Congressional Contempt by Tim Kelly June 28, 2012 The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has voted 23–17 in favor of holding Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress. The resolution is expected to reach the full House for a vote this week. The party-line vote came after a 16-month investigation into the botched anti-gunrunning operation named Fast and Furious. That the committee would split along ...
Self-Defense and the Anti-Gun Mentality, Part 1 by Scott McPherson June 27, 2012 Part 1 | Part 2 I recently attended a meet-up group started by a friend of mine. The goal of the group is to bring people together from across the political spectrum to discuss a variety of issues and to, as the mission statement reads, use “common sense ideas to build a healthier and happier community.” The group ...
An Unfamiliar Definition of “Voluntary” by Wendy McElroy June 27, 2012 It is called a “voluntary safety plan.” Using the plan, Child Protective Services (CPS) can bypass the constitutional rights of parents and take children away from non-abusive homes. (Note: agencies function under different names from state to state, but they are often referred to merely as CPS.) The definition and implementation Texas guidelines offer a typical CPS definition of a safety ...
Keynesians, Austrians, and the Continuing Economic Depression, Part 1 by William L. Anderson June 27, 2012 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 During a news talk show on August 14, 2011, Princeton University economist and 2008 Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman made a startling declaration: If the United States were to mobilize for a supposed invasion of “space aliens,” the current economic downturn would be over “in 18 months.” The ...
Are Americans Not Submissive Enough? by Sheldon Richman June 26, 2012 If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought New York Times columnist David Brooks was having a laugh at our expense. Alas, Brooks means every word of his column titled “The Follower Problem,” as anyone who reads him regularly will realize. “I don’t know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a followership problem,” Brooks laments. “Vast ...
Is It Time to Raise the Minimum Wage? by Laurence M. Vance June 26, 2012 During World War II, the Office of Price Administration (OPA), established by one of Franklin Roosevelt’s executive orders in 1941, was given the power to ration the supply of certain goods and freeze prices on all goods except agricultural commodities. The OPA was abolished in 1946 and is generally defended today only as a wartime measure. Richard Nixon’s “temporary” imposition ...
I Was Fooled by the War-Makers by Thomas E. Woods Jr. June 24, 2012 Twenty years ago, as I was completing my freshman year in college, I was a full-blown neoconservative. Except I didn’t know it. Having concluded that I was not a leftist, I simply decided by process of elimination that I must be a Rush Limbaughian. Like most people, I was unaware that any alternative to those two choices existed, or that ...
Book Review: Unequal Justice by Matthew Harwood June 23, 2012 With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful by Glenn Greenwald (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2011), 304 pages. In August, something incredible happened: a three-judge panel of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, in a split decision, allowed a lawsuit seeking monetary damages to proceed against former Defense ...
A Tilting Domino by Rich Schwartzman June 22, 2012 In the 1960s and ‘70s, the war hawks screeched that there was a domino effect in Southeast Asia, that if Vietnam fell to the communists, so too would Thailand, the Philippines, and other countries in the region. North Vietnam won — despite the 58,000 American lives and the untold Vietnamese lives lost in that fiasco — but South Vietnam ...
Still No Accountability for Torture by Andy Worthington June 22, 2012 Last week, the bad news from the Supreme Court was not manifested only in the Court’s decision to abdicate its responsibilities towards the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by turning down appeals submitted by 7 of the 169 men still held. That dreadful decision established that the D.C. Circuit Court could continue in its mission to
Will Supreme Court’s Ignorance Torpedo Americans’ Freedom? by James Bovard June 21, 2012 Americans have never had reliable protection against the ignorance of the Supreme Court. During the past 80 years, Supreme Court justices have routinely rubber-stamped government policies that they grossly failed to understand. Black-robed economic illiteracy is perhaps the Obama administration’s best hope in the Court’s pending decision on the constitutionality of Obamacare. At the oral arguments in late March, neither ...
The Continuing Economic Crisis by Tim Kelly June 20, 2012 President Obama has been rightfully criticized for his observation that “the private sector is doing fine.” The statement was a glaring indication that the president has no understanding of the country’s economic problems and therefore has no idea how to solve them. The Romney campaign was quick to make use of the president’s gaffe, running ads accusing ...