I’ve said that there’s little local difference between liberals and conservatives in Whitewater. I’m sure it’s true — conservative support for markets is slight here, with so many on the right looking for government intervention for their favored projects. Progressive support for rights and equal treatment — something opportunity conservatives support just as much —…

Yesterday,  I posted a short clip from the 1949 film version of Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead.  The film stars Gary Cooper as Howard Roark, an architect and individualist.   Here’s a bit more. Rand wrote the screenplay for the film, and one can easily hear her voice in Roark’s words.   Roark finds himself on trial, and delivers a…

Yesterday was the anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright’s birth. I thought I’d follow up with a movie clip, from Rand’s Fountainhead. Ayn Rand often denied that the Fountainhead‘s architect Howard Roark was based on Frank Lloyd Wright. (She did, however, commission a home from FLW, one that was never built.) Still, the real and fictional…

Campaign finance laws are often heralded as positive reform — but there’s a much darker side to those laws — they often limit free expression of political speech. Over at Cato, they’ve prepared a video to discuss aspects of a case involving the Federal Election Commission’s presumed entitlement to regulate political speech, a case now…

From Reason Magazine‘s website, an online TERRORIST QUIZ. See how I did: Adams’s Results. (I’ve no idea if Whitewater’s Chief Coan had a hand in designing the quiz, or if he intends to incorporate it as an investigative tool. Can’t be any worse than his prior efforts.)

In December, I received and posted a cheery dour Christmas email from Libertarian Party presidential candidate Bob Barr. (See, from December 22nd, a post entitled, Libertarian Bob Barr Says Hello.) Well, I saw that the LP’s Director of Communications, Andrew Davis, must really care about me, too, because yesterday I received his email (and he’s…

I get a good deal of email, but imagine my surprise when Libertarian Bob Barr wrote to me, using my given name, to wish me a Merry Christmas. I will walk around all day, now, with a warm, holiday, free enterprise glow. (Quickly, before someone writes to tease me – Yes, I know that, really,…

Yesterday, I posted on Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch’s view that a new ‘libertarian moment’ awaits America, and that the best days for libertarianism are yet ahead.  Their optimism was general, not specific to any strategy.  Reason follows that article from its December issue with another, from January’s issue, on how libertarians will argue against…

In our time of unfolding recession, criticism of free exchange, and bailouts, one might conclude that the libertarian way of life is a faint shadow from another time.  Nothing could be more false.  Over at Reason, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch persuasively contend, in the Libertarian Moment, that far from ending, a new libertarian era…

I don’t smoke, although reading about Democrats’ plans to try (again) for a statewide smoking ban makes me think about lighting up in protest. Having now secured the majority in both chambers of the legislature, in a state suffering a projected budget deficit, and a declining economy, someone must think that keeping tavern patrons from…