Hillary Clinton, whose State Department has been involved in overseeing renditioning, who ran for president in 2008 on a more pro-torture platform than John McCain, has condemned Turkey for human rights abuses. In particular, Turkey has cracked down on journalists and has plans to restrict internet freedom. In 1998, responding to the internet gossip...
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In the continuing revolving door between industry and its government regulators, the Wall Street Journal yesterday reported on the $13 million Congressional staffers earned from their former private employers, companies they run or other side jobs in 2009. Further, ethics rules “permit the vast majority of [Congressional] aides to have financial ties to companies...
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Writer Brendan Behan once remarked, “There’s no bad publicity except an obituary.” I am an economics professor at Florida State University (FSU), and my department has been getting lots of publicity this week. Our run in the spotlight started with an op-ed on May 1 in the local newspaper, The Tallahassee Democrat, in which...
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Did the administration threaten to exclude the San Francisco Chronicle from covering future presidential events? Reporter Carla Marinucci says yes, although the White House denies it. A little over a week ago, protesters paid $5,000 each to get into a DNC fundraiser where they could interrupt Obama’s speech and break into a song, expressing...
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The newest round of WikiLeaks revelations unearths troubling facts about the U.S. prison facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Operating for more than nine years now, the prison camp was originally said to be holding “the worst of the worst”—terrorists of the same moral plane and dangerousness as those who committed the attacks of 9/11....
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This Thursday, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in a case brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) against the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) use of body scanners. The case asserts “that the federal agency’s controversial program violates the Administrative Procedures Act, the Privacy Act, the...
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There is no Social Security trust fund, but it is a useful fiction. For decades taxpayers have paid in more in Social Security payroll taxes than the program has paid out, and the excess payroll tax revenues have gone to pay for other federal expenditures. The Treasury has issued bonds — IOUs — to...
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Of recent human rights abusers, the liberal left points with great frequency to Augusto Pinochet, the military dictator of Chile—and for Arnold Harberger’s memories as one of the “Chicago boys” during Pinochet’s regime, see here—whose immunity from prosecution over his “disappeared” victims was dramatically challenged by the investigative crusade of a Chilean judge—as documented...
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The New York Times now reports that exactly contrary to its earlier claims, the Obama administration is now quietly seeking to sneak back in by regulation the provision of “end-of-life planning” (“death panels”) that were dropped from the Obamacare bill that was signed into law. The Times article reports that the regulations have been...
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In a roundtable discussion on the U.S. National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (“Deficit Reduction Commission”), Nobel Prize laureate and hyper-Keynesian economist Paul Krugman came clean on his view on ABC’s “This Week with Christiane Amanpour,” regarding how to reduce the gigantic federal deficit that he has been so supportive in seeing created:...
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