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Republican Jewish Coalition Bars Ron Paul From Presidential Debate, Saying He's Too "misguided and extreme"

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 18:27:08 -0800

Reason Magazine - By Matt Welch - Dec. 01 - On Wednesday, Dec. 7, the Republican Jewish Coalition will host a presidential-candidates forum featuring Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum. Not invited is the GOP candidate currently polling around third in New Hampshire and second in Iowa: Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas).

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Mitt Romney's Immigration Dodge

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Reason Magazine - By Jacob Sullum - Nov. 30 (Opinion) - The former Massachusetts governor's immigration stance precludes the possibility of reconciling policy with reality.

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40 Years of Drug War Failure - LEAP's Neill Franklin

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Reason Magazine - By Nick Gillespie, Joshua Swain - Jun. 17 (Interview) - As the reform group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) documents in a new comprehensive study, the drug war has destroyed lives and property, shredded the constitution, and distorted American education, health care, and even foreign policy. That's why, notes LEAP, fully 75 percent of Americans and 69 percent of police chiefs agree that the drug war has failed.

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A Labor Strike Against Economic Reality

Mon, 16 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Reason Magazine - By Steve Chapman, Reason - May. 16 (Opinion) - Strikes are an expensive luxury. The last one, which went on for nearly two months, was estimated to cost Boeing more than $2 billion. "Based on previous strike experience," reported The Seattle Times, "Boeing will not recoup that money for many years."

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It Doesn't Get Any Clearer Than That: "Free speech is a great idea, but we're in a war"

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Reason Magazine - By Matt Welch - Apr. 04 (Opinion) - You know what? We're always going to be in a war, thanks in no small part to the Lindsey Grahams of the world. Which means if we truly value our free speech, we're gonna have to bounce out every politician who subjects American expression to a wartime litmus test. Better yet, maybe start electing some who at least occasionally refrain from supporting new wars against majority-Muslim countries that have yet to make it through a Reformation.

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The 19 Percent Solution

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Reason Magazine - By Nick Gillespie, Veronique de Rugy - Apr. 04 (Opinion) - There’s a better way to balance the budget, one that wouldn’t raise revenue levels above historic averages or “eviscerate” anything other than bloated spending. To get there, though, we’ll need to lay out the basic facts without flinching, especially when it comes to realistic projections of revenue.

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Why Obama Wants to Cut Corporate Taxes

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Reason Magazine - By Steve Chapman - Feb. 10 (Opinion) - America doesn't feel much like the champion of the world these days. Everywhere we look, we see other countries outdoing us—in economic growth, educational performance, and men's soccer. But this year, we are expected to gain an impressive distinction: the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world.

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It Can Happen Here

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Reason Magazine - By Arnold Kling, David Henderson, Maurice McTigue - Oct. 19 (Opinion) - In an era of frightful budgets and frightened politicians, cutting government may seem like a flatly impossible task. But a look around the world—and at our own recent economic history—turns up a few inspirational examples of knife work that not only trimmed back budget deficits but created the conditions for unprecedented prosperity.

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Just Admit it, Newspapers: You're Scared of Muslims

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Reason Magazine - By Matt Welch - Oct. 13 (News) - If the Post's new standard for comics is to make jokes "immediately clear," then it might be time to kill the comics page altogether. No, Martel/Brauchli, you pulled the cartoon because your fear of Muslims outweighs your commitment to free expression, period.

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Civil Rights and Armed Self-Defense

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Reason Magazine - By Damon W. Root - Jul. 09 (News Analysis) - Thomas’ concurrence in McDonald draws from a long and uninterrupted line of civil rights activists who preached the virtues of armed self-defense. The great abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, for instance, who famously urged President Abraham Lincoln to arm the liberated slaves against their former masters, was an outspoken champion of gun rights in the decades after the Civil War. American liberty depends upon “the ballot-box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box,” Douglass wrote in his third and final autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881). Without these privileges and immunities of citizenship, “no class of people could live and flourish in this country.” Blacks therefore required all three. Thomas’ concurrence in McDonald draws from a long and uninterrupted line of civil rights activists who preached the virtues of armed self-defense. The great abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, for instance, who famously urged President Abraham Lincoln to arm the liberated slaves against their former masters, was an outspoken champion of gun rights in the decades after the Civil War. American liberty depends upon “the ballot-box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box,” Douglass wrote in his third and final autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881). Without these privileges and immunities of citizenship, “no class of people could live and flourish in this country.” Blacks therefore required all three. ... It is altogether fitting, therefore, that the lead plaintiff in the landmark decision restoring gun rights to their proper place in our constitutional system is a 76-year-old African American grandfather and Army veteran who simply wants “a handgun in my house for my protection,” while the most constitutionally sound opinion in the case cites Frederick Douglass and was written by the Court’s one African-American justice.

