Common Core educational standards, like all recent attempts to expand federal control of the education system, rely heavily on standardized testing in their efforts to improve the competitiveness of American students. It seems that bureaucrats on educational boards are capable of no more creative idea than that repeatedly drilling facts into children’s heads and then testing them to within an inch of their life is the only way to improve educational outcomes.

Early this month, the Pew Research Center released its News IQ Quiz, in order to survey the general public’s level of knowledge about current events. This provided no end of fun for commentators, gleefully mocking the average American’s ignorance, as if knowing the minimum wage or the Chair of the Federal Reserve has any relevance to most people’s lives, when many are still struggling to find jobs and feed their families.

There’s been considerable speculation over whether ObamaCare would manifest itself as a major election issue this year, in light of the media’s focus on Ebola and the turmoil in the Middle East. Well, any doubt that ObamaCare still matters can be put to rest, with the announcement that 13 states and the District of Columbia will be sending out hundreds of thousands of insurance cancellation notices by the end of October, mere days before the November 4th elections.

Benjamin Franklin said that the only two certainties in life are death and taxes. But why do we have taxes in the first place? What are they for, and why must they be so certain?

I don’t often quote scripture in service of a point, but when I heard that the Justice Department is pursuing legal action against many of the world’s largest banks, charging them with illegal currency manipulation, I couldn’t help but think about this line from Matthew.:

Much has been written on the variety of ways in which ObamaCare is making life more difficult for Americans. The millions of plan cancellations and rising premiums have been justifiably getting the lion’s share of media coverage, but with any law as broad and far-reaching as ObamaCare, there are bound to be other, more indirect effects that, while equally important, are less obvious or easy to pin down.

It would be hard to describe last year’s ObamaCare enrollment period as anything other than a disaster. It started with the hopelessly dysfunctional HealthCare.gov website. Then, when enrollment numbers fell consistently short of the administration’s projections, repeated extensions were necessary to achieve the desired final number. In light of this, one might think that there’s no way the 2015 enrollments go any worse.

Back in March, the U.S. government announced that it would relinquish control over ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. This is the organization that is responsible for managing how domain names are assigned on the internet, and until now, it has been under fairly tight supervision from the Commerce Department.

When Congress drafted the most sweeping and disruptive set of health care regulations America has ever seen, a multi-thousand page monstrosity that no one even read before voting on, they needed an agency to enforce the dozens of new taxes, mandates, and penalties that were to be an integral part of ObamaCare. But which?