Washington Times, July 18, 2013 BOVARD: AmeriCorps’ national service charade Paying youths to push big government makes a mockery of volunteerism by James Bovard At a White House ceremony Monday, President Obama announced a Task Force on Expanding National Service. He is jumping onto a popular bandwagon: Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson recently promised that […]
Here’s a piece I wrote in 2009 on one of Obama’s first assaults on privacy. A few of the piece’s punchier lines: *Privacy is very lucrative for the Beltway boys: they reap millions when they betray it. *We now know that psychologists were brought to the prison at Guantánamo to exploit detainees’ weaknesses for interrogation […]
The New York Times published a long article today on secret rulings by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The article describes the FISA court as “almost a parallel Supreme Court” which has cast aside traditional understandings of privacy and the Fourth Amendment. Reading between the lines, it is clear that NYT has the actual decisions…. […]
Thomas Drake after his speech The Restore the Fourth organization had a rally at McPherson Square in downtown DC on this July 4th afternoon. They had several excellent speakers – including the Libertarian Party’s Carla Howell, CEI’s Ryan Radia, Cato’s Julian Sanchez, and Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin. (Other rallies are occurring across the nation.) […]
I was a big Civil War enthusiast as a boy. My sixth grade teacher wrote on my permanent record that I was “overly interested in war.” In this photo (probably snapped at Gettysburg), I’m sitting astride a cannon wearing a pair of flip-flops that definitely would have been out of place a century earlier. […]
Today is the 25th anniversary of the U.S. Navy shooting down an Iranian passenger jet. Following is the writeup on the shootdown from my 2003 book, Terrorism & Tyranny: In the wake of the Iranian arms debacle, the Reagan administration sent the U.S. Navy to patrol the Persian Gulf—in part to reassure Arab nations that the U.S. […]