The conservative think tank Cato Institute has announced its latest effort to hold local police accountable by establishing its National Police Misconduct Reporting Project. Its purpose is to “determine the extent of police misconduct in the United States ... and report on issues about police misconduct in order to enhance public awareness.”

However, the institute may be totally unaware that the project's apparently sensational presentation of police misconduct may be playing into the hands of those whose interest is in attacking the credibility of local police officers. By loosening those bonds of credibility, the argument for national control of local police authorities gains credibility. In Nazi Germany, that police force was called the Gestapo.

ClearSign Combustion in Seattle, Washington, is one of the first small “early-stage” companies to raise public capital under the JOBS Act enacted in early April. The company’s core expertise is in using computer technology to make boilers, furnaces, turbines, and other combustion systems more efficient. It sold three million shares at $4 each, raising $12 million in the process. After expenses and underwriters’ fees, the company expects to net about $9.5 million. But without the JOBS Act it might not even have bothered.

Edward Klein, a certified member of the establishment, has exposed Barack Obama for what he is: arrogant, prideful, and unsuited to be President.

The latest report from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released on Tuesday said that if the country falls off the “fiscal cliff” — variously also called “taxmageddon” — it will likely enter a new recession. With the ending of the Bush-era tax cuts (essentially a gigantic tax increase on the wealthy), the termination of extended unemployment benefits, the reimposition of the payroll tax rates back up to 6.2 percent from the current 4.2 percent, and the “sequester” cuts in government spending demanded by the agreement that Congress hammered out last summer in order to raise the debt ceiling, the CBO predicts that the country’s Gross National Product (GNP) will go negative for at least two quarters, which is the classic definition of a recession.

Executive Orders to reduce regulatory burdens on the economy, such as the one issued last week by President Obama, are likely to have little if any effect. A better solution is for Congress, which created the monstrous regulatory state, and which still has the power to shut it down, to starve the agencies by failing to renew their requests for operating funds. 

In the face of the $500 billion "taxmageddon" tax increase coming in 2012, Congress will pass the buck. Nothing is likely to happen before the election, and the lame duck Congress will then drop-kick the issue into next year by extending current law and letting the new Congress deal with it.

Outrageous examples in the United States of the misuse of civil asset forfeiture laws — whereby government officials confiscate money, though the people carrying the cash have done nothing wrong — include that of a man pulled over for speeding in Tennessee who nearly lost $22,000.

The revelation of a 1991 biographical sketch of Barack Obama that states he was born in Kenya, plus other evidence that he is Kenyan-born, have been discounted as irrelevant and attention has been deflected from the subject by members of the so-called conservative media.

On Wednesday the Senate voted down five budget proposals, reflecting gridlock and unwillingness to face reality.  Four of the budget proposals were presented by Republican senators, while the fifth was based on President Obama’s budget.

House speaker John Boehner decided on Tuesday to fire the first round in the coming battle to deal with the huge tax increases taking place after the first of the year by setting the terms for the debt ceiling debate. In a speech at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s 2012 Fiscal Summit in Washington Boehner said that any discussion would revolve around his “Boehner principle” — every dollar of additional debt increase for the federal government must be matched by an equal or greater reduction in government spending.