The anti-American Taliban extremists are resurgent not only in Afghanistan, where they once sheltered Osama Bin Laden, but also in neighboring Pakistan (which has nuclear weapons) as well. Thousands of Pakistanis are fleeing the Swat Valley, which is dominated by the Taliban.

But the Obama Administration stubbornly refuses to learn from the Bush Administration’s mistakes in Afghanistan. It’s stepping up efforts to wipe out the mainstay of the Afghan economy, by eradicating the opium poppies that Afghan farmers cultivate. Afghans are so…

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In the March 2009 issue of the Atlantic, Virginia Postrel recounts her recent successful battle with breast cancer and notes that she may not have had such a happy outcome if she lived in New Zealand. Following surgery to remove several tumors, Postrel’s doctors prescribed the monoclonal antibody Herceptin, which regulates cell division and can keep some cancerous cells from dividing uncontrollably. Herceptin has a 95 percent success rate in early-stage cancers like Postrel’s. And, although it’s been just a short…

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Already burdened by $8 trillion in new federal spending commitments and the likelihood of higher taxes to pay for bailouts, pork, and welfare, the economy now faces an additional threat: an explosion of litigation.

Even liberal Washington Post columnist Michael Kinsley can’t stand the Supreme Court’s liberal 6-to-3 ruling in Wyeth v. Levine, which let a patient sue an innocent drug maker for an injury caused by a physician’s assistant who disregarded repeated warnings by the drug maker. (The ruling indirectly “will cost lives“). As…

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I was initially going to post this as a comment to Greg Conko’s recent post arguing against the Court’s recent decision in Wyeth v. Levine, but the comment system didn’t work correctly for me.

I appreciate the force of Greg’s argument (and I certainly agree that this particular case should have been decided much earlier on different grounds), but I think there is room for reasonable disagreement within the libertarian community about whether FDA preempting state tort law is good or bad.…

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