After forty years, AMC is remaking a six-hour version of The Prisoner, the late Patrick McGoohan’s clever, libertarian, metaphysical, TV mini-series. With the ominous rise of statism and collectivism now in the United States and elsewhere, this program could not be more timely in addressing such issues as privacy and government surveillance, propaganda and...
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The Bush policy of spying on antiwar activists continues, now conducted by the military in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. See Amy Goodman. Yet another example of the bipartisan surveillance state.

California’s political leaders are in the midst of celebrating their temporary “solving” of the state’s Brobdingnagian budget mess by combining spending cuts and tax increases with heavy doses of accounting legerdemain. Once again, however, Sacramento has failed to take advantage of a golden opportunity to stanch the red ink without imposing a much heavier...
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Attorney Harvey Silverglate is unfortunately not a reliable source to defend the natural rights of the citizenry from the abuse of government agents. Like most “liberal” attorneys, Silverglate’s views are a mixed bag, even when his intent may be to defend habeas corpus. Incredibly enough, given his critique of the Cambridge, Mass., police in...
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Harvey A. Silverglate has a wonderful piece on the neglected issue in the Gates arrest—the constitutional right to be rude to a cop, and the trouble with “disorderly conduct” as a class of criminality. A choice excerpt: It is not yet entirely clear whether there was a racial element to the initial decision by...
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Means cracking down on citizens too. Hector Veloz was detained for 13 months, including 5 months after he was determined to be a U.S. citizen but the decision was appealed by the immigration authorities. Some argue that the government is not taking the task of keeping out illegals seriously enough. Because of the nature...
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A whopping $242 million in cuts. “These ‘cuts’ will save less than $1 per household this year,” says a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, or enough to pay for five hours of interest on the federal debt. The savings represent 0.006% of the nation’s $3.99 trillion budget. Obama promised to go through the...
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Writes Jonah Goldberg: [L]et us consider how President Obama’s health-care bill would work. An official body—staffed with government doctors, actuaries, economists and other experts—will determine which treatments, procedures and remedies are cost-effective and which are not. Then it will decide which ones will get paid for, and which won’t. Democrats call this “cost-controls.” But...
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Those on the left who believe in positive rights but not negative liberties have always confounded me when they claim universalism. Now, I believe in universal human rights, locally (and, ideally, civilly) enforced. But if you believe everyone has a right to health care or education, then your conception of rights is limited to...
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This post might sound parochial (no pun intended). However, my take on the latest papal statement on capitalism is that we need to understand how parochial schools are no longer fulfilling their purpose of offering an alternative to public education. Ignatius Insight published my op-ed arguing that point. On a related point, I blogged...
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