Clinton or Bush? Liberal or Conservative? What’s the Difference? by Jacob G. Hornberger June 23, 2015 Last Sunday,longtime Washington Post journalist Dan Balz raised my hopes and then quickly dashed them. In an article in last Sunday’s Post comparing Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, Balz immediately got my attention with the following sentence near the beginning of his article: “Though of different parties and different philosophies, Clinton and Bush share one thing in common: ...
Deep Hypocrisy on Cuba and Egypt by Jacob G. Hornberger June 22, 2015 In an editorial last Saturday calling for the lifting of the U.S. government’s ban on travel to Cuba, the New York Times pointed out two things that reflect the warped thinking and deep hypocrisy that have long characterized U.S. foreign policy. First, the editorial pointed out that the U.S. travel ban against Cuba was part of “a strategy to ...
Charleston and the National-Security State by Jacob G. Hornberger June 19, 2015 Commenting on the massacre in Charleston, Rand Paul told a group of conservatives that a “sickness” in the country is at the root of the killings and that the problem “isn’t going to be fixed by your government.” Paul’s point is well taken but I don’t think he gets to root of the problem, which is the perpetual, ongoing culture ...
Repeat after Me: Gun Control Doesn’t Work by Jacob G. Hornberger June 18, 2015 Here we go again. What will it take for gun-control proponents to finally get it? Gun control doesn’t work. Let me put that another way: Gun-control laws do not prevent murderers from using guns to murder people. Yesterday, nine people were murdered at a well-known black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Upon hearing that news, a proponent of gun control would ...
The Most Important Question of Our Time by Jacob G. Hornberger June 17, 2015 The question that U.S. presidential candidates should be discussing and debating is this one: What should be the role of government in a free society? In fact, that’s the question that every American should also be discussing and debating. Should government have the power to: 1. Force people to submit to religious indoctrination? 2. Determine what people should read and watch? 3. Decide ...
I Love Magna Carta by Jacob G. Hornberger June 16, 2015 In the debate between those who consider Magna Carta to be a tremendous step in the advancement of liberty and those who don’t, count me among those who do. For me, two things stand out most about Magna Carta. First, it was the first time in history that government (i.e. the king) acknowledged that its powers over people are limited in ...
Romero’s Beatification and the CIA’s Assassination Attempts on Castro by Jacob G. Hornberger June 15, 2015 The Catholic Church’s beatification of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was gunned down at the altar while celebrating mass at a small hospital chapel in El Salvador in 1980, provides a helpful reminder to us of how much the U.S. national-security state warped and perverted the values of the American people, in the name of its anticommunist crusade during ...
The Libertarian Case Against Vouchers by Jacob G. Hornberger June 12, 2015 During FFF’s first year of existence — 1990, one of our major donors requested me to write an op-ed favoring school vouchers, which he planned to send to newspapers in his home state. I explained to him that neither I nor FFF could ever publish such an article. He said that if I refused to write the article, he ...
Federal Judicial Deference to the National-Security State by Jacob G. Hornberger June 11, 2015 If you’d like a good example of the power that the national-security branch of the federal government has acquired within our federal governmental structure, all you have to do is consider the judicial system that the Pentagon has established and runs at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for terrorism prosecutions. It is a perfect example of how the federal judiciary, out ...
Release the CIA’s Still-Secret JFK Records Now by Jacob G. Hornberger June 10, 2015 Today, June 10, marks the anniversary of one of the most important and remarkable speeches in American history — President John F. Kennedy’s speech at American University on June 10, 1963 -- what has become known as the “Peace Speech.” Two excellent books have been written about the speech: To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Speech ...
Who’s the Traitor? by Jacob G. Hornberger June 9, 2015 A few days ago, Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Max Boot authored an article in Commentary entitled “The Traitor’s Triumph” in which Boot accused NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden of being a traitor for revealing the NSA’s illegal and unconstitutional super-secret surveillance scheme to the American people and to the people of the world. Boot’s article raises one of ...
Is Max Boot Really a Liar and a Coward? by Jacob G. Hornberger June 8, 2015 Glenn Greenwald and Max Boot, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, engaged in an interesting exchange about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in which Greenwald suggested that Boot is both a liar and a neocon coward. The exchange arose out of Boot’s critique of an op-ed by Snowden published last week by the New York Times. ...
