it’s beyond hypocrisy. I think it’s something to do with class. A lot of people have accused Obama of class warfare, but in the wrong direction. I believe this is Obama chortling with Jimmy Fallon about lower class people. Do we believe, even for a second, that if [...]

Last Friday, the Cato Institute honored dissident Chinese economist Mao Yushi with the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. Just a week prior, Mao, a consistent critic of Chinese government policies and advocate of both individual and economic liberty faced the possibility of being detained rather than being permitted to fly to Washington D.C. to [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

Is there a more worthless phrase on the political landscape than “judicial activism”? And a court that gave us Bush v. Gore and Citizens United will prove conclusively that it sees no limits on its power, no need to defer to those elected to make our laws. A Supreme Court that is supposed to give [...]