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Gun Shy

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Reason Magazine - By Jacob Sullum - Jun. 30 (News Analysis) - In their dissenting opinions, Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer (joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor) worry that overturning gun control laws undermines democracy. If "the people" want to ban handguns, they say, "the people" should be allowed to implement that desire through their elected representatives. What if the people want to ban books that offend them, establish an official church, or authorize police to conduct warrantless searches at will? Those options are also foreclosed by constitutional provisions that apply to the states by way of the 14th Amendment. The crucial difference between a pure democracy and a constitutional democracy like ours is that sometimes the majority does not decide.

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How Many Employers Will Drop Health Coverage Under ObamaCare? - Hit & Run

Fri, 28 May 2010 05:24:55 -0700

Reason Magazine - May. 28 -

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Bill Clinton: Tim McVeigh Hated the Guv'mint Too

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Reason Magazine - By Michael C. Moynihan - Apr. 16 (Opinion) - Now, I usually preface all discussion of the Tea Parties with links to my criticism of some of the nonsense I have come across interviewing, to clarify that I find some of the rhetoric I've come across when reporting from various Tea Party events to be deeply problematic. But most of it, though, is simply a canned case against government spending.

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Health Care Reform Passes. But At What Cost?

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Reason Magazine - By Peter Suderman - Mar. 21 (Opinion) - It's being hailed as a major legislative achievement, and in size and scope, it certainly is. But for those of us who do not take comfort in legislation of great size and scope, it's an achievement of dubious merit.

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Ted Kennedy and the Death (Hopefully) of an Era

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Reason Magazine - By Nick Gillespie - Aug. 26 (Opinion) - There's a certain irony that Ted Kennedy has died just as President Barack Obama, who seems to very much grok the senator's mind-set, is pushing health care reform, the issue Kennedy called "the cause of my life." Virtually all Americans understand that if any sort of legislation actually gets passed, it will make their lives slightly more hellish when it comes to cost, bureaucracy, and quality of care.

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The Whole Foods Plan for Health Care Reform

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Reason Magazine - By Matt Welch - Aug. 13 (Comment) - Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, who is a donor to the Reason Foundation, takes to the Wall Street Journal to sketch out his eight-point plan for health care reform. Excerpt:? Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs). The combination of high-deductible health insurance and HSAs is one solution that could solve many of our health-care problems. For example, Whole Foods Market pays 100% of the premiums for all our team members who work 30 hours or more per week (about 89% of all team members) for our high-deductible health-insurance plan. We also provide up to $1,800 per year in additional health-care dollars through deposits into employees' Personal Wellness Accounts to spend as they choose on their own health and wellness.Money not spent in one year rolls over to the next and grows over time. Our team members therefore spend their own health-care dollars until the annual deductible is covered (about $2,500) and the insurance plan kicks in. This creates incentives to spend the first $2,500 more carefully. Our plan's costs are much lower than typical health insurance, while providing a very high degree of worker satisfaction.? Equalize the tax laws so that that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits. Now employer health insurance benefits are fully tax deductible, but individual health insurance is not. This is unfair.? Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines. We should all have the legal right to purchase health insurance from any insurance company in any state and we should be able use that insurance wherever we live. Health insurance should be portable.Many of Mackey's recommendations will be familiar to readers of Reason's past health care coverage, including Science Correspondent Ron Bailey's most recent manifesto.As someone who h-a-t-e-s the health care system, I've never understood why de-linking insurance from employment isn't a central part of every serious crack at reform, given that a preponderance of analysts on all sides of the debate agree that the post-war linkage of health benefits to the workplace is one of the system's Original Sins. To relate one of those "personal stories" Team Obama seems to value so highly, I left my previous job on a Friday, and started the new one on a Monday, with yards of paperwork filed in advance, in a desperate attempt to maintain my health coverage and not get sucked into a Cobra nightmare. The result? Something like six or seven weeks of...a Cobra nightmare! One that coincided with A) my wife discovering she was pregnant, and B) us moving across the country. I am still sorting through the paperwork and quintuply-filed bills on that fiasco, and the cost difference between what I paid for and what I would have paid fr had we maintained a portable, individualized plan (keep in mind that my current and previous employer use the same health care provider), was at least in the high four figures. Is that the "status quo" I want protected? Hell no, it's not. And for those of you wiseacres who tell me it's my own damned fault for not shelling out coin for my own insurance, know this: California isn't exactly crawling with insurance companies offering people deals. Though I'm healthy, during my long-suffering freelance journalism career I was turned down for health insurance by both Kaiser and Blue Cross, and the one company that finally let me give them money refused to cover any childbirthin', then jacked up my premiums by more than 50 percent after Year 1. How much of that lack of competition is a result of individual state regulation and an inability to cross state lines? I don't know. But common sense suggests that such restrictions certainly don't produce more choice.I would be open to supporting a reform package that treats individual existence on equal footing as full-time employment, while removing barriers to competition for those individual consumers. Health care security, and general availability, after all, are part of the core problems we're trying to solve here, right? Unfortunately, things don't seem to be headed in that direction.

