By Jason Stverak
As featured in FoxNews.com

About a year ago, Taymour Karim, 31-year-old doctor in Syria was abducted and tortured for his protest against the government in Damascus.

His captors beat him so hard that they knocked out two of his teeth and broke three of his ribs, yet he refused to give up the names of his friends.

Despite his efforts, his computer had already told the men beating him everything they wanted to know.

“They knew everything about me,” he told Bloomberg. “The people I talked to, the plans, the dates, the stories of other people, every movement, every word I said through Skype. They even knew the password of my Skype account… my computer was arrested before me.”

Read the full story here at FoxNews.com

By Steven Greenhut
As featured in Bloomberg.com

Whenever a free-market research or business group releases a “best and worst” list of states, my eye goes straight to the bottom: To see whether California is last or was edged out for the lowest rank by one of the other mismanaged liberal bastions. Illinois seems to exist to boost the self-esteem of Californians.

I can raise a glass of zinfandel to California’s great victory in the Mercatus Center’s recent “Freedom in the 50 States” study. The state didn’t place last. That distinction went to New York, thanks to its highest-in-the-nation tax rates and entrepreneur-crushing economic regulations. I owe an apology to residents of the Land of Lincoln.

For all the study’s detail about tax rates and regulation, this information jumps out as the most telling about New York: “9.0 percent of the state’s 2000 population, on net, left the state for another state between 2000 and 2011, the highest such figure in the nation.” Moving is the surest sign of dissatisfaction, especially when people relocate from a state that has long been an economic and cultural magnet.

Read the full story here at Bloomberg.com

By Rob Nikolewski 
As featured in SantaFeNewMexican.com

In May 2009, Barack Obama held one of his first news conferences with the White House press corps, and New York Times reporter Jeff Zeleny asked him …

Well, what tough question do you think would come from a hard-bitten group that prides itself on its preternatural skepticism?

Read the full story here at SantaFeNewMexican.com

By Steven Greenhut
As featured in UTSanDiego.com

California, the ninth-largest economy in the world, is a profoundly troubled state. It remains badly broken in many fundamental ways even as the national economy slowly but steadily emerges from the Great Recession and as cash from November’s voter-approved tax hikes pours into the state treasury.

The tax increases have, to be sure, provided short-term budgetary relief, even a multibillion-dollar surplus, after years of multibillion-dollar deficits that were papered over with phony economic assumptions, accounting gimmicks, massive borrowing and raids on the treasuries of school districts and other local governments. Indeed, state Controller John Chiang says that April was the first month in six years in which the state was able to pay its bills without raiding internal funds.

This flood of new cash has cast a glow over Sacramento — a giddiness that all is well again in the Golden State.

But compelling arguments can be made that the tax hikes were the worst thing that could have happened. . .

Read the full story here at UTSanDiego.com

By Steven Greenhut
As featured in City-Journal.org

During his first stint as California’s governor in the 1970s, Jerry Brown was an acolyte of E. F. Schumacher’s “small is beautiful” philosophy. He slowed down the state’s infrastructure spending and urged Californians to pare back their lifestyles. His approach stood in stark contrast to that of his father, Edmund “Pat” Brown, who as governor from 1959 to 1967 increased state spending on water, transportation, and higher education. As Joel Kotkin explained, “Jerry Brown turned out to be of a very different political hue than his father. Sometimes he sounded more anti-government even than Reagan. He disdained his father’s traditional focus on infrastructure spending and instead preached about a more environmentally friendly ‘era of limits.’”

As he took the oath of office again in 2011, it was unclear exactly what Brown would do as governor—beyond seeking tax increases to “fix” the state’s budget mess. To the surprise of many, rather than picking up where he left off as governor 30 years ago, Brown decided to emulate his father. The new Brown maintains a reputation as an environmentalist, of course, especially when it comes to battling climate change. But instead of thinking small, Brown has made massive infrastructure spending the cornerstone of his policy prescriptions, along with the advancement of a pro-labor union agenda. Construction unions, in particular, have backed his infrastructure push, which includes building a $65 billion high-speed rail system that presumably would help the environment by getting people out of their cars, and a Bay Delta Conservation Plan that would cost at least $24.5 billion to change the flow of the Sacramento River—ostensibly to save a tiny, endangered fish that lives in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta.

