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Suggest adding the whipping post to America’s system of criminal justice and most people recoil in horror. But offer a choice between five years in prison or 10 lashes and almost everybody picks the lash. What does that say about prison? … Never in the history of the world has a country locked up so many of its people. … Not even the most progressive reformer has a plan to reduce the prison population by 85 percent.  I do: Bring back the lash. Give convicts the choice of flogging in lieu...

While the world watched Weiner resign, the Senate was busy doing stuff that mattered a lot more, like voting 73-27 to kill nearly $6 billion a year in ethanol subsidies. An amendment offered by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) failed on Tuesday, but rose miraculously from the grave two days later (take that, Jesus!) and passed today. A mini-hullabaloo erupted within Republican ranks this week because the language eliminating the ethanol tax credit doesn't include a tax cut to offset the...

Forty years ago this Friday, President Richard Nixon announced that "public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse." Declaring that "the problem has assumed the dimensions of a national emergency," he asked Congress for money to "wage a new, all-out offensive," a crusade he would later call a "global war on the drug menace." The war on drugs ended in May 2009, when President Obama's newly appointed drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, said he planned to stop calling it that. Or...

This is my second dispatch from a junket sponsored by the Dole Food Company touring their banana and pineapple plantations and facilities in Costa Rica. The company has gathered a group of “key leaders in sustainability” for the trip to show them various sustainability projects involved in growing, packing, and shipping fresh pineapples and bananas. In my first dispatch, I described what our happy band of sustainability companeros saw. This next dispatch completes our journey in s...

A couple of months ago, an invitation from a public relations firm dropped into my email to participate in an “invitation-only tour” of Dole Food Company pineapple and banana plantations in Costa Rica that would bring together "key leaders in sustainability.” I was eager to go on the all expenses paid junket for two reasons: (1) I have long been puzzled by what is meant by “sustainability” and (2) I used to work for the Tico Times many years ago and have a great affection for...

Part 1 of astonishing BBC documentary:

Evidence that the growth of government is a one-way ratchet continues to mount in Washington, where President Obama's pieties about abiding by the rule of law are eclipsing "one word: plastics" as a punch line. The day after he was inaugurated, Obama promised that the rule of law would be a touchstone of his presidency. Apparently this was not a solemn vow but rather a sop to those liberals and progressives who had fumed over the Bush administration's traducing of the Constitution. For...