Daily Articles

The Pentagon’s Crooked “Judicial” Process

by Jacob G. Hornberger April 2, 2007

While Pentagon officials are celebrating the terrorism conviction of David Hicks in Guantanamo’s military-tribunal system, the process by which Hicks was convicted and sentenced only confirms that the Pentagon’s “judicial” system is as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. After all, most everyone knew that Hicks, who has been held at Guantanamo for more ...

Why Germans Supported Hitler, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger April 1, 2007

Part 1 | Part 2 The most remarkable part of the movie Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is the courtroom scene, which is based on recently discovered German archives. Sophie and her brother Hans, along with their friend Christoph Probst, stand before the infamous Roland Freisler, presiding judge of the People’s Court, whom Hitler had immediately sent to Munich ...

Thank You, Congress, for Not Taking It All

by Sheldon Richman April 1, 2007

If the government isn’t taking 100 percent of your income, you should be grateful for Congress’s generosity. Because in the eyes of the Bush administration, that’s exactly what it is, generosity. You have no right to what you earn or any other money you might get hold of. In principle it ...

War Lies and the 2004 Election

by James Bovard April 1, 2007

Shortly after he was reelected, President Bush declared that American voters had had their “moment of accountability” regarding the Iraq war. Since he had gotten slightly more than 50 percent of the votes in the November 2004 election, that meant that they had ratified his policies and that Bush was ...

Funding Leviathan, Part 2

by Laurence M. Vance April 1, 2007

Part 1 | Part 2 When the Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, broached the idea of a consumption tax to replace all or part of the income tax in his testimony before the President’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform, he was not alone. There are three other voices that have of late been promoting a consumption ...

Nanny-State Quandary

by Scott McPherson April 1, 2007

Paternalistic agitators must be in a real quandary. A Massachusetts man is suing his former employer for firing him for smoking. The man lost his job as a lawn-care specialist after testing positive for nicotine. Isn’t this great? After all, anti-smoking types have been haranguing us for years about the dangers ...

The Slippery Slope of Nanny-State Politics

by Jeffrey A. Singer April 1, 2007

On December 5, 2006, the City of New York banned the use of transfats in restaurants and food preparation. Ironically, many of the experts proclaiming the dangers of transfats were the ones who urged us to embrace them as “heart-healthy” in the 1980s. William Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at Harvard University, who was one of the ...

Liberty versus the Morality Police

by George Leef April 1, 2007

Liberty for All: Reclaiming Individual Privacy in a New Era of Public Morality by Elizabeth Price Foley (Yale University Press, 2006); 287 pages, $35.00. Most Americans have settled somnolently into the view that whatever laws are passed are all right because they’re the product of democracy. To be sure, there ...

Speaker Spotlight: Richard Vague and Joanne Mariner

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 30, 2007

The two speakers at our June 1-4 conference Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties who are being highlighted this week are Richard Vague and Joanne Mariner, two people whose lives can be summed up in one word: Courage. Richard Vague, one of our conservative speakers, is one of the ...

Thank Goodness We Can Ignore the Wars

by Sheldon Richman March 28, 2007

New York Times foreign-affairs columnist Thomas Friedman laments that most Americans are disengaged from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. During a recent radio appearance, Friedman cited comedian Bill Maher’s complaint that “the enemy” has had to fight only 140,000 Americans rather than all 300 million of us. You hear this a ...

The Pentagon’s Power to Jail Americans Indefinitely

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 26, 2007

The presiding judge in the Jose Padilla case has held that the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a speedy trial does not protect American citizens from being indefinitely incarcerated by the Pentagon. Padilla had filed a motion to dismiss the case on the ground that the federal government had denied him his right to a speedy trial. Padilla ...

Immigration Policy Reveals What We Are

by Sheldon Richman March 25, 2007

The new compromise immigration bill is drawing lots of flak, not least from conservatives who object to granting amnesty to millions of so-called illegal aliens in the country. (I prefer to think of them as independent migrants.) Here I have to agree with the conservatives. The illegals shouldn’t be granted ...