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California may not be ready for recreational marijuana, according to remarks made by Governor Jerry Brown earlier this month.Brown worried that legalizing the drug for recreational use could have "ripple effects," and said he is keeping an eye on Colorado and Washington to see how well those states succeed with their newly-legal pot industries. But the governor's stance may not be in step with the general populous, according to Mason Tvert, director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Pr

I broke my own rule this week and compared somebody to Hitler. It was only a little argumentum ad nazium. I suggested that Russian’s recent move to seize the largely Russian-speaking Crimean region of Ukraine had a lot of historical parallels to Hitler’s 1938 invasion of to annex the largely German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. Apparently, Hillary Clinton has been thinking the same thing, and has taken the predictable fire that such comparison’s inevitably bring. There was onl

In an article, titled "Do The American People Have Freedom?," IVN contributor Michael Hoang introduced the notion that freedom is about belonging to a "mother nation" and being harmonious with the other members of a person's "national family." While the idea is not entirely unconventional, it is fundamentally incompatible with the Western liberal tradition and, specifically, the ideals of the American Revolution. Briefly, freedom is not earned, neither is it given nor received. Freedom is a sta

It turns out that Ayn Rand believed in Utopia too—what she described as the “Utopia of Greed.” This was my big takeaway when I read Atlas Shrugged last year at the not-so-impressionable age of 46. Rand’s heroine, Dagny Taggart, finds this utopia when her plane crashes deep in the Colorado mountains. In "Galt's Gulch," she meets all of the creative and talented people who have been disappearing from society—including the legendary John Galt, the übermencsh über alles who has been convincing all o

Campaigns are big business. And, like any business, it requires raw materials in order to produce a finished product. In elections the raw material is money and the finished product is power and influence. Campaign contributions are closely regulated. According to the Federal Elections Commission, an individual is limited to $2,600 per candidate or candidate committee per election. The limit on contributions to a national party in a year is $32,400 and only $10,000 to any state, district, or lo

It seems that in every cycle there is debate about which states should hold the first presidential primary elections. Some state always seems to try to jump ahead of Iowa and New Hampshire. Since 1972, the Iowa Caucuses have been first in the nation and New Hampshire has been the first "primary" since 1920. There, of course, have been states that have attempted to circumvent Iowa and New Hampshire, claiming that they don't truly represent America as they are small states with seemingly narrow

While the entire military voting system is broken, there are some states whose military absentee voting records are particularly shocking, and it seems that the Department of Defense and state voting officials are simply passing the buck -- pointing the finger at each other as the problem. In the end, it adds up to the disenfranchisement of military voters. According to a report from the Military Voter Protection Project (MVPP), the picture during the 2012 election was not pretty, and unless s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5djtYZuqz_8Voters across America will be tuning in tonight as President Obama delivers his sixth State of the Union address. Since his last address, Edward Snowden revealed the National Security Agency's mass surveillance program, the Healthcare.gov website launched and crashed on October 1, the government shut down for 17 days, and the Supreme Court overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, giving same-sex couples equal protection under federal law. The events of

On Friday, President Obama spoke before the Department of Justice to comment on his administration's internal review of intelligence programs used by the National Security Agency. The administration’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies suggested 40 changes to surveillance practices in the president's report delivered last month. In his statements, Obama ordered a new path for the United State's surveillance programs, in particular the controversial 'Section 215' provis

Primaries first began in the early twentieth century as a response to increasingly strong party control over elections. At the time, voters wanted a larger say in who would be chosen as their candidate, instead of the long-standing tradition of party bosses choosing who would run for office. Progressive reformers viewed direct primaries as a way for constituencies to increase transparency and allow for citizens to participate in the electoral process. As primaries became a feature of local, stat