Politics

Barack Obama’s America [Must] Serve Plan

by Scott Shields December 1, 2009

Throughout Barack Obamas campaign for president, he expressed his desire to increase community service in America. He outlined his plan, called America Serves, on change.gov, the website that provided details of his presidential agenda and transition. A screen-shot of America Serves is still available at www.politicallore. com/images/change.jpg. President Obamas plan for community service is now described as a part of ...

Inconsistent Conservatives and Progressives

by Sheldon Richman November 23, 2009

Listening to the leading voices of conservatism and progressivism, one gets the feeling they are not quite listening to themselves. On any given day you are likely to hear each side make arguments against the other that fully apply to itself in some area of public policy. Progressives, for example, tend to be critical (though imperfectly so) of the military ...

Liberal Delusions about Freedom

by Jacob G. Hornberger November 1, 2009

To combat the town-hall protests that sprang up around the nation against President Obama’s health-care plan, one of the favorite tactics employed by liberals was to question the sanity of the protesters. Anyone who showed up at such meetings angrily protesting Obama’s plan to socialize medicine was termed a crazy. That was especially true if a protester happened to be ...

Frightening Voters into Submission

by James Bovard November 1, 2009

Former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge has a new book out that reveals that he almost resigned because the Bush administration was hustling bogus terror alerts before the 2004 election. Ridge’s revelation was not surprising to people who had closely followed the tactics Bush used to snare a second term. During the 2004 campaign, residents of swing states were under ...

The New York Times Shines a Light into the JFK-CIA-Joannides Scandal

by Jacob G. Hornberger October 19, 2009

Last Friday, October 16, the New York Times, for the first time, shined a light onto the JFK-CIA-Joannides scandal with a story entitled “C.I.A. Is Still Cagey About Oswald Mystery.” The story soon began appearing in other mainstream newspapers and on Internet websites. Never mind that the scandal has been brewing since 1998, ...

Democratic Misrepresentation

by Sheldon Richman October 1, 2009

If you want to know how representative government works not in airy theory but on the ground, contemplate these facts: (1) Except perhaps for the rarest exception, no member of Congress will have read the entire final 1,000-plus-page bill that seeks, in the New York Times’s words, to “reinvent the nation’s health care system”; and (2) in July the ...

Appoint a Special Prosecutor in the JFK-Joannides Matter

by Jacob G. Hornberger August 2, 2009

While we’re discussing whether a special prosecutor should be named to investigate and prosecute CIA officials for violations of federal laws against murder, kidnapping, and torture, why not use the occasion to do the same in the matter of George Joannides? For it would be difficult to find a better example of obstruction of justice and fraud on the ...

Hamilton’s Betrayal

by George Leef June 1, 2009

Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution — and What It Means for America Today by Thomas J. DiLorenzo (Crown Forum 2008); 232 pages. There is a tendency among Americans to think of the nation’s Founders as a group of wealthy white men who owned property, didn’t like ...

Socialism: Faith Trumps Reality

by Ralph R. Reiland May 21, 2009

Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman got it right about a lot of things, but he was overly optimistic when he wrote in 1990 that socialism was dead. “Ten years ago, many people around the world believed that socialism was a viable, even the most promising, system for promoting material prosperity and human freedom,” wrote Friedman. ...

Obama and Perilous Delusions of Democracy

by James Bovard April 1, 2009

When Barack Obama was inaugurated on January 20, there was euphoria across the land and millions of people cheered in the streets of Washington. Many people are convinced that American democracy has been redeemed and that the federal government no longer poses a peril to individual rights. Since the people’s choice is now at the helm of the U.S. ...

Boundless Ignorance versus Self-Government

by James Bovard March 1, 2009

Modern democracy is based on faith that the people can control what they do not understand. As government has grown by leaps and bounds, “government by the people” has become one of the great fairy tales of our times. As the Founding Fathers feared, citizen ignorance often brings out the worst in their rulers. Contemporary ...

The Campaign-Reform Crime, Part 2

by James Bovard February 1, 2009

Part 1 | Part 2 We saw in the last issue how the McCain-Feingold Act — the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA) — sought to fundamentally change the American political landscape. Politicians did not allow the Act’s power to lie idle in the first presidential election after its enactment. The BCRA’s issue-ad ban — the peril that Justice ...