John T. Reed’s news blog

A reader wanted to know how my fictional Unelected President “Mike Medlock” would handled the Russian buzzing of US Navy ships. He would give every topside sailor in the Navy a laser pointer.“President Medlock” does not hesitate to use maximum super power force when appropriate, but he prefers to use the cheapest, cleverest, lowest casualties on both sides, finesse means to eliminate enemy capability to hurt Americans whenever possible. And he does.He’s trying to get the US military out of the mindset that every military situation requires a billion-dollar, macho firepower response. For example, can you wipe out 48% of...

After age 50 or so, most medical plans in America have men get a PSA blood test. If your score is below 4.0 in your 60s, you probably do not have prostate cancer. If it’s above 4.0, maybe you do. It’s a maddeningly inaccurate test for the purpose of determining whether you have prostate cancer. Other conditions and some activities like sex and bicycle riding can raise PSA scores. Canada and some other medical plans stopped giving the test routinely. My score started to go above 4.0 some years, then back down, then back up. Here is a quote from...

Presidential candidates say and promise a ton of things. No president in the 20th century really affected the nation much except Hoover and FDR. No doubt some who were not alive during Hoover/FDR will say Reagan won the Cold War. Not really. It would have ended around the same time even if he had never been president. It actually ended after he left office. Plus winning the Cold War was a lot easier than winning the hot one—World War II—which FDR did. The two major events of the 20th century The two major events of the 20th century were the Great Depression...

Have you noticed this phraseology in the media question about what to do about the 11 million illegals who are currently here. “So what’re you gonna do, candidate? Round ’em all up?”And there are a number of other phrases alluding to kicking in doors in the middle of the night, “separating families,” and so on.It should be obvious that the questioners who talk like this believe it is impossible to deport 11 million illegals, or want to believe it. These phrases are intended to depict inhuman, Nazi-like tactics and concentration camps and the like.In a courtroom, I would object that...

An article in the December 15, 1890 issue of the Harvard Law Review, written by attorney Samuel D. Warren and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, entitled The Right To Privacy, is often cited as the first implicit declaration of a U.S. right to privacy. There is no right of privacy in the Constitution Exactly. It’s not in the Constitution in spite of abortion activists repeating that ritualistically. But somehow, the “right of privacy” has become equal to rights like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and ideas like democracy and the rule of law. No privacy for...