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Here’s another epigram from Public Policy Hooligan: The fewer facts the feds gathered, the easier it was to vilify government victims. That line comes at the end of a discussion of how federal agencies’ shenanigans after the killing of Sammy and Vicki Weaver. Here’s the final paragraph of that riff: The Marshals Service, like the […]

Someone started a thread on Twitter yesterday with the hashtag #TheBestThingsAboutObamasDrones Here are some of the most amusing zingers thus far – The Best Things About Obama’s Drones is…. @poor_richard …they eliminate the need to read an American citizen their miranda rights @CanadianBacon_2 if they turn out like the Volt, they’ll probably crash into the […]

Redux – Here’s a piece I did for the Freeman in 1987 on the “Hungarian Illusion.” Brian Summers was the Freeman’s editor back then, and he was excellent to deal with. (This is the pre-edit version of the text. The full text is no longer available online from FEE.) THE HUNGARIAN ILLUSION by James Bovard […]

I see in the papers that Mark Palmer,the U.S. ambassador to Hungary from 1986 to 1990, has passed away. I never met Palmer but I dealt with the U.S. embassy staff in Budapest several times when I was visiting there in 1986 and 1987. Those folks drove me nuts: they seemed willfully oblivious to the […]

I’ve been ragging on the Postal Service since my first article in the Boston Globe in 1978. I never understood my true motivation until I saw this New Yorker cartoon.  

How much evidence should the US government be obliged to show before it kills an American citizen? None, according to the Obama administration. That was the lead for a piece on Obama’s assassination policies I wrote for Christian Science Monitor in 2011. Unfortunately, that policy is still in place – despite all the breakthroughs that […]

Sen. Menendez’s problem is that he didn’t realize that the notion of the U.S. govt. screwing foreigners was supposed to only be a metaphor. If the scandal gets any worse, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will have to announce that he has found God. On Twitter @jimbovard