Keeping marijuana illegal is tantamount to taxing it—and that’s just fine with R. Gil Kerlikowske, federal drug czar, who says the high price discourages consumption by young people. His bizarre logic also admits that the profits of pot go into the hands of criminals, instead of enriching government coffers, like standard taxes on alcohol and [...]

Here’s what Bernie Sanders just said from the floor of the Senate, announcing that he is changing his amendment: SANDERS:  In other words, Mr. President, we now have 59 senators who, as part of the budget resolution, voted on this issue, 320 members of congress, the house, two u.s. courts that have all told the [...]

It is becoming more and more clear that President Obama and congressional Democrats don’t intend to get to immigration reform this year–despite the fact that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently released an outline of a significantly right-leaning immigration proposal. Speaking at a Cinco de Mayo event in the White House Rose Garden, the president [...]

The Dow is swinging wildly–down as much as 980 points within the last hour–largely due to insecurity about the situation in Greece and shaky retail sales. And according to Brad DeLong, who is generally pretty tight with the White House, Obama will come out in opposition to Audit the Fed this afternoon. At a time [...]

JP Morgan chief Jamie Dimon sits on the board of the NY Federal Reserve. He knows what the Fed is doing. But Hagan says Congress can’t be trusted with that information because they would leak like a seive and the markets would crash. In the short span of a year, she has decided she doesn’t want anyone to tell her anything, and that we should just trust Jamie Dimon to do the right thing.

That’s. . . delightful.

This is just an incredibly disturbing video. A Columbia, Missouri SWAT team breaks into the house of Jonathan Whitworth, shoots and kills a dog in the presence of a small child and the man’s wife, shoots and wounds a second dog, all over a grinder, a pipe and a small amount of marijuana. And then [...]

In Congressional testimony today, two FBI officials said that “marijuana is the top revenue generator for Mexican DTOs [cartels]“, calling it “a cash crop that finances corruption and the carnage of violence year after year.” Of course, nowhere does the FBI make the obvious connection that if you want to stop the cartels from financing their operations with marijuana, you can make marijuana legal and cut out their legs from under the cartels.

Economists James Galbraith, Dean Baker and Robert Auerbach write a letter to Larry Summers, urging  him to “reconsider the administration’s position of apocalyptic opposition to the bill in Congress that would subject Federal Reserve operations to an audit” (PDF): Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs The University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712 [...]

Richard Burr and Claire McCaskill are signaling that they will flip-flop on Audit the Fed in order to protect Wall Street’s secret bailouts from scrutiny. Burr and McCaskill are among 67 Senators who either voted for or cosponsored Audit the Fed in the past year. Wall Street was asleep when Alan Grayson and Ron Paul’s [...]

As part of a comprehensive Immigration bill, Democrats are planning to make everyone who wants to work in this country get a national ID embedded with biometric data. This will be a requirement for both citizens and immigrants. Under this plan, the government would create a national biometric database cataloging every person in the country. [...]