Read the full story here at City-Journal.org

How fear drives drug policy

By Steven Greenhut
As featured in Reason.com

“As many as 100,000 crack babies are born every year,” reported the Los Angeles Times in an overheated 1990 article echoing the results of a Department of Health and Human Services study. The feds were calling for a massive influx of tax dollars to fund social programs to help a new generation of Americans born to mothers who used so-called crack cocaine.

The article included a “must have” list for government agencies: more postnatal care and foster care, extra dollars for schools to deal with the disabilities these children reportedly would have, government-provided residential care, drug programs and more. “But absent those billions of additional dollars, what can state and local government do now to help those innocents?” the article asked, almost hopelessly. This was typical of news coverage of the time.

More than two decades later, we learn the truth. The hysteria – which led to new drug laws that imposed unreasonably harsh sentences on the mostly African-American people who used that particular kind of cocaine – was unwarranted. The numbers of crack babies were wildly exaggerated. As The New York Times now reports, “This supposed epidemic … was kicked off by a study of just 23 infants that the lead researcher now says was blown out of proportion.”

Read the full story here at Reason.com

By Christopher Santarelli
As featured in TheBlaze.com

Lawsuits and political intimidation won’t stop the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity from continuing to publish watchdog articles, such as a recent investigation into the growing use of conservation easements to prevent development on private property or the expose on the controversial government “cash-for-visas” immigration program used by GreenTech Automotive, says Jason Stverak, the center’s president.

In an interview with TheBlaze, Stverak referred to fighting an $85 million lawsuit the center has found itself wrapped up in after the GreenTech investigation as ”the cost any good news organization must pay to report the news.”

Since its establishment in 2009, the Franklin Center has been conducting investigative reporting into government waste, abuse of power and institutional dysfunction, and Stverak vowed to continue delivering reports from the center’s network of Watchdog reporters at state capitals across the country.

“Bring it on, we’re here to defend the First Amendment.”

Read the full story here at TheBlaze.com

By Steven Greenhut
As featured in Reason.com

It’s hard to believe, but the current tax scandal will eventually fade away just as all Washington, D.C. scandals run their course. It’s easier to believe that the IRS will remain a loathsome and abusive agency, subject perhaps to some reforms and personnel changes that ultimately will do nothing to change its character.

This has been a good teachable moment for Americans about the nature of the federal Leviathan, but few people will glean the most important lesson: Both parties need a powerful tax agency to collect the funds that support the programs they, and the constituencies they represent, favor.

And boy do they favor programs. Despite the partisan rancor and the pretense of “big debates” about the size of government, the Democrats and Republicans have no interest in trimming, let alone slashing, anything of substance. Democratic leaders are particularly infuriating as they blame any tragedy on sequester “cuts,” but Republicans are no more given to trimming entitlement programs – plus they still want the defense budget to grow.

Read the full story here at Reason.com

By Jason Stverak
As featured in HumanEvents.com

I was livid last week when I learned that the Internal Revenue Service was targeting organizations based on their ideology. Having spent much of my professional life fighting and exposing government malfeasance, I realize that frequently such improprieties are only the tip of the iceberg. Unfortunately, this iceberg is of Titanic proportions.

When the IRS scandal broke, I ordered a review of our organization and the website analytics of our affiliate news project, Watchdog.org. From January 2010 to the end of April 2013, Franklin Center’s websites were visited by IRS computers 492 times, and received 128 visits from the Executive Office of the President (eop.gov). Some of these visits were to the same page on the same day. This alone is far enough out of the ordinary to warrant a raised eyebrow, but when taken in the context of other suspicious behavior by the executive branch, we can’t help but have some serious concerns.

Read the full story here at HumanEvents.com

By Mark Lagerkvist
As featured in Philly.com

The New Jersey agency entrusted with ensuring access to public records may be Gov. Chris Christie’s biggest ally for keeping a pension scandal secret in an election year.

After a sudden decision last year not to review state Treasury documents that could incriminate Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno, the Government Records Council sat on the case five months before transferring it to the Office of Administrative Law.

The council voted in December to punt the case to OAL. Yet GRC staff waited until this month to send the file, despite an assurance the referral would only take a week or two.

“The delay was due to a work backlog in the Government Records Council,” said spokeswoman Lisa Ryan. She would not elaborate.

Read the full story here at Philly.com