A month after a deranged mother-murderer shot up that elementary school in Connecticut in 2012, California state Sen. Leland Yee, 65, described by the Los Angeles Times as “a hero of gun regulators,” helped introduce what was seen as one of the toughest pieces of gun control legislation in the country, an attempt to ban […]
My friend Ed was a United States Marine. Some would say he was an “ex-Marine,” but I’m not sure these guys are ever “ex-” Marines. Ed lived in Connecticut. It’s my birthplace, but a state I left long ago. If I needed to be reminded why, my recent conversation with Ed’s widow would have done […]
My mom called me the other day to ask whether I thought the “government shutdown” would impact some state program or other. I can see how the thought arose, given that there are hardly any independent “state programs” any more (most having fallen victim to the siren call of “supplemental federal funding,” which leaves them […]
By a disturbingly slim 5-4 majority, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled March 26 that police cannot bring a drug-sniffing police dog onto a suspect’s property to look for evidence without first getting a search warrant. The ruling upholds a Florida Supreme Court ruling throwing out evidence seized in the search of Joelis Jardines’ Miami-area house. […]
Not content with banning or at least fining those who traffic in cigarettes, trans-fats, salt, and big sugary soft drinks, New York City’s Mayor and millionaire chief busybody, Michael Bloomberg, last week set his sights on a new villain: Styrofoam. In his State of the City address Thursday, Mayor Bloomberg pushed for a ban on […]
A reader — one of many similar — recently wrote in to complain “They tell us that Social Security and Medicare are broken. The fact is the government used that money for wars and should have left the money in the so-called lock box. … I’m incensed that those programs are called entitlements. I paid […]
In his State of the Union speech Tuesday, President Barack Obama made a few favorable references to his erstwhile opponent, Mitt Romney, the guy who four months ago was such a heartless cad that he “didn’t even care” that some woman got sick and died years after she left a company that Bain Capital took […]
Civil forfeiture is the government power to take property suspected of involvement in a crime. And unlike cases of criminal forfeiture — the seizure of ill-gotten gains after a criminal conviction — police can seize property without so much as charging the owner with any crime. This led to some widely publicized cases, a few […]
Univision, the largest Spanish-language network in the U.S., aired a lengthy report on the Justice Department’s “Fast and Furious” Mexican gun-running operation on Sept. 30. Gerardo Reyes and Santiago Wills offer an English-language version at http://tinyurl.com/9jdp2gh:
Sixty desert tortoises, each equipped with a radio transmitter and trailing a small antenna, were released Sept. 21 at the southern end of the Nevada National Security Site, 60 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Researchers plan to track the critters over the next year as part of a $100,000 study ultimately aimed at increasing the […]