"The First Amendment was intended to secure something more than an exercise in futility." -- Justice John Paul Stevens, dissenting in Minnesota Board for Community Colleges v. Knight (1984)

Living in a representative democracy such as ours means that each person has the right to stand outside the...

In a unanimous 9-0 ruling in United States v. Jones, the U.S. Supreme Court has declared that police must get a search warrant before using GPS technology to track criminal suspects. But what does this ruling, hailed as a victory by privacy advocates, really mean for the future...

"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes... known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.... No...

"The drug war is not to protect the children, save the babies, shield the neighborhoods, or preserve the rain forests. The drug war is a violent campaign against black men and by extension the black family, among many others."-- Wilton D. Alston, "How Can Anyone Not Realize the...

"If we're training cops as soldiers, giving them equipment like soldiers, dressing them up as soldiers, when are they going to pick up the mentality of soldiers? If you look at the police department, their creed is to protect and to serve. A soldier's mission is to engage his enemy...

It's been a year of populist uprisings, economic downturns, political assassinations, and one scandal after another. Gold prices soared, while the dollar plummeted. The Arab Spring triggered worldwide protests, including the Occupy Wall Street protests here in America. Nature unleashed her forces with a massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan,...

It had been a tumultuous year. The North Vietnamese launched the Tet offensive, attacking garrisons and invading the U.S. Embassy in Saigon; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated; and a rebellious decade reached its climax in 1968, as disenchanted citizens from Paris to Chicago took to...

"The Christmas hope for peace and good will toward all men can no longer be dismissed as a kind of pious dream of some utopian. If we don't have good will toward men in this world, we will destroy ourselves by the misuse of our own instruments and our own...

When I was a child in the 1950s, Christmas glowed. My parents didn't have much money to spend at Christmastime, but being poor didn't really matter all that much because there was magic in the air. And the magic of Christmas, which hinges on the spiritual nature of the holidays,...

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busy bodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those...

"Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech... or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." -- First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

The United States has historically stood for unfettered free speech, which is vital to...

"All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined... could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it...

Ten years ago, on November 29, 2001, George Harrison--the "quiet Beatle"--passed away at the age of 58, a victim of throat cancer. Harrison left behind an amazing legacy, one that not only spanned a legendary musical career that began with the Beatles and continued throughout his solo career, but also...

Just when you started to think it might be safe to fly again...

Remember those whole-body, X-ray scanners the government installed in airports across the country and kept insisting were so safe? It turns out that they're not so safe, after all. According to an investigative report by...

"We need to put pressure on Congress to get things done. We will do this with First Amendment activity. If Congress is unresponsive, we'll have to escalate in order to keep the issue alive and before it. This action may take on disruptive dimensions, but not violent in the sense...

Insisting that the "damage done by drugs is felt far beyond the millions of Americans with diagnosable substance abuse or dependence problems," President Obama has declared October 2011 to be National Substance Abuse Prevention Month. However, while drug abuse and drug-related crimes have unquestionably taken a toll on...

"That's what the two-tiered justice system is: elites are immunized for egregious crimes while ordinary Americans are subjected to merciless punishment for trivial transgressions." -- Glenn Greenwald, author of With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful

While...

"The strength of the vampire is that people will not believe in him."--Dr. Abraham Van Helsing

Halloween is associated with many strange creatures, but none more so than the vampire. To most people, the vampire is nothing more than a mythic monster popularized in movies, television, books and so on....

"Sometimes I feel like I'm actually on the wrong planet, and it's great when I'm in my garden, but the minute I go out the gate I think: 'What the hell am I doing here?'" -- George Harrison

By the time he was 21 years old, George Harrison -- along...

"The privacy and dignity of our citizens [are] being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen--a society in which government may intrude into the...