Politics & Rights

A federal antitrust class action lawsuit has been filed against the companies that supply the pressure pumping equipment, fluids, and personnel essential to the hydraulic fracturing (fracking) revolution underway in the United States. The lawsuit alleges that the three largest suppliers, Halliburton, Baker Hughes, and Schlumberger, have “colluded to restrict…

On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous speech, “I Have a Dream,” in which he reaffirmed the principles and promises of the Declaration of Independence. Noting that “One hundred years [after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation] the life of the Negro is still badly crippled…

Secretary of State John Kerry is right that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s use of nerve gas against the Syrian population is a “moral obscenity”—but he is wrong that this moral obscenity justifies U.S. military intervention. As Reuters reports, the evidence indicates Assad used “rockets or missiles . . . to…

Rebecca Cullers of Adweek claims that marketer and so-called “consumer advocate” Alex Bogusky has a “foolproof way of bringing back 1 million U.S. jobs.” Bogusky says in a YouTube video, “It’s as simple as this: Every time you buy something, ensure it was made in America.” He immediately backs off…

In a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece, “Targeting the Wealthy Kills Jobs,” T. J. Rodgers, founder and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, addresses some causes and consequences of today’s culture of envy. “The American dream has traditionally been one of individual success that is rewarded and admired,” writes Rodgers. “But…

Seeking to rid the nation’s politics of ambiguous language that clouds the true meaning of politicians’ plans and government’s policies, a team of UK government employees has created an official style guide for both internal communications and public statements, reports the Independent. The goal is to require government officials to…

Exposes the fundamental causes of the Internal Revenue Service’s “closer scrutiny” of Tea Party and conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status, identifying the constellation of laws that effectively authorized the IRS to target such groups, showing how these laws operate in practice, and shedding light on the deeper premises that support these laws and fuel their enforcement.

In his recent National Affairs essay, “Religion and the American Public,” George Will writes: “I approach the question of religion and American life from the vantage point of an expanding minority,” namely, Americans with no religious affiliation, “a cohort that the Pew public-opinion surveys call the ‘nones.’” Will’s essay is…

“The National Security Agency [NSA] has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008,” the Washington Post reports. Regardless of how one evaluates the Post’s source for this information (Edward Snowden), the NSA’s big-brother tactics…

On July 18, the city of Detroit declared that it had reached insolvency, and, with $11 billion in debt, filed for bankruptcy. Since the announcement, numerous pundits have penned postmortems attempting to explain Detroit’s decline, but Daniel Hannan has gotten closest to the essence of the issue. In his piece…