The ‘war on terror” has come home – and it’s wreaking havoc on innocent American lives. The culprit is the militarization of the police.

The weapons that destroyed Afghanistan and Iraq have made their way to local law enforcement. While police forces across the country began a process of militarization – complete with SWAT teams and flash-bang grenades – when President Reagan intensified the ‘war on drugs,” the post-9/11 ‘war on terror” has added fuel to the fire.

Through laws and regulations like a provision in defense budgets that authorizes the Pentagon to transfer surplus military gear to police forces, local law enforcement agencies are using weapons found on the battlefields of South Asia and the Middle East.

A recent New York Times article by Matt Apuzzo reported that in the Obama era, ‘police departments have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft.” The result is that police agencies around the nation possess military-grade equipment, turning officers who are supposed to fight crime and protect communities into what looks like an invading army. And military-style police raids have increased in recent years, with […]

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The 24 states which refused to expand Medicaid under Obamacare are poised to give up $423.6 billion in federal funds over a decade and keep 6.7 million residents uninsured, according to a new study by the Urban Institute and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

“In the 24 states that have not expanded Medicaid, 6.7 million residents are projected to remain uninsured in 2016 as a result. These states are foregoing $423.6 billion in federal Medicaid funds from 2013 to 2022, which will lessen economic activity and job growth,” the authors wrote.

This chart comes via the Urban/RWJF study:

The non-expansion states — which include high-population Texas and Florida — feature Republican governors or legislators (or both) who blocked the federal funds. The expansion, initially required by Obamacare, was made optional by the Supreme Court. It covers residents up to 133 percent of the federal poverty line with a low price for states; Washington pays the full cost for the first three years and 90 percent thereafter.

Since September 2013 the number of uninsured fell by 38 percent in expansion states and just 9 percent in non-expansion states, the study found.

Democrats on the state and federal level widely support expansion; some GOP governors (like New Jersey’s […]

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Journalists forcibly removed from covering a story. Facing down tear gas and hostile police. Finding themselves under arrest. It’s a situation that is supposed to happen in other countries, not the United States. But last night in Ferguson, MO, journalists found themselves facing exactly those conditions, lending credence to the fact that the United States – despite all its support in its laws and customs – does not top the world’s rankings in terms of freedom of the press.

Two DC-based reporters, the Huffington Post’s Ryan Reilly and the Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery, were working in a McDonald’s near the scene of the protests that have become a nightly event in Ferguson when police officers entered the restaurants and demanded they leave. In taking too long to do so, the two reported after the fact, the police chose to place them both under arrest. ‘As they took me into custody, the officers slammed me into a soda machine, at one point setting off the Coke dispenser,” Lowrey wrote in his account of the confrontation. ‘They put plastic cuffs on me, then they led me out the door.” Both were later released with no charges – but also with no police report […]

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Jason Westcott was afraid.

One night last fall, he discovered via Facebook that a friend of a friend was planning with some co-conspirators to break in to his home. They were intent on stealing Wescott’s handgun and a couple of TV sets. According to the Facebook message, the suspect was planning on ‘burning” Westcott, who promptly called the Tampa Bay police and reported the plot.

According to the Tampa Bay Times, the investigating officers responding to Westcott’s call had a simple message for him: ‘If anyone breaks into this house, grab your gun and shoot to kill.”

Around 7:30 pm on May 27th, the intruders arrived. Westcott followed the officers’ advice, grabbed his gun to defend his home, and died pointing it at the intruders. They used a semiautomatic shotgun and handgun to shoot down the 29-year-old motorcycle mechanic. He was hit three times, once in the arm and twice in his side, and pronounced dead upon arrival at the hospital.

The intruders, however, weren’t small-time crooks looking to make a small score. Rather they were members of the Tampa Bay Police Department’s SWAT team, which was executing a search warrant on suspicion that Westcott and his partner were marijuana dealers. They had been […]

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There’s been quite the buzz in the chattering classes this week over Robert Draper’s suggestion in the New York Times Magazine that the Republican Party, and perhaps even the nation, may finally prepared for a ‘libertarian moment,” likely through the agency of the shrewd and flexible politician Rand Paul. It’s obvious, in fact, that some of the aging hipsters Draper talks to who have been laboring in the libertarian fields for decades glimpse over the horizon a reconstructed GOP that can reverse the instinctive loathing of millennials for the Old Folks’ Party.

Unfortunately, to the extent there is something that can be called a ‘libertarian moment” in the Republican Party and the conservative movement, it owes less to the work of the Cato Institute than to a force genuine libertarians clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged are typically horrified by: the Christian Right. In the emerging ideological enterprise of ‘constitutional conservatism,” theocrats are the senior partners, just as they have largely been in the Tea Party Movement, even though libertarians often get more attention.

There’s no universal definition of ‘constitutional conservatism.” The […]

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