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Yesterday, two journalists were arrested for taking pictures and filming a public meeting of the D.C. Taxi Commission. One of those journalists was Jim Epstein of Reason Magazine, and you can read his account here or watch his video of the event: This is downright Soviet. If people don’t have the right to record public [...]
Has progressive activism reached a new low? A George Washington University law professor is threatening to sue Catholic University over its recent decision to return to single-sex dorms. The professor, John Banzhaf, claims that Catholic’s decision is in violation of a D.C. anti-discrimination law that prohibits discrimination based upon sex. GW prof John Banzhaf argues [...]
Forty years ago today, Richard Nixon announced that “we must wage what I have called total war against public enemy number one in the United States, the problem of dangerous drugs.” It has not gone well. Illicit drugs are easily available and continue to be used by tens of millions of Americans. For this complete [...]
Throughout the day, people sent me a story about a SWAT team in Stockton, California raiding a man’s house because his estranged wife defaulted on her student loans. According to the Department of Education, the raid was not executed over bad student loans, but it was part of an unspecified “ongoing criminal investigation.” That’s troubling but [...]
A report released yesterday by the Global Commission on Drug Policy calling for the legalization or decriminalization of many drugs is generating quite a buzz (at least judging by the wide variety of people in my social network I have seen post it). The findings of the report are not terribly noteworthy–people have been making [...]
Filed under: Foreign policy, Law, World
Whenever I start to think that I’m overly cynical and paranoid about the government, I read something like this and realize that, if anything, my paranoia is completely insufficient for the off the wall schemes our government concocts. In fact, the only thing that appears to keep government officials from engaging in Parallax View style [...]
Filed under: Law, libertarianism, Scandal, Terrorism
And the drugs have won. Take a look at this news report from Tennessee on how law enforcement agencies are using civil asset forfeiture to “fight” drugs: This report doesn’t explain much about how civil asset forfeiture works, so here’s a crash course. Under federal law, if police believe property was involved in a crime, [...]
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg belies his elitist image, boldly demonstrating his contempt for due process will not be overawed by wealth and status: “I think it is humiliating, but if you don’t want to do the perp walk, don’t do the crime. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for that.” And if you [...]
“You don’t have to fake DNA — you issue a press release”. –Spartan, David Mamet Some of the French are angry about Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s “perp walk”: Socialist Party leader Martine Aubry denounced “degrading images” and said France was lucky to have a law on the presumption of innocence that bars media from showing defendants in [...]
Wry Dan McCarthy asks below: Won’t it be a wonderful victory for civil liberties when the problem of intimate searches is solved and we can all go back to being X-rayed whenever we fly? Alas, long before we manage to un-encumber ourselves of such as the TSA, x-ray technology will have become our grand-children’s steampunk. [...]