North Carolina has at least one criminal justice reform that all states ought to adopt: an innocence commission (particularly for states which currently have a death penalty). So far, North Carolina is the only state which has such a commission. Greg Taylor, convicted of 1st degree murder of prostitute Jacquetta Thomas in 1993, was the [...]

“I mean, say what you like about the tenets of the Republican party, Dude, at least it’s an ethos…” Apologies to Joel and Ethan Coen… There has been a recent meme circulated by the leftosphere, that the Republicans… in fact any opponent of the Obama agenda… are nihilists. Now, I have to say, I don’t [...]

You might have heard the old saying “The best measure of a mans intelligence and wisdom, is how closely he agrees with you on any given subject”… Well, by that measure, Kommander is a damn genius (from a thread discussing Obamas abandonment of manned space flight): The problem with exploring and colonizing space, as opposed [...]

Catastrophe Denied: The Science of the Skeptics Position (studio version) from Warren Meyer on Vimeo. Warren is local to me (he lives about three miles away actually), and runs both the excellent libertarian small business and economics blog CoyoteBlog, and the absolutely essential climate blog Climate Skeptic.

Warren, the blogger and small businessman behind Coyote Blog, does business in a number of states. Alabama, which is a relatively new state for him (6 months), just sent him a notice that he was being audited for his business over the last three years in Alabama. He called to clear this up, and was [...]

I suspect we’ll see a corresponding shift in the rhetoric. Instead of Obama saying the stimulus “created or saved X million jobs”, he’ll say the stimulus “put X million Americans to work.” Either way, it’s still a joke: When the White House unveiled its nearly $800 billion stimulus package last year, it promised not only [...]

I’ll blockquote Peter Suderman over at Reason blockquoting the CAP’s “wonk room” blog on this one: The short version of the argument is that C-SPAN’s coverage would put pressure on legislators to perform for the cameras and thus make the bill worse: C-SPAN is grounded in the belief that transparency produces superior legislation. And maybe [...]

From Jonah Goldberg, re: airline security: Anyone who flies regularly will tell you, the hellishness of airline travel is not primarily derived from the outrage of lost privacy, it’s derived from the outrage of inefficient, time-consuming idiocy. I would gladly trade the privacy invasion that would come with those body scanners in Total Recall in [...]

Alabama’s premium political blog reports the following: “The Department of Finance, Executive Budget Office has released a power point presentation on the same subject.” The topic of the report may be interesting, but that’s not why I’m posting these links.  If you open up the Power Point presentation, here’s what you’ll see on page 5: [...]

Now it’s the automakers. Too bad nobody predicted that throwing money into these fine well-run American corporations could have been a bad deal! The Obama administration will tell Congress Wednesday that it expects to lose about $30 billion of the $82 billion government bailout of the auto industry. Gene Sperling, senior counsel to Treasury Secretary [...]

Now, as we’ve all been taught for many years, the free market is the tool of evil brutes, who’d just as soon toss your kids into a sweatshop (if not outright slavery) to produce products that are dangerous and deadly, and will collude amongst their fellow ruffians to ensure that consumers have no recourse to [...]

For some time, it looked like Republicans were more persuasive liars than their counterparts in DC. After all, they (with the assistance of Judith Miller and The New York Times) convinced a great deal of Americans that aluminum tubes had been intercepted which were to be used to create nuclear bombs. Visions of Islamic terrorists [...]

I’m actually surprised that it hasn’t occurred to me to post “Land of Confusion” for Liberty Rock sooner. This is a great song with a great message that seems perhaps even more appropriate now than its original 1986 release. The song raises questions in my mind such as: Who is ultimately responsible for this land [...]

The governator sent a letter to the California State Assembly where he, er, told them he would “strike” them. Carnally. To the Members of the California State Assembly: I am returning Assembly Bill 1176 without my signature. For some time now I have lamented the fact that major issues are overlooked while manyunnecessary bills come [...]

Peter Suderman writing for The Wall Street Journal has written an excellent article about the (apparent) unlearned lessons of government run healthcare. But unlike many others who use Canada and the UK as examples, Suderman insists that we only need to look at states like New York, Massachusetts, Washington, and Tennessee for their respective failed [...]

Here in Southern California, water is a pretty precious commodity. And I’m not just talking about the pretentious restaurants where you get dirty looks if you don’t like your water “sparkling” and at $6 a bottle. No, it’s a serious outgrowth of building a major city in the middle of a desert, in which you [...]

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c Arizona State Capitol Building for Sale www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview The above video clip from The Daily Show, while very humorous, illustrates a fundamental problem of government: shortsightedness. In this example, the State of Arizona is offering [...]

I tells ya, sometimes ya just gotta to make an example of ‘em: When Sally Harpold bought cold medicine for her family back in March, she never dreamed that four months later she would end up in handcuffs. … Harpold is a grandmother of triplets who bought one box of Zyrtec-D cold medicine for her [...]

After reading the litany of Radley Balko’s Puppycide chronicles, I still took solace in the fact that if some brute squad mistakenly came to bust down my door instead of a neighbor’s, my 10 lb Yorkshire Terrier, who I refer to as a “barking cat” due to his laziness, would probably not get himself shot. [...]

Barack Obama’s recent dictatorial decision to once again break his campaign promise on raising taxes byraising tariffs on Chinese made tires in order to payback political allies in organized labor is already having some consequences. First of all, Obama has probably ignited a new trade tensions that may cause a trade war between the US [...]