Hornberger's Blog

The Drug War: An Old Mission for the Pentagon

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 11, 2009

As the Berlin Wall came crashing down, the Pentagon was desperately in search of a mission. Given the demise of the Soviet Union, which had been the excuse for an ever-growing military-industrial complex for decades, the talk of a “peace dividend” was in the air. “What do we need all that military spending for ...

Barack Obama, Fake Change Agent

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 10, 2009

If Barack Obama’s handling of the Ali al-Marri case was supposed to show his credentials as a major change-agent as president, he has flunked the test. Except for some procedural differences, his handling of the al-Marri case is really no different, in principle, than how Bush handled the Jose Padilla case. First of all, recall ...

Obama the Socialist

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 9, 2009

Amidst all the devastation from the latest economic crisis, there have been some really funny moments. Among the most humorous has got to be what happened this past week with President Obama and the New York Times. Recall that last week I referenced an article by Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson in which he expressed shock that people ...

What about the Yamashita Doctrine?

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 9, 2009

In the wake of President Obama’s decision to not seek criminal prosecutions of U.S. officials who violated criminal statutes against torture, maybe this would be a good time to revisit the case of Tomoyuki Yamashita. He was a World War II Japanese army general in charge of troops in the Pacific. After the war, ...

Immigration Socialism

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 6, 2009

Advocates of the U.S. government’s war on immigrants are no doubt celebrating the 23-month sentence in a federal penitentiary that Martin de La Rosa-Loera received this week. His “crime”? As supervisor of a meat-packing plant in Postville, Iowa, he was convicted of “aiding and abetting the harboring of 389 illegal aliens.” Translation: He was ...

Damn the Children

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 5, 2009

Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson is agog that people are calling Barack Obama a socialist. Socialism, he says, is when the government owns everything. Apparently, such things as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, stimulus packages, bailouts, massive federal spending, and perhaps even nationalization of banks should simply be considered as free-market reforms ...

Is It Now Okay to Talk about Hitler’s Assumption of Dictatorial Power?

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 4, 2009

I know that it’s been considered improper to bring up Hitler in the context of what the Bush administration did for the past 7 years, but I wish someone would explain to me how Bush’s powers, as now revealed by those secret legal memos, were different from the dictatorial powers exercised by Hitler after ...

Another War-on-Terrorism Success Story in Afghanistan

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 3, 2009

Another war-on-terrorism success story comes out of Afghanistan, where U.S. troops have been battling The Terrorists for some 7 years (and, if things go according to plan, will be battling Them for at least another 7 years). Heavily armed U.S. troops entered a village in Logar Province in the dead of night, raided a “compound,” and shot dead two ...

Hornberger’s Blog, March 2009

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 1, 2009

Tuesday, March 31, 2009 Neo-Cons and Moral Degeneracy by Jacob G. Hornberger The presidential advisor for press affairs to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has an interesting op-ed in the Los Angeles Times today. Pointing out that Barack Obama’s offer to talk to the Iranian regime is nice, Ali Akbar Javanfekr pointed out that words alone are insufficient, especially if the ...

Legalize Drugs Instead of Banning Guns

by Jacob G. Hornberger February 27, 2009

In an editorial this morning sarcastically entitled “The Drug Cartel’s Right to Bear Arms,” the New York Times is climbing aboard the drug-war/gun-control bandwagon. Here’s how the reasoning goes: The Mexican drug-war cartels are killing people with assault rifles. The weapons are purchased in gun shops in the United States and illegally smuggled ...

Interventionism: A Failed and Dangerous Paradigm

by Jacob G. Hornberger February 26, 2009

For the last several months, we have witnessed one of the core principles of interventionism in economic affairs — that one government intervention inevitably leads to more interventions to deal with the crises and chaos that the previous intervention produces. What begins as a free-market economy — that is, one that is free of government control — ends up ...

Playing Nice With Our Communist Loan Officers

by Jacob G. Hornberger February 25, 2009

Did you ever think you’d see the day when a U.S. Secretary of State would be pleading with a communist regime to continue lending money to the U.S. government? Well, that’s what Hillary Clinton has been doing this week in China. She’s been making the case to the Chinese communists that they would be smart ...