Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“The Trump-appointed judge found that the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act “exceeds the scope of the statute and is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute’s terms.””
https://reason.com/2025/05/01/federal-judge-rules-trumps-alien-enemies-act-proclamation-is-unlawful/
“The Declaration of Independence referred to “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The First Amendment strictly specifies that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Both are rooted in the understanding that rights don’t come from government but are inherent in individuals. The government must respect our rights whether or not it agrees with how we exercise them so long as we, in turn, respect others’ equal rights.
In February, Eugene Volokh of the Hoover Institution and the UCLA School of Law wrote that “when it comes to aliens and immigration law, the First Amendment questions aren’t settled” in a discussion about the constitutionality of deporting noncitizens for their speech. That may still be true, but cases like American Association of University Professors v. Rubio show at least some federal judges viewing First Amendment protections as universally applicable, which squares with American history.
Campus radicals have the same free speech rights as we all possess, even if they’re just visiting.”
https://reason.com/2025/05/02/immigrants-and-radicals-have-the-same-free-speech-rights-as-everyone-else/
“Texas generates the most renewable energy in the nation. Three Republican bills being advanced by the state legislature could halt Texas’ green energy progress and give fossil fuels a leg up in the state’s energy market.
Senate Bill 388, which has passed the state Senate, would require at least 50 percent of power generation installed after January 1, 2026, to come from “dispatchable” energy sources, which include natural gas, nuclear power, and coal. This bill effectively subsidizes fossil fuel projects by requiring utility providers to purchase power generation credits from dispatchable energy sources.”
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“A report from Aurora Energy Research estimates that this bill would add $5.2 billion to Texas power prices over the next decade; residents could pay an extra $200 per year in energy costs.”
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“Using the “police power” of the state ignores what regulators and the market are saying: Texas needs every energy source to meet future demand. That includes renewables.”
https://reason.com/2025/05/02/texas-lawmakers-want-to-use-police-power-of-the-state-to-halt-renewable-energy-projects/
https://reason.com/2025/05/02/5-times-the-trump-team-told-americans-to-accept-being-poorer/
“Bondi’s most obvious mistake is equating potential overdoses with actual overdoses: She assumes that 258 million opioid-naive people would each have consumed two milligrams of fentanyl in one sitting. But Bondi also erroneously assumes that seizing 3,400 kilograms of fentanyl is the same as reducing U.S. fentanyl consumption by that amount.
That is obviously not true. Prohibition allows drug traffickers to earn a hefty risk premium, which gives them a strong incentive to find ways around any barriers the government manages to erect. Given all the places where drugs can be produced and all the ways they can be smuggled, it is not possible to “cut off the flow,” as politicians have been vainly promising to do for more than a century. The most they can realistically hope to accomplish through interdiction is higher retail prices resulting from increased costs imposed on drug traffickers.
That strategy is complicated by the fact that illegal drugs acquire most of their value close to the consumer. The cost of replacing destroyed crops and seized shipments is therefore relatively small, a tiny fraction of the “street value” trumpeted by law enforcement agencies. As you get closer to the retail level, the replacement cost rises, but the amount that can be seized at one time falls.
These challenges—which are compounded in the case of fentanyl, a highly potent drug that can be transported or shipped in small packages containing many doses—explain why interdiction never seems to have a significant and lasting impact on retail prices. From 1981 to 2012, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the average, inflation-adjusted retail price for a pure gram of heroin fell by 86 percent. During the same period, the average retail price for cocaine and methamphetamine fell by 75 percent and 72 percent, respectively. In 2021, the Drug Enforcement Administration reported that methamphetamine’s “purity and potency remain high while prices remain low,” that “availability of cocaine throughout the United States remains steady,” and that “availability and use of cheap and highly potent fentanyl has increased.””
https://reason.com/2025/05/02/pam-bondis-absurd-claim-about-fentanyl-overdoses-epitomizes-the-illogic-of-the-war-on-drugs/
“The Constitution grants Congress the sole power of the purse. The executive branch is tasked with faithfully executing the laws Congress passes. If Congress passes a law saying jump, it’s the president’s job to jump. And if Congress passes a law that says spend, it’s the president’s job to spend.”
https://reason.com/2025/05/03/what-if-the-president-doesnt-want-to-spend-money/
“When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained Venezuelan makeup artist Andry Hernandez Romero in 2024, it suspected he belonged to the Tren de Aragua gang. Yet ICE provided no “official records, media reports, and correspondence,” “intelligence information received from other agencies,” or “validation” or “confirmation” by “law enforcement, Corrections, or sending jurisdiction,” to prove that Hernandez Romero was tied to the gang.
Instead, ICE officials flagged Hernandez Romero as a potential Tren de Aragua associate based on two of his tattoos: the words mom and dad, topped with crowns, on each wrist.”
https://reason.com/2025/05/05/deported-for-tattoos/
“President Donald Trump announced Sunday that he’s ordered the federal government to rebuild and reopen the infamous Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. However, that plan will likely require a massive investment in a dysfunctional federal prison system that can barely staff the prisons it currently operates.”
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“”The reopening of ALCATRAZ will serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE,” the president continued later in the post.”
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“The federal penitentiary on San Francisco Bay’s Alcatraz Island opened in 1934 as a last stop for the federal prison system’s most troublesome and violent inmates. But it lasted less than three decades due to the exorbitant costs of operating an island prison. It closed in 1963.”
https://reason.com/2025/05/05/reopening-alcatraz-is-an-expensive-unnecessary-pipe-dream/
“In the new school year, thousands of Oklahoma students will be required to learn about 2020 election fraud conspiracy theories as part of a new curriculum developed by the state’s controversial superintendent, Ryan Walters. Walters, who has come under fire in recent months for an effort to require Oklahoma classrooms to stock Bibles and display the Ten Commandments, has said that the addition “empowers students to investigate and understand the electoral process.”
Under the state’s new curriculum, high school students will be taught to “identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellwether county’ trends.”
While it’s not necessarily unreasonable to want students to learn about the dispute over the 2020 election, the standards’ framing of the controversy (which turned up no evidence of election interference) and Walters’ comments about it make it clear that teachers are meant to shed doubt on the veracity of the election.”
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“The standards also contain passages directing teachers to ensure that students can “identify the source of the COVID-19 pandemic from a Chinese lab,” and “explain the effects of the Trump tax cuts, child tax credit, border enforcement efforts.””
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“The curriculum change is just one of a battery of recent attempts to inject partisan politics into public school curricula. While blue states have faced criticism from the right for injecting critical race theory into the classroom, many red states have engaged in far more galling efforts to politicize classroom instruction.”
https://reason.com/2025/05/06/new-oklahoma-curriculum-requires-students-to-learn-2020-election-fraud-conspiracies/
“Tariffs on movies produced overseas might drive Hollywood to film more intensively in the United States, but it also makes it more difficult and expensive for American audiences to see movies made by foreign companies. Films from South Korea, India, Europe, and elsewhere compete with the U.S. film industry in terms of culture, ideas, and sometimes politics. Tariffs on overseas productions could effectively trap us with the products of Hollywood and reduce its need to adjust to the tastes of the viewing public.”
https://reason.com/2025/05/07/trumps-foreign-film-tariffs-could-stick-us-with-nothing-but-disney-movies/