A Weak and Dependent People by Jacob G. Hornberger July 25, 2008 With its coming bailout of homeowners and mortgage lenders, the federal government refortifies its role as daddy for the American people and the people’s role as child-adults who are dependent on their daddy to take care of them. The bailout, while strengthening the federal government, makes the American people weaker than ever. A people who ...
Trial by Jury Protects Us from Tyranny by Jacob G. Hornberger July 24, 2008 In my blog entry yesterday, I pointed out one of the crucial differences between the judicial system that our ancestors brought into existence with the Constitution and the model “judicial’ system that President Bush and the Pentagon have established at Guantanamo Bay. In the U.S. constitutional system, the accused has the right to have ...
Why No Trial by Jury at Gitmo? by Jacob G. Hornberger July 23, 2008 Seven years after the Bush administration declared its “war on terrorism,” the first trial of an accused terrorist is now underway at Guantanamo Bay. The Gitmo trial involves the new-fangled “judicial” system that the president and the Pentagon put into place after 9/11, without even the semblance of seeking a constitutional amendment. Keep in ...
Is It Time to Liberate China from Communism? by Jacob G. Hornberger July 22, 2008 In last Sunday’s edition, the New York Times carried an article about pro-China advertisements that Western companies are running in China during the Olympic Games. McDonald’s is running a “Cheer for China” ad. Pepsi, which painted its blue cans red for the games, is advertising, “Go Red for China.” According to the Times, ...
How Bananas Brought Regime Change by Jacob G. Hornberger July 21, 2008 Over the weekend, I read Bananas!: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World by Peter Chapman. The book details the history of the United Fruit Company and specifically its deep involvement in the history of Central America. Part of the book’s focus is on the CIA’s ouster of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz ...
An Example of Kangaroo Justice at Gitmo by Jacob G. Hornberger July 18, 2008 A recent experience in kangaroo court at Guantanamo Bay provides an excellent example of how things operate in that surreal, unjust world of military tyranny and oppression. Accused terrorist Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is representing himself, told the presiding judge, Col. Ralph H. Kohlmann, that he had asked the prison guards to let him ...
Is the Washington Post Going the Way of the Wall Street Journal? by Jacob G. Hornberger July 17, 2008 With the recent appointment of former Wall Street Journal editor Marcus Brauchli to the post of editor of the Washington Post, the Post will inevitably continue to move further in the direction of the Wall Street Journal with respect to foreign policy and the so-called war on terrorism. Consider, for example, an article entitled “
The Fourth Circuit’s Ominous Decision by Jacob G. Hornberger July 16, 2008 Led by conservative judges, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has just affirmed the Bush administration’s “enemy combatant” doctrine, a doctrine that allows President Bush and his military forces to designate anyone anywhere in the world as an “enemy combatant” in the so-called war on terrorism and treat him accordingly. While the ...
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 ...
