Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
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"Who runs the country?" I've been hearing variants of that question a lot over the last few weeks, mainly in forms like "given Joe Biden's age and apparent mental decline, can we trust him to run the country for another four years?" For the last eight or nine years, I've also heard it a lot, in slightly different forms, about Donald Trump. I visited Google Trends to find out if I'm just imagining increased frequency of that annoying question. Turns out my perception is correct: After a brief spike in 2004, the phrase "who runs the country"...
Earlier this year, William Smith writes at the Pioneer Institute, "[t]he federal government announced the formation of a working group to 'develop a framework for the implementation of the march-in provision of the Bayh-Dole Act.'" Smith thinks it's a bad idea – the title of his piece is "University Science Research Is Under Threat." The very simplified version: Under the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, universities can use taxpayer money to do research, then patent any useful results and make bank on their discoveries by licensing those patents to c...
Facebook "whistleblower" Frances Haugen, the Washington Post reports, has "repeatedly accused [Facebook CEO Mark] Zuckerberg of choosing growth over the public good." The Post's headline puts it a slightly different way: "Growth over safety." The meaning of "growth" in this context is pretty obvious: Zuckerberg's company makes a lot of money, and he wants it to make even more. The meaning of "safety" is somewhat more nebulous. Facebook spokeswoman Dani Lever refers to "difficult decisions...
On July 26, 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order under which the U.S. government's Medicare Part D program would have negotiated lower prescription drug prices based on an "International Price Index." Implementation of the order was delayed pending counter-proposals from Big Pharma, but the Democratic response was swift. "Instead of meaningfully lowering drug prices, President Trump's Executive Orders would hand billions of dollars to Big Pharma," House Speaker Nancy Pelos...
"If [Donald] Trump and [Bernie] Sanders take the same position on Big Tech censorship," David Catron writes at The American Spectator, "the issue deserves serious attention." He's right, but in pretty much the opposite of the way he intends. When the mainstream "right" and "left" agree on anything, that's almost always a blazing neon sign warning us that our freedoms are under threat. Catron (and Trump and Sanders) want the U.S. government to seize control of social media platforms, and dictate...
In its current form, the U.S. Senate’s delaying tactic called the "filibuster" hangs on a rule requiring 60 votes for "cloture." Simply put, it takes 51 Senators to pass a bill, but before that, it takes the consent of 60 Senators to end debate and actually get to a final majority vote. Each time control of the U.S. Senate changes hands, the new majority party publicly mulls doing away with the filibuster in the name of democracy, while the new minority party staunchly defends the filibuster in the name of minority rights to force due d...
On March 2 -- the late Theodor Seuss Geisel's 117th birthday -- Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced that, some time last year, it ceased publishing/licensing six of the popular author's children's books which "portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong." Cue woke approval, deplorable outrage, investor interest, and low-information reader fear, all of which are good for business. As I write this on March 9, Dr. Seuss titles constitute ten of Amazon's top 25 "Best Sellers in Children's Books." On eBay, sellers have copies of And to Think I...
Over the years, I've written many columns concerning the war on Internet freedom. My usual targets are the politicians and government agencies who serve as shock troops for the Dark Side across fronts ranging from encryption to sex worker advertisements to darknet marketplaces. On the "private sector" side of things, I've generally just noted that anti-freedom business practices are bad business practices, that bad business practices tend to be self-punishing, and that none of the Big Actors in Big Tech are, strictly speaking, monopolies. Now t...
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible," President John F. Kennedy said in a 1962 speech, "will make violent revolution inevitable." Nearly 60 years later, two warring groups within the American political class seem resolutely determined to make "peaceful revolution" -- by which JFK seems to have meant orderly democratic decision-making -- impossible. Supporters of Donald Trump rejected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and, with his active if deniably worded encouragement, rioted in a tantrum intended to overturn that...
As of late October, the political modelers at FiveThirtyEight gave Democrats a 72% chance of pulling off the trifecta -- winning the White House and majorities in both Houses of Congress -- on November 3. My visceral response to that possibility is negative. Excluding outlier possibilities like a Libertarian landslide, I've always considered divided government the best outcome. Gridlock, in theory, is good. If an opposition party controls either the White House or one house of Congress, that...
Every four years without fail (and usually a little earlier in each quadrennial cycle), both “major” American political parties wind up and toss the same slow, fat pitch across the public’s plate: This is the most important presidential election of our lifetimes. Maybe even the most important presidential election EVER. You gotta vote. And this time, just like every other time, you can’t risk voting for anyone but Candidate X. A vote for third party or independent Candidate Y, the candidate you like best, isn’t really a vote for Candidate...
As an old saying goes, it's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end. The world's politicians are innovating on the fly (pun intended) by trying to combine the fall – the COVID-19 epidemic – with the sudden stop, bringing life and commerce to a halt through draconian travel restrictions, business closures, etc. We don't yet know what the COVID-19 death toll is going to be. In the U.S., based on current numbers, it looks like we're going to see quite a few more deaths than occurred in the 9/11 attacks, more even than fro...
On March 12, the New York Federal Reserve announced a $1.5 trillion injection of money into the U.S. financial system. Three days later, it cut its benchmark interest rate to zero and announced it would be buying at least $500 billion in government bonds and another $200 billion in mortgage securities. The Fed is returning to a policy of "Quantitative Easing" in response to the COVID-19 panic. The idea behind these moves is that throwing money at the banks and the government will "stimulate" the economy by keeping credit easy for consumers and...
U.S. President Donald Trump "Has a Problem as the Coronavirus Threatens the US," assert the authors of a New York Times analysis: "His Credibility." In the tagline and elsewhere in the article, the authors imply that the spread of COVID-19, aka "the coronavirus," constitutes a "public health crisis" and a "national emergency" which Trump's "history of issuing false claims" handicaps him in selling plans to address. If they're right about Trump's credibility, they're pointing to a feature, not a bug. The last thing we need is an impetuous...
As the calendar prepared to flip from 2019 to 2020, protesters stormed the US embassy in Baghdad. As I write this, the action -- a response to US airstrikes in Iraq and Syria which killed at least 25 and wounded more than 50 -- hasn't yet become a reprise of the Iran hostage crisis of 40 years ago, but it's eerily reminiscent. Although few Americans seem to notice, Iraq is arguably the second-longest war in U.S. history. Mainstream media often refer to the 18-year US occupation of Afghanistan as "America's longest war." That claim is wrong on i...
Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world, boasting revenues of more than $230 billion last year. But last month the company sued the US Department of Defense over a paltry potential $10 billion spread over ten years. Amazon lost out to Microsoft in bidding for the Pentagon's Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (yes, JEDI, because the most important part of a government program is coming up with a cool acronym) cloud computing program. Amazon claims it lost the contract due to, well, JEDI mind tricks – "improper pressure" and "rep...
A political writer's annual Thanksgiving column can be easy to write, or incredibly difficult to put together. It can also be inspiring or banal. The two are probably connected. It's always a difficult one for me; its quality is a matter of your opinion. But hey, it's time to talk about being thankful. Please bear with. Yes, like you, I'm grateful for family, friends, neighbors, the absence of bankruptcy or prison time, yada, yada, yada. All in all it's been a good year for me, and I hope it's been a good one for you as well. On the political e...
According to an October Rasmussen poll, 38% of likely voters say they intend to vote for "someone other than President Trump or the Democratic presidential nominee" in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. In a three-way presidential race, 38% constitutes a winning plurality, assuming it's distributed among the states such that the Electoral College outcome reflects it. As a long-time activist in America's largest "third" political party, the Libertarian Party, I'm prone to find that number encouraging. On the other hand, I've seen numbers like...
"Wasting resources, capital and income on stuff nobody really needs," Charles Hugh Smith wrote in 2017, "is a monumental disaster on multiple fronts. Rather than establish incentives to conserve and invest wisely, our system glorifies waste and the destruction of income and capital, as if burning time, capital, resources and wealth on stuff nobody needs is strengthening the economy." I come across the "stuff nobody needs" argument frequently, from voices all across the political spectrum, for reasons ranging from economic to environmental to sp...
On Oct. 9, Pacific Gas & Electric began shutting down power to about 750,000 customers (affecting as many as 2 million people) in California. The company claims the shutdowns are necessary to reduce the risk that its power lines and other infrastructure will cause wildfires like last year's Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and caused $16.5 billion in damage. The Camp Fire was an extreme result, and the blackouts are an extreme response, but they're far from the only indicators that Americans should no longer trust aging "grid" distribution...
Politicians are people with jobs and with bosses. On its face that seems like a relatively uncontroversial statement, but I'm always surprised at how much time people spend looking for high principle in the decisions politicians make instead of considering the mundane dynamics of political employment. In a recent column, I pointed out that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) finally opened a formal impeachment inquiry versus President Donald Trump because she's good at counting votes, not because she's personally keen on the idea. Pelosi wants to keep...
On July 25, U.S. Attorney General William Barr ordered the Federal Bureau of Prisons to update its execution protocol and schedule five executions starting this December. Whether you support the death penalty or not – I don't because I prefer limited government and the power to kill disarmed prisoners in cold blood and with premeditation is by definition unlimited government – it's worthwhile to ask: Why? More to the point, why now? Politics, that's why. There's a presidential election next year. U.S. president Donald Trump's re-election str...
In mid-May, San Francisco became the first American city to ban the use of facial recognition surveillance technology by its police department and other city agencies. That's a wise and ethical policy, as a July 7 piece at the “Washington Post” proves. Citing documents gathered by Georgetown Law researchers, the “Post” reports that at least two federal agencies, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have – for years – mined state photo ID databases to populate their own facial recognition databases....
On June 14 -- "Flag Day" in the United States -- US Senator Steve Daines (R-MT) and U.S. Representative Steve Womack (R-AR) proposed a constitutional amendment: "The Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States." President Trump indicated his support for the amendment via Twitter, calling it a "no-brainer." The amendment isn't likely to get the 2/3 approval of both Congressional houses and ratification by the legislatures of at least 38 states, to become part of the U.S. Constitution. Nor is...
Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, adding his voice to calls to "break up" the social media giant, calls it a "powerful monopoly, eclipsing all of its rivals and erasing competition." In recent years, we've seen similar claims, and heard demands for similar remedies, aimed at Google, Amazon and other large companies. Are these claims true? Are the large "dot-coms" monopolies in any real sense? The short answer is no. Using the "m-word" is a way of avoiding the necessity of making a sound argument for a desired policy outcome. Whether that...
