An Iranian Dissident’s Experience Provides Lessons for Americans by Jacob G. Hornberger July 15, 2008 Last Sunday, the New York Times carried an article about a 31-year-old Iranian dissident, Ahmad Batebi, who successfully escaped imprisonment in Iran, where he was being tortured. Making his way through Iraq and ultimately arriving in Washington, D.C., Batebi taunted his former captors with a photograph of himself in front of the ...
The Rotten Fruits of Socialism and Interventionism by Jacob G. Hornberger July 14, 2008 The Washington Post carried an interesting article on Sunday by a photojournalist in Iraq whose photograph of a U.S. soldier carrying an injured Iraqi child at the outset of the U.S. invasion of Iraq made the front page of USA Today. The point of the photograph, of course, was that American soldiers were ...
The Fantasy Debate over Economics by Jacob G. Hornberger July 11, 2008 One of the amusing things about liberals and conservatives is how they sometimes lock themselves in their own little conservative-liberal paradigm and carry on a silly debate over the causes of America’s economic woes. For example, liberals cry, “America’s economic woes demonstrate the failures of capitalism,” and then point to “deregulation” during the Reagan-Bush eras ...
The Lesson from Obama’s Cowardly Flip-Flop by Jacob G. Hornberger July 10, 2008 Those who think that the election of Barack Obama will save the nation from its many foreign-policy/civil-liberties woes got smashed and dashed with a cold dose of reality. Flip-flopping in the finest political tradition, Obama voted in favor of President Bush’s wiretap/immunity bill, after promising to filibuster it before he secured the Democratic Party ...
Robert Mugabe and the Second Amendment by Jacob G. Hornberger July 8, 2008 A front-page article in last Saturday’s Washington Post detailed an inside account of how Zimbabwe’s thuggish president Robert Mugabe ensured his victory in the country’s recent presidential run-off election. The account provides a good refresher course on why our American ancestors enshrined the right to keep and bear arms in the Second Amendment — and why they ...
Americans Had It Coming by Jacob G. Hornberger July 7, 2008 Everyone is complaining and crying about the high gasoline prices and, well, the rising prices of most everything else, especially food. The problem is that hardly anyone wants to admit that it’s all part of the cost of empire and imperial adventurism. Do Iraq and Afghanistan come to mind? In 2001 and 2002, weren’t many Americans ...
The Federal War on Financial Privacy by Jacob G. Hornberger July 3, 2008 While Americans are celebrating pre-revolutionary efforts by the English colonists to avoid taxes imposed by their government (e.g., the Sugar Act, Stamp Acts, Townshend Acts, and Tea Act), the IRS is celebrating a federal court victory forcing a Swiss bank, UBS, to disclose the identities of U.S. customers who may have used secret accounts ...
Torture, Communism, and the American Way by Jacob G. Hornberger July 2, 2008 Do you recall how outraged U.S. officials appeared to be when people were comparing the Pentagon’s prison camp at Guantanamo Bay to the Soviet communist gulags? Well, the outrage might have been a bit fake and false. Guess what U.S. military officials have been using as a guideline for interrogations at Guantanamo Bay. According to ...
Hornberger’s Blog, July 2008 by Jacob G. Hornberger July 1, 2008 Thursday, July 31, 2008 Is China a Model for U.S. Conservatives? by Jacob G. Hornberger Conservatives must be ecstatic over what is happening in China. Joining the U.S. government in its crusade against terrorism, the Chinese communist government is adopting measures that would make any U.S. conservative proud. For example, the Chinese government recently bused several thousand Chinese students and office ...
Immediate Withdrawal Is the Only Honorable Course in Iraq by Jacob G. Hornberger July 1, 2008 Supporters of the U.S. occupation of Iraq sometimes point out that U.S. soldiers are doing good deeds there, such as establishing electricity, water, and other essential services. They also say that the U.S. government liberated the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator. In fact, many of the soldiers themselves honestly feel that they are ...
Isolationist Options for the United States by Jacob G. Hornberger June 30, 2008 Whenever a libertarian calls for the dismantling of the U.S. government’s overseas military empire and the end of foreign interventionism, the standard response of the pro-empire, pro-intervention crowd is, “We cannot return to isolationism. That would be a disaster.” The sentence is intended to immediately shut down all further discussion given the opprobrium that ...
A Second Amendment Victory for Freedom by Jacob G. Hornberger June 27, 2008 In a 5-4 decision yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court declared unconstitutional Washington, D.C.’s, ban on possession of handguns in people’s homes. Rejecting the ridiculous argument of the gun controllers that the Second Amendment is intended to protect the “right” of the National Guard to own guns, the Court correctly held that our American ancestors intended to protect the right ...
