Obama’s Link to “Old Iron Pants” by Jim Powell August 1, 2009 Since Barack Obama pledged a “New New Deal” for the American people, he has been favoring a combination of more government spending, more government regulations, and more power for labor unions. This has led some observers to conclude that he might be drawing inspiration from “Old Iron Pants” — the hard-drinking, fast-talking Gen. Hugh Johnson, Time magazine’s 1933 “Man ...
Imprisoning Musical Creativity by Jennifer Warren-Baker August 1, 2009 I am a composer. Since the age of 12, I have been painting canvases of sound at the piano. But my teachers never cared. In fact, my type of talent was deemed worthless by the government’s public-school system. Growing up in the D.C. area, I didn’t have any real models to follow. In the shadow of the nation’s capital, ...
A Prudent Foreign Policy by Doug Bandow August 1, 2009 Smart Power: Toward a Prudent Foreign Policy for America by Ted Galen Carpenter (Cato Institute, 2008); 352 pages. Change has come to Washington in the form of a new administration. Yet the cast of characters looks much the same. Their philosophies, while differing in degree, remain solidly interventionist. The question ...
What We Spend on Health Care Is None of the Government’s Business by Sheldon Richman July 30, 2009 “Preventive care” is one of the magic formulas often invoked in discussions of so-called health-care reform. Don’t worry about the apparent costs of reform, we’re told, because we’re going to save a ton of money with — fanfare — preventive care. To listen to this promise, you’d think no one would get sick if the ...
The Health-Care Debate Needs a Dose of Reality by Scott McPherson July 30, 2009 The current debate over “reforming” health care in America — and lest anyone need reminding, “reform” means more laws dictating our health-care decisions — is a perfect opportunity to start asking important questions about the world around us. In an essay written in 1973, “The Metaphysical versus the Man-Made,” the philosopher and novelist Ayn ...
Shades of Operation Condor by Jacob G. Hornberger July 29, 2009 The CIA’s assassination plan, which it chose to keep secret from Congress, brings to mind Operation Condor, a similar plan run by DINA, which was Chile’s counterpart to the CIA under the dictatorial regime of military strongman Augusto Pinochet. After Pinochet took power in a coup, his agents proceeded to round up communists and ...
Martial Law and the War on Terrorism by James Bovard July 28, 2009 The New York Times reported last week that the Bush administration considered sending in the U.S. military to arrest the so-called Lackawanna Six in 2002. Ironically, one of the worst prosecutorial overreaches by the Justice Department in the war on terror almost resulted in a temporary period of martial law. The Lackawanna Six was a group of half-a-dozen Yemeni-Americans from a ...
Obama and the Guantánamo Deadline: It’s Worse than You Think by Andy Worthington July 27, 2009 When the Obama administration’s Detention Policy Task Force, established by executive order on the president’s second day in office, conceded last week that it would miss its six-month deadline to issue its recommendations about how to close Guantánamo, many observers focused on whether this meant that Obama would fail to meet his deadline of Jan 21, 2010, for ...
Failure Leads to Success in the Public Sector by Gregory Bresiger July 24, 2009 We are playing out the latest chapter in the crisis and leviathan model in the financial-services business. It is a model in which public-sector failure leads to bigger government. It leads to success for socialists who want the government to expand into every aspect of our economy but dont want to overtly call for nationalization ...
Obama’s Failure to Deliver Justice to the Last Tajik in Guantánamo by Andy Worthington July 21, 2009 Two weeks ago, the indefatigable Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald, Guantánamo’s most dedicated reporter, outlined the story of Umar Abdulayev, the last Tajik prisoner in Guantánamo, who has been cleared for release from the prison on two occasions — once by a military review board under the Bush administration, and six weeks ago by the Obama administration’s ...
The Fatal Conceit of Health-Care Reformers by Sheldon Richman July 20, 2009 It’s easy to get distracted by the details and crushing cost estimates of “health-care reform” while losing sight of the key question: Can a handful of congressmen, most of whom probably have never even run a small business, design an entire market for medical services and insurance? A few moments’ thought should be enough to ...
Guantánamo and the Courts, Part 1: Exposing the Bush Administration’s Lies by Andy Worthington July 13, 2009 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 In recent months, those who have been studying Guantánamo closely have come to the disturbing conclusion that the biggest obstacle to President Obama’s pledge to close Guantánamo by January 2010 comes not from the fear-mongering and opportunistic politicians who recently voted to prohibit the use of any funds to ...