by Bob Barr | Aug 31, 2022 | Townhall Article |
Townhall In the latest “Right Track/Wrong Direction” national poll and the global “Happiness” rating, there is good news and there is bad news. The good news is that the United States is not the unhappiest country on earth (we currently rank #19). The bad news is a significant majority of our citizens (88% according to some estimates) believe we are headed in the wrong direction and pessimistic about turning that trajectory around. A cursory analysis of politics, education, business, law, and pretty much any other sector of contemporary American society reveals why we are such an unhappy place – we are a citizenry afraid. The United States has in recent years morphed from a bold, forward-looking, optimistic, and freedom-based society into one that is driven by fear. Not so much physical fear — although fear of crime is a very real and mounting concern — but rather the sense that people are afraid to openly and honestly communicate or interact with others, insofar as doing so may get them in trouble; in trouble with government regulators and snitches (usually referred to as “whistleblowers”), in trouble with social media, in trouble with co-workers, in other words, everