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The feds and their own bribery

Normally, when the government asks a judge to dismiss criminal charges against a defendant, the judge will happily do so. This does not occur frequently, but occasionally, the government will reevaluate the strength of its own case and conclude it cannot prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty. What happens when the government believes it can meet that standard, but for reasons having nothing to do with the strength of its case, it seeks a dismissal? Can the Department of Justice legally, and can its lawyers ethically, hold the prosecution of the Mayor of New ...

Fire the Muskrat

Please call your members of Congress today and tell them Elon Musk must be fired. Immediately. (The U.S. Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121. Tell the operator where you’re from and the operator will connect you to your representatives and senators.) This past weekend, Musk, the richest person in the world, posted a message to millions of federal employees on X — the platform he bought for $44 billion and turned into a cesspool of lies, hate, and bigotry. His message, from his own account, was: “Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees ...

Where was ‘60 Minutes’ crew when Rust Belt jobs were cut?

CAMPBELL — Sept. 19 marked 47 years since thousands of workers, who were mainly men, did what they did every Monday in the valley. They walked into the Campbell Works of Youngstown Sheet and Tube along the Mahoning River for the early shift. Within an hour of the workers’ shift, Youngstown Sheet and Tube abruptly furloughed 5,000 of them in a day. Within months, 16 more plants owned by U.S. Steel shut down, including Youngstown-based Ohio Works. The company cited foreign imports, lack of profitability, aging facilities and the cost of growing government regulations on the industry ...

Explaining the health care free speech movement

Why should you join America’s health care free speech movement? You may have already enlisted if you’ve had the gnawing feeling that the well-known patterns of health care debate conceal some as yet unrevealed primal reality that block important issues from being joined. You’d be right. There may be a few thousand people nationwide who are occasional health care free speechers, although they don’t call themselves that. Among them are a few lawyers, some academics, a handful of medical doctors, and independent theoreticians and citizen-dissenters. Consider this: historians ...

Politics is upstream of culture, too

Politics, my mentor Andrew Breitbart famously stated, is downstream of culture. By that, Andrew meant that culture shapes and embodies our values as a society; we then vote based on those values. From church to music, from movies to television, we are affected by the things we see and hear — and we then enshrine our culture in the instruments of government. In truth, however, there is another side to the coin: Culture is upstream of politics, but politics shapes culture as well. The relationship between culture and politics is more cyclical than linear: Culture affects for whom we ...

Greed, profit motive make our world a much better place

Politicians bash businesses. “Stop the greed!” shouts Sen. Bernie Sanders. Many Republicans are equally ignorant. When some Florida businesses raised prices in response to sudden demand during a crisis, Attorney General Pam Bondi called that “sickening ... disgusting ... unacceptable!” Now she’s U.S. attorney general. Sen. Josh Hawley attacks airline CEOs for charging different people different prices. “You make it clear,” he sneered. “Money is your bottom line ... “ Well, yes, Senator. That’s the CEO’s job. Sadly, bigshots trained as lawyers rarely ...