Free Republic

Put a public school teacher in the governor's mansion and you'll have a pedagogue as the chief executive every time. It really doesn't matter how long she's in office, she'll always be a schoolmarm who's out of her element and in over her head—the Peter Principle epitomized. Unfortunately for the people of New Orleans, it took a crisis of cataclysmic proportions in which thousands of people suffered physical deprivation and emotional humiliation—and hundreds died before anyone realized that when you elect a follower as your leader, no one makes realistic plans for the crisis until a catastrophe occurs, and while...

MP3s Are Not the Devil Since every penny I earn depends on copyright protection, I'm all in favor of reasonable laws to do the job. But there's something kind of sad about the recording industry's indecent passion to punish the "criminals" who are violating their rights. Copyright is a temporary monopoly granted by the government -- it creates the legal fiction that a piece of writing or composing (or, as technologies were created, a recorded performance) is property and can only be sold by those who have been licensed to do so by the copyright holder. Without copyright, once a...