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Too Diverse to Fail

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Reason Magazine - By Michael C. Moynihan - Jul. 20 (Opinion) - According to a report in The Boston Globe, a small-circulation, Boston-based newspaper focusing on that city's black community "plans to accept a $200,000 loan from the city to stay afloat, despite criticism that the money could compromise its impartiality during an election year." The Bay State Banner, which ceased publication last month because of declining ad revenues, is the city's only black-owned newspaper. The news comes a week after a group of minority-owned broadcasters petitioned Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for federal aid, warning that "Minority-owned broadcasters are close to becoming an extinct species."

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There's No Such Thing as Free Health Care: The costly truth about Canada's health care system

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Reason Magazine - By John Stossel - Jul. 06 (Opinion) - President Obama says government will make health care cheaper and better. But there's no free lunch.

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Stripping Away Free Expression: A Pennsylvania town tries—and fails—to ban a form of exercise.

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Reason Magazine - By Shawn Macomber - Jun. 27 (Special Report) - Despite its cheeky name, the city of Mars isn’t always amenable to cultural efforts perceived as alien. The “pink-and-black color scheme of Ms. Babines’ website and the high-heeled shoe in her logo” were enough, according to court documents, to convince Code Enforcement Officer Gary Peaco to protect the community from these exercise classes.

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The Top 10 Most Absurd Time Covers of The Past 40 Years

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Reason Magazine - By Jeff Winkler, Radley Balko - Jun. 13 (Opinion) - From William Randolph Hearst's ginned up hysterical stories about marijuana to the "10-cent plague" comic book scare of the 1950s to The New York Times warning of "cocaine-crazed Negroes" raping white women across the Southern countryside, the media has always whipped up anxiety and increased readership via thinly sourced exposes of the next great threat to the American way of life.

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The Beginning of the End of Private Health Insurance

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Reason Magazine - By Ronald Bailey - Jun. 10 (Opinion) - Sadly, we are already well on our way to a wholly government-run health insurance system. After fall, about 47 percent of all health care expenses today are paid for by federal, state, and local governments, e.g., Medicare, Medicaid, and State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Establishing a public insurance scheme would dramatically increase the percentage of health care that is paid for by the federal government.

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Why libertarians—and everyone who believes in limited government—should worry about Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee

Thu, 28 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Reason Magazine - By Damon W. Root - May. 28 (Opinion) - President Barack Obama's announcement that he wants federal appeals court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter comes as something less than a shock.

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Cap-and-Trade Delusions

Wed, 20 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Reason Magazine - By Ronald Bailey - May. 20 (Opinion) - Proponents need to stop pretending cap-and-trade will cost nothing and create tons of jobs.

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Barack Obama & the DC School Voucher Program

Tue, 05 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Reason Magazine - By Nick Gillespie - May. 05 (Special Report) - Mercedes Campbell is one of the 1,700 students in the Washington, D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, a school-voucher program authorized by Congress in 2004. The program gives students up to $7,500 to attend whatever school their parents choose. For kids like Mercedes, who now attends Georgetown Visitation Prep, the DC voucher program is a way out of one of the worst school districts in the country.

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W-2 WTF?!?!: Tax Facts to Make Your Head Explode!

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Reason Magazine - By Meredith Bragg, Nick Gillespie - Apr. 15 (Opinion) - Is it patriotic to pay taxes? And if so, who the most patriotest Americans? Who are the least? How many words are in the tax code? How much do patriotic Americans pay to prepare their taxes? How long do you have to work in a year to earn enough to pay your taxes?

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