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The United States is once again in the middle of a major election year and in many elections, people will go the polls with only two options to choose from -- red or blue, Republican or Democrat. The problem is a majority of Americans do not believe either major political party represents America. According to the latest Rasmussen poll, 53 percent of likely voters believe "neither party in Congress is the party of the American people." While some may dispute the results of a single poll, furthe

On FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver’s website, he recently predicted that the GOP will win the U.S. Senate, and retain control of the U.S. House of Representatives. Due to President Obama’s lagging popularity and the GOP’s more viable candidates, Silver’s research forecasts that Republicans are favored to win at least 6 seats in the Senate alone. However, what will be the major issues in these campaigns? Following the 2012 election, many politicians believed immigration reform would finally pass t

Despite police fears that legal marijuana businesses attract crime, including under-the-table drug dealing, weapons violations, and robberies, a new study says the opposite might be the case. Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas analyzed major crimes from 1990 to 2006 in the United States, paying particular attention to early medical marijuana states: Alaska (1998), California (1996), Colorado (2000), Hawaii (2000), Maine (1999), Montana (2004), Nevada (2000), Oregon (1998), Rhode

This week the Colorado Department of Revenue released tax figures for the state's first month of legal recreational marijuana sales and they are already comparable to tax receipts from alcohol sales, delivering on the promises of marijuana activists that legal marijuana could mean big revenue for state governments. According to state revenue officials, Colorado made $2 million in tax revenue from the state's 59 recreational marijuana businesses this January. That figure is much higher than the

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