An editorial headlined, “Your Time is Coming – Make it Count” in Sunday’s Nashville Tennessean denounced my bad attitude: Staunch libertarian James Bovard cynically decries efforts to promote participation in elections, saying, “Trumpeting the importance of voting deludes people into thinking that they have a leash on the government.” We could not more vehemently disagree. […]
I am mystified by all the whooping on the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Most of the commentators seem to believe that Lincoln was an honest man touting the highest ideals. Massachusetts abolitionist Lysander Spooner offered the most concise refutation to President Lincoln’s claim that the Civil War was fought to preserve a “government […]
The Future of Freedom Foundation is producing transcripts from its 2007 and 2008 conferences. Following is the text of my speech at their June 2008 conference, “Restoring the Republic 2008: Foreign Policy & Civil Liberties” held in Reston, Virginia. My opening bit about having lunch with Homeland Security czar Mike Chertoff and getting the scoop on […]
This is the anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Nixon knew that his defense was doomed and chose to throw in the towel without a Senate trial. But President Gerald Ford compounded the damage from Nixon’s presidency when he issued a sweeping pardon of Nixon that practically condemned future generations of Americans to […]
Here’s a 2003 piece from the American Conservative on out-of-control government surveillance. This was the first piece I wrote for them (the magazine was launched the previous Fall). The editing process went more smoothly with subsequent pieces I wrote for them. 🙂 My original final paragraph: Three months after 9/11, Ashcroft announced: “To those who […]
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 […]
Washington Times, May 13, 2003 BOVARD: Dancing to the beat of the grapevine The raisin famers seek servitude liberation Does the secretary of agriculture need unlimited power over farmers to protect them against themselves? The Supreme Court might finally settle this issue in an imminent decision on one of USDA’s most bizarre regimes. When […]
