Tag Archives | Clinton

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My Wall Street Journal Bouquet for AmeriCorps

Wall Street Journal The Reality of Feel-Good Government After nearly 20 years and billions of taxpayer dollars, AmeriCorps has little to show. By JAMES BOVARD The government-supported service organization AmeriCorps got a boost from President Obama in April, when he announced a new program to “connect more professional scientists and engineers to young students who might […]

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My 1998 piece: The IRS, Now & Forever

The Foundation for Economic Education reposted this as a “timely classic” last week. A few highlights: *In recent years, IRS agents have been indoctrinated to see taxpayers as a class enemy. *The only Americans who have legal rights, in the IRS’s eyes, are those who can afford to hire lawyers and topnotch accountants to fight […]

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The American Spectator

My 2000 Article: The Rise of the Surveillance State

The American Spectator reposted online this morning a piece I wrote for them 13 years ago on the proliferation of government surveillance.  I included some of this in my 2000 book, Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years.  If memory serves, reviewers denounced my paranoia on surveillance issue […]

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MP3 of Scott Horton Show – IRS Interview

  Now online – the MP3 of last Thursday’s   Scott Horton Show interview on the Wall Street Journal IRS article.  Here’s Scott’s summary of the show – “Jim Bovard, author of Public Policy Hooligan, discusses the IRS’s targeting of conservative nonprofit groups; a brief history of presidential administrations that used the IRS to combat political opponents; the […]

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From Hooligan: How I Got Kicked Out of the Supreme Court

The @HLMenckenbot had a great Mencken quote on Twitter this morning: “The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.” It never occurred me that laughing in court could be a crime punishable by jail time.  But maybe […]

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My Wall St Jrn op-ed: IRS Political Targeting Since FDR

Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2013 A Brief History of IRS Political Targeting One survey found that 75% of IRS respondents felt entitled to deceive or lie to Congress. By JAMES BOVARD Many Republicans are enraged over revelations in recent days that the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative nonprofit groups with a campaign of audits […]

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Waco 20 Years Ago: Hooligan Chapter on “Flummoxing the FBI”

  Twenty years ago today, the FBI assaulted and demolished the Branch Davidians’ home outside of Waco, Texas.  That assault and the subsequent coverups helped redefine the relation of the federal government to the American people. I wrote about the attack in several books and in articles for the Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Times, […]

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