Speaking Monday on the Alan Colmes Show, Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity Chairman Ron Paul discussed the danger the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) poses to peace. read on...
Under a new government policy announced by Australia Prime Minister Tony Abbott, many Australian families are respectively facing the denial of thousands of dollars in welfare and tax benefits over a year’s time because their children have not received all the vaccinations listed on a government schedule. Meanwhile, in America, recently developed pro-mandate momentum threatens to end the most commonly used exemptions families claim to exempt children from mandatory vaccinations.
The new Australian policy cuts welfare and tax benefits if parents rely on a conscientious objection — often referred to as a philosophical objection in America — to deviate from the government’s vaccination schedule. While the conscientious objection option has been available to parents generally, the religious and medical exemptions that may still be asserted under the new policy are only available to a subset of families. read on...
Massachusetts does not have a death penalty. It has not had one for over thirty years — since the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 1984 that the state’s death penalty violated the state constitution. Yet, we have the spectacle of Charlie Baker, the state’s Republican governor, proclaiming on Wednesday that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who a United States district court trial jury had that day found guilty of counts related to the Boston Marathon bombing, should be executed in contravention of Massachusetts law.
Executing Tsarnaev is an option only because the United States Department of Justice decided to prosecute him in the US court system. Had that decision to intervene not been made, prosecution would have surely been pursued in the Massachusetts state court system where Tsarnaev would face incarceration upon a guilty verdict, but not execution. read on...
When President George W. Bush announced the Global War on Terrorism in 2001 he did not have to start his war from scratch. Instead, the development of the United States government’s war on drugs that President Richard Nixon announced forty years earlier facilitated much of Bush’s new war. Two revelations this week provide new examples of the linkage between the two wars.
First, Brad Heath reported Wednesday at USA Today that from 1992 through 2013 the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) collected calling records of “virtually all” phone calls from America to a long list of countries. At the list’s peak size, bulk collection was undertaken on calls between the US and over 100 countries. Countries that the article notes were on the list at “one time or another” include most countries in South America, Central America, and the Caribbean, as well as Canada, Mexico, Italy, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and other countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa. read on...
Norman Singleton, who worked for years as the legislative director for former Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), provided a very revealing account on Tuesday of the terrible way the PATRIOT Act was moved quickly to passage by a huge majority of votes in the US House of Representatives and Senate in October of 2001. Singleton, who is currently the vice president of policy at the Campaign for Liberty, made the comments as a panelist in a Washington, DC congressional briefing regarding the Surveillance State Repeal Act (HR 1466) introduced this week by Reps. Mark Pocan (D-WI) and Thomas Massie (R-KY). read on...
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Tuesday speech to the United States Congress is a continuation of his nearly 20 years of scaremongering the US government to encourage both US intervention in the Middle East and US military aid for Israel says Ron Paul Institute Academic Board Member Hillary Mann Leverett in a new CCTV interview. Instead of falling for the scare tactics again, Mann Leverett suggests the US move toward a policy approach that would include pulling back from repeated military invasions and occupations designed to achieve dominance in the Middle East. read on...
Texas State Rep. David Simpson (R-Longview) introduced a bill, HB 2165, on Monday that he says is intended to remove marijuana offenses entirely from Texas state law and replace them with nothing. Simpson, in a KETK-TV story, is quoted explaining that he is proposing with his legislation that marijuana “be regulated like tomatoes, jalapeños or coffee.” If Simpson’s bill is enacted, Texas would have the least government controls on marijuana of any state in America. read on...
According to Pew Research Center poll results released Friday, 63 percent of Millennial Generation Republicans support marijuana legalization. On this issue these Republicans born between 1981 and 1996 have more in common with Democrats than with Republicans generally. And these young Republicans are definitely at odds with the majority of Republicans in the United States House of Representatives who continue to vote “no” on rollbacks of the US government’s war on marijuana.
The further we look back through earlier generations of Republicans, the less support for legalization we see — 47 percent among Generation X (born in 1965 through 1980), 38 percent among the Baby Boom Generation (born in 1946 through 1964), and 17 percent among the Silent Generation (born in 1928 through 1945). In contrast, substantial majorities, ranging from 61 percent to 77 percent, support marijuana legalization in each of these generations of Democrats, except among the oldest polled generation — the Silent Generation — where support registers at 44 percent. read on...
Judge Andrew Napolitano provides a brief and excellent introduction to the US government’s mass spying program in a new video monologue this week at Fox News. In less than a minute and a half, Napolitano explains that the mass spying program of the National Security Agency (NSA) and other US agencies is a reincarnation, with a huge technological boost, of Britain’s use of general warrants in colonial America. Those despised general warrants helped drive Americans to fight for independence. After the war, Americans then demanded the protection of the Fourth Amendment in the US Constitution to ensure that such arbitrary and unjust government actions would not occur again. read on...
Michael Hayden, who served in turn as director of the National Security Agency (NSA), principal deputy director of National Intelligence, and director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1999 through 2009, elicited laughs and a loud jeer of “No you’re not!” in response to his assertion Friday morning during a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) debate that he is an “unrelenting libertarian.”
It is hard to imagine a more preposterous assertion from Hayden who defends the United States government’s extensive torture program, many of the revolting details of which were recently revealed in a partially released Senate Intelligence Committee report, and oversaw the NSA mass spying program. Libertarians, of course, oppose such violations of individual rights. read on...
