The Continuing Economic Crisis by Tim Kelly
Twelve Victims of the Drug War by Laurence M. Vance
The Jacob Hornberger Show: June 17, 2011 by Jacob G. Hornberger
The Natural Right to Be Free by Laurence M. Vance
The Supreme Court Abandons the Guantánamo Prisoners by Andy Worthington
Slow, Predictable Hearing on Fast and Furious by Wendy McElroy
Bloomberg’s Soda Policy: The End Doesn’t Justify the Means by Sheldon Richman
The Constitution versus the Executive-Branch Departments by Laurence M. Vance
The Jacob Hornberger Show: June 10, 2012 (video) by Jacob G. Hornberger
Abolish the Postal Monopoly by James Bovard

HEALTH CARE Will Supreme Court’s Ignorance Torpedo Americans’ Freedom? by James Bovard Future of Freedom Foundation WAR ON TERRORISM The Secret Wars Editorial Baltimore SunTerror Tuesdays, Kill Lists and Drones: Has the President Become a Law Unto Himself? by John W. Whitehead Rutherford Institute Hope Dies at Guantanamo by Marjorie Cohn Jurist DRUG WAR U.S. Hand in Honduran Massacre by Laura Carlsen Foreign Policy in Focus

REGULATION Taken for a Ride by Jeff Horwitz and Chris Cumming Slate FOREIGN POLICY America’s First Neocon War by Jefferson Morley Salon.comThe Looming U.S. Return to Cam Ranh Bay by Ted Galen Carpenter National Interest Johnson’s “The Sorrows of Empire” Becoming Prophetic by Sherwood Ross Op Ed News Chile Court of Appeals Orders Investigation of Ronni Moffit’s 1976 Assassination in Washington Santiago Times

Zombieapocalypse?  Congress investigates air leak, possible safety lapses at CDC lab

WWII Veteran Being Forced Out of Home and Forced to Exhume Wife’s Body

The Mancession

The US State Department Goes Bad

Israel demolishes Arab village 38 times

Google reports ‘alarming’ rise in government censorship requests

Obama administration will grant work permits to younger illegal immigrants

Pentagon to hold its first gay pride event

U. S. military completes planning for Syria

America’s next bank holiday will be a nightmare

Know your ‘troll’: UK considers law disclosing users` identities

Sales of ‘Zombie Bullets’ on the rise

Navy drone crashes in Maryland

Image resembling Jesus found in mold

How much do we really hate the TSA?

Where’s the outcry on the U.N. push to regulate the Internet?

The government knows what’s good for you

‘Flame’ spyware infiltrating Iranian computers

Homeland Security Releases List of Keywords That Cheese Them Off

Alejandra’s family could lose their home because of a bank error. Tell PNC Bank to admit their mistake and negotiate a loan modification.

Sign Alejandra’s Petition

It was no ordinary morning. Police arrived at 4am and broke down the door to Alejandra Cruz’s family home with a battering ram. PNC Bank was trying to take her family’s Minneapolis home after a bank error, and their friends and neighbors were in the home to defend it. The police forced everyone to leave — but now Alejandra is fighting back to save her family’s home.

Alejandra’s family made every online payment on their home for seven years. But one month, PNC Bank didn’t withdraw it. Instead of admitting their error, they demanded two months’ payment as penalty.

Alejandra says there was no way her family could have come up with so much money on such short notice. So PNC put them into foreclosure and forced them to leave the house in 48 hours.

But now, Alejandra is fighting back. She’s started a petition asking PNC to sit down and negotiate — and this Thursday, she’s traveling to the the bank’s headquarters to deliver her message. It could decide the fate of her family’s home — and if thousands of people join her before then, she knows the bank won’t be able to ignore her message.

Click here to stand with Alejandra — ask PNC Bank to admit their mistake and negotiate a loan modification with her family.

Alejandra says her family has worked incredibly hard to meet their mortgage payments. Her father worked two jobs, and she and her brother worked part time through school to help. The foreclosure has already forced them to move out of their home, and when friends and neighbours tried to stop the bank from taking the home, police arrested them.

But Alejandra knows there is hope. Just last week, another Minneapolis resident named Nick Espinosa started a Change.org petition to save his mom’s home. Thousands of people signed in a matter of days, and the bank was forced to back down and let Nick’s mom keep her home with a reduced mortgage.

Local media are already taking interest in her family’s battle, and if PNC Bank hears from thousands across the country right now, Alejandra is convinced they’ll decide to negotiate rather than face a public relations nightmare.

