Here are some of today’s important stories and opinions:
Drug War: According to the Journal for the American Medical Association, states with legal medical marijuana have fewer deaths due to opioid use. I wrote an article for the Objective Standard about that and the broader issue of drug prohibitions and regulations; see “Government to Patients: ‘We Feel Pain Is Best for You.’”
Gas Taxes: Starting in January, Californians will pay even higher gasoline taxes, reports Fox News, because of a pointless effort to restrict carbon dioxide emissions in a relatively small region.
Islamic State: “The Islamic State wants more than $6 million to free an American woman the Muslim extremists kidnapped a year ago while she did humanitarian work in Syria,” USA Today reports. How about U.S. special forces rescue the woman, then unload $6 million worth of artillery on these barbaric bastards instead?
More Islamic State: A Westpoint study says Islamic State has been growing and organizing for several years, reports Fox News.
Al Qaeda: Al Qaeda Islamists want to hit “casinos in Las Vegas, oil tankers and military colleges” in America, Fox News reports.
Common Core: Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal has sued the Obama administration over Common Core education standards, “accusing [the administration] of illegally manipulating federal grant money and regulations to force states to adopt the Common Core education standards,” the Associated Press reports. But it’s unclear to me how Common Core is any worse, Constitutionally, than W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act.
Coal: Frank Wolak claims, “[E]xpanding western U.S. port capacity to allow a significant increase in exports of Powder River Basin coal to Asia will likely lead to reduced global greenhouse gas emissions,” PERC reports. The idea is that exporting coal to China would cause Americans to burn more natural gas to generate electricity, thereby on net reducing global carbon dioxide emissions. (Whether reducing global carbon dioxide emissions is a worthwhile goal is a separate question, of course.)
Socialized Medicine: “Paramedics will give patients whose heart has stopped a dummy drug as part of an ‘ethically questionable’ study into whether adrenalin works in resuscitation or not,” the Telegraph reported earlier this month. Paul Hsieh writes about this for Forbes.
Climate Treaty: Guy Benson claims for Townhall.com that Obama may try to commit the “United States to an anti-climate change international treaty without even attempting to seek formal approval from the Senate.”
Ministry of Truth: “The National Science Foundation has embarked on a little-known project to create an online database of ‘political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution,’ reports Elizabeth Harrington of The Washington Free Beacon,” re-reports Edward Morrissey for the Week. See Harrington’s original piece. But we don’t need a Ministry of Truth. American bureaucrats seem to forget that works such as 1984 and Brave New World were not intended as templates for government. Aside from speech directly relevant to government action, government bureaucrats have no legitimate business deciding which private speech is accurate and which is not.
Gaza: How many “ceasefires” is this now?
Christie Corruption? Despite his hard-leftist views, David Sirota might actually be onto something regarding Chris Christie’s cozy relationship with Wall Street. “There is a curiously overlooked story from David Sirota that examines the mutually profitable kinship between Gov. Chris Christie and Wall Street hedge funds,” opens an editorial from the New Jersey Star-Ledger.