Discussion at the Hoover Institution’s Boyd and Jill Smith Task Force on Virtues of a Free Society meeting during June 8 and 9 covered a range of topics, including political philosophy, U.S. political history, the social costs of Internet pornography, and President Barack Obama’s way of thinking.

In the November/December 2012 issue of Stanford Magazine, Peter Schweizer, the William J. Casey Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, is featured discussing legislation and his current research. Last year, the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes featured Schweizer, spotlighting his book Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison.Feedback from the program helped pass the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, which prohibits members and employees of Congress from using nonpublic information for private gain.

The Hoover Institution has established a new initiative aimed at educating Americans about the arguments and consequences of the modern world’s dominant, conflicting, and most fiercely debated economic systems: socialism and free-market capitalism.

The Hoover Institution hosted its annual Board of Overseers’ summer meeting during July 9–11, 2013.

The program began on Tuesday evening with before-dinner remarks by Paul D. Clement, a partner at Bancroft PLLC. Clement served as the forty-third solicitor general of the United States from June 2005 until June 2008. He has argued more than sixty-five cases before the US Supreme Court. During Clement’s speech, titled “Federalism in the Roberts Court,” he talked about the revitalization of federalism in the Rehnquist court “imposing some limits on the federal government’s power vis-a-vis the states.”

The Hoover Institution’s Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson will appear on the new Fox Nation streaming service on Nov. 29 with an exclusive interview of economist and Hoover senior fellow Thomas Sowell.

The Hoover Institution’s annual postdoctoral W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellows have been named for the 2009–10 academic year.

Campaign strategies for the upcoming presidential election, the state of the economy, and the Middle East were the topics at the Hoover Institution’s May 28–29 retreat.

During the past year, severe stress in the financial markets has given rise to a host of new Federal Reserve actions. The Fed has created a trio of new facilities designed to alleviate the credit crunch and support vulnerable financial firms.

The Hoover Institution Spring 2012 Retreat began on Sunday, April 22, 2012, with before-dinner remarks by John Stossel, a commentator on the Fox Business Network, where he hosts Stossel, a weekly program highlighting current consumer issues from a libertarian viewpoint. Before joining Fox, he coanchored ABC’s prime-time news magazine show 20/20. He discussed his new book No, They Can’t: Why Government Fails—but Individuals Succeed, which depicts Stossel’s ideas of “what we’re imprinted to believe and what reality has taught [him].” Stossel, in talking about how people are unsatisfied with the government today and how the free market system works better for our society, stressed how “central planning appeals to people” and how we are “programmed to follow the central planner.”