Click here to help Alejandra save her family home, and tell PNC Bank not to penalize the Cruzes for a mistake of its own doing.

Curing the Healthcare Crisis

The American healthcare system is fraught with bad incentives that raise the cost of healthcare, reduce its quality, and make care less accessible than it should be. To fix it, the United States should move away from a third-party payment system and lift the impediments to free-market prices in healthcare. Unfortunately, Obamacare takes the diametrically opposite approach and will make many problems worse. This is the theme of the provocative new Independent Institute book, Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, by John C. Goodman, an economist noted for his development of the concept of Health Savings Accounts. In addition to explaining the origins of the current mess and the fatal flaws of the Affordable Care Act, Goodman offers numerous correctives that draw from common-sense economics and a recognition that American healthcare is a complex system that cannot be micromanaged by government bureaucrats or other third parties.

“Under the conventional approach, every doctor, every nurse, every hospital administrator will get up every morning and ask, ‘How can I squeeze more money out of the payment formulas today?” Goodman writes in his Introduction. “My answer is just the opposite. Under the approach I will recommend, all these people will be encouraged to start each day by asking, ‘How can I make my service better, less costly, and more accessible to patients today?'”

With the U.S. Supreme Court expected to decide the constitutionality of parts of the new healthcare law within a week, the publication of Priceless is very well timed. In addition to the law’s individual mandate, Goodman identifies the provisions most in need of repeal and replacement. Those include various measures that create perverse incentives for insurers to attract the healthy and avoid the sick, and for individuals to game the system by dropping their coverage after they receive care and their medical bills are paid. Goodman concludes by explaining the principles for healthy healthcare reform, including promoting genuinely portable insurance policies whose prices are determined in a free market. “Portability, we have seen, is about the only rational solution to the problems of pre-existing conditions,” he writes in his final chapter. “Without it, employers and employees face all manner of perverse incentives in the labor market.”

Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, by John C. Goodman

“John Goodman has long been the clearest and most insightful healthcare thinker…. It’s time we acted on his common sense, fact-based wisdom inPriceless.” –Mitch Daniels, Governor of Indiana

And please be sure to catch John C. Goodman on the following programs:

• Tues., 6/19, 11:20 a.m. Eastern Time: Geraldo Rivera’s radio show
• Wed., 6/20, 6:00 a.m. Eastern Time: Fox andThurs., 6/21, 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time: Stossel

The White House would like to show its “toughness” on Iran by imposing stringent economic sanctions, but it fears that higher oil prices from a smaller world supply of oil would hurt President Obama’s re-election prospects. Luckily for the administration, Saudi Arabia, a staunch foe of Iran, has signaled its willingness to increase oil production in order to offset any reduction of Iranian oil exports (and, truth be told, Iran will likely find ways to work around the sanctions). Moreover, greater Saudi production–along with increased energy supplies from Brazil and Canada, improved energy efficiency, and lower energy demand due to a weak world economy–make it likely that oil prices will fall before November, according to Ivan Eland, director of the Independent Institute’s Center on Peace & Liberty. This is good news for the White House. READ MORE

Smoke and Mirrors in Energy Policy, by Ivan Eland (6/13/12) Spanish Translation

No War for Oil: U.S. Dependency and the Middle East, by Ivan Eland

“Ivan Eland has produced a devastating indictment of the ‘oil rationale’ for the intrusive, counterproductive U.S. military presence in the Middle East. No War for Oil should help debunk the most prominent justification for that misguided policy.” –Ted Galen Carpenter

Anyone who has watched CSI and similar television crime shows is aware that forensic science has made great strides since the days of LAPD Sergeant Joe Friday on Dragnet. And yet, the science is only as good as the practitioner, as a 2009 report from the National Academy of Science revealed. Case in point: digital forensics–the investigation of evidence left on computer hard drives, cell phones, and the like–is still an “emerging” discipline that many forensic analysts have yet to master. In fact, inexperienced forensic “experts” run the risk of creating false convictions that send innocent people to jail, as Independent Institute Research Fellow Roger Koppl and digital forensics consultant Monique M. Ferraro explain in a new op-ed. READ MORE

Digital Devices and Miscarriages of Justice, by Roger Koppl and Monique M. Ferraro (The Daily Caller, 6/15/12)

Steps to Take to Resolve Crime Lab Problems, by E. James Cowan and Roger Koppl (The National Law Journal, 5/21/12)

The Pursuit of Justice: The Law and Economics of Legal Institutions, edited by Edward J. Lopez

Obamacare Cronyism Makes Bad Medicine