Conservatives and the Courts by Sheldon Richman August 23, 2006 It is always amusing to watch conservatives react to court decisions they don’t like. They were firmly in character last week when Federal District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled that the Bush administration broke the law and violated the Constitution when it began wiretapping, without warrants, international phone calls between Americans and “suspected terrorists.” She’s ...
Iraqis Are Ingrates by Jacob G. Hornberger August 21, 2006 Poor President Bush. According to the New York Times, the president is frustrated by the lack of public support ... in Iraq. Apparently he’s lamenting that thousands of Iraqis were recently demonstrating in the streets in favor of Hezbollah and chanting, “Death to Israel! Death to America!” Those darned ...
DEA Snake Oil by Jacob G. Hornberger August 18, 2006 Don’t ever suggest that federal bureaucrats are not smart. Take, for instance, the DEA, the federal agency that has the responsibility of waging the war on drugs, a war that has obviously failed to achieve its objective after 30 years of warfare, not to mention all the collateral violence that the drug war has ...
Polarization Needed by Sheldon Richman August 16, 2006 When Sen. Joseph Lieberman lost his Connecticut Democratic primary to an anti-war candidate, he used his concession speech to decry the politics of polarization. This was hypocritical because the war hawks, Lieberman included, have gone far in suggesting that criticism of the war policy is tantamount to assisting terrorists. But even if no hypocrisy were involved, the abhorrence of polarization ...
Why Do They Hate Us? by Jacob G. Hornberger August 9, 2006 You’ll recall that immediately after the 9/11 attacks, U.S. officials declared that the attacks had been motivated by the terrorists’ hatred for America’s “freedom and values.” That refrain produced the “war on terrorism” and, more recently, the “war on radical Islamo-fascism.” Nonsense, said libertarians. The anger and hatred that Arabs ...
Mr. Bush, Are You There? by Sheldon Richman August 4, 2006 If President Bush is trying to convince us that he hasnt the slightest understanding of the Middle East, then hes doing an outstanding job. Every statement he makes and this goes for his secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, too is soaked in ignorance. Any American who is paying attention should be shuddering to think that this man is running ...
The Birth Pangs of Rosemary’s Baby by Jacob G. Hornberger August 2, 2006 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice employed an interesting metaphor to describe the death and mayhem in Lebanon. She said that the world was witnessing the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” Why is that an interesting metaphor? Well, she’s obviously referring to a pregnant woman’s labor pains and the ...
The Federal War on Gold, Part 1 by Jacob G. Hornberger August 1, 2006 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Given the rising price of gold and the fact that federal spending is totally out of control, the prospect of gold confiscation and criminalizing the private ownership of gold by federal authorities inevitably rears its ugly head. There are few things that federal big spenders hate more than gold. ...
Beware Income-Tax Casuistry, Part 1 by Sheldon Richman August 1, 2006 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 For many opponents of the income tax the name Brushaber is magical. It comes from Frank R. Brushaber v. Union Pacific Railroad Co., the 1916 U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld the 1913 income-tax law passed under the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That income-tax opponents would ...
Lies and Leviathan by James Bovard August 1, 2006 Big government requires big lies and not just on wars but across the board. The more powerful government becomes, the more abuses it commits and the more lies it must tell. Interventions beget debacles that require cover-ups and denials. The more the government screws up, the more evidence the government is obliged to bury or deny. The government becomes ...
The New Deal and Roosevelt’s Seizure of Gold: A Legacy of Theft and Inflation, Part 1 by William L. Anderson August 1, 2006 Part 1 | Part 2 In a recent discussion on the economy with a faculty colleague, I reminded her of some of the absurdities of New Deal economic policies (many of which have been laid out in previous issues of Freedom Daily and elsewhere). She reminded me that Franklin D. Roosevelt is a “hero” to her and ...
Economic Freedom and the Peasant Uprising of 1381 by Scott McPherson August 1, 2006 There’s no bread, let them eat cake There’s no end to what they’ll take Flaunt the fruits of noble birth Wash the salt into the earth. — “Bastille Day,” by Rush Beginning roughly from the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066, feudalism took hold of England and replaced the Saxon institutions that had defined that land for six centuries. Under this ...