A new episode of Five Minutes Five Issues posted on Thursday. You can listen to it, and read a transcript, below. You can also find previous episodes of the show at Stitcher, iTunes, YouTube, and SoundCloud.
Listen to the new episode here:
Read a transcript of the new episode, including links to further information regarding the topics discussed, here:
The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity welcomes you to Five Minutes Five Issues.
Starting in five four three two one.
Hello, I am Adam Dick, a Ron Paul Institute senior fellow.
Let’s start.
Issue one.
Some good may come from the kerfuffle concerning Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic National Convention speaker Khizr Khan. The attention on Khan last Thursday holding up a bound pocket-size United States Constitution and asking if Trump had read it caused sales of pocket Constitutions to skyrocket. Jennifer Maloney noted Monday in the Wall Street Journal that a one-dollar pocket Constitution had reached number two in Amazon.com book sales.
People are also ordering other pocket constitution printings. For example, Maloney writes that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) “received about 80,000 orders through its web store” for free copies of its pocket constitution. Also, Kim Soffen reports in the Washington Post that “Google searches for the document increased more than tenfold on Friday compared to the daily average of the previous month.”
Hopefully, many people reading the Constitution will think about how the situation in America may be much improved if the US government adheres to constitutional limits.
Issue two.
Since taking office as the president of the Philippines this summer, Rodrigo Duterte has been waging a ruthless war on drugs. Sarah Dean and John Carney report in the Daily Mail that July saw hundreds of supposedly suspect drug dealers killed. “Summary executions carried out by police officers, without the benefit of a full and fair trial” is how Dean and Carney describe many of the killings.
Last week United States Secretary of State John Kerry met with Duterte. An Associated Press (AP) article reports that a Duterte spokesman said Kerry offered Duterte $32 million for law enforcement training. A State Department press release regarding the meeting says that “Kerry pledged U.S. willingness to provide continued assistance to the Philippine government as it works to address drug trafficking and violent extremism.”
Issue three.
Last week, Nick Gillespie of Reason interviewed Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson and vice presidential nominee Bill Weld. When Gillespie asked who Johnson would appoint to the US Supreme Court, Johnson turned the answering over to Weld, declaring the subject in Weld’s area of expertise. Here are the examples Weld offered as the types of people Johnson would appoint to the top court: Current Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and US appellate court Judge Merrick Garland, who President Barack Obama has nominated to the court.
Wow: The Libertarian presidential ticket does not want to put libertarians on the Supreme Court.
Issue four.
How do you deal with a 13-year-old student whose repeated burping is disrupting gym class? At Cleveland Middle School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the kid’s teacher called in the “school resource officer” — that means a cop. Noah Feldman writes at Bloomberg that the cop arrested the kid for “committing the misdemeanor of violating New Mexico’s school disruption law.” The kid was frisked, handcuffed, and driven in a police car to a juvenile detention facility.
The kid’s parent sued. On July 25 a US appellate court affirmed a lower court’s rejection of the parent’s claims.
It is not just in New Mexico that students routinely encounter police state tactics. This is a problem across America.
Issue five.
In 2011, nearly 65,000 Australians listed their religion as “Jedi” on the census. I suppose for most of them it was a tongue-in-cheek answer. Now some people are fretting that more Australians will answer this year’s census the same way. That’s fine with me. What business is it of the government what religion people have? Maybe some Americans will follow the Australians’ example when confronted with the US Census Bureau’s supernosey American Community Survey.
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That’s a wrap.
Transcripts of Five Minutes Five Issues episodes, including links to related information, are at the Ron Paul Institute blog.
Five four three two one.
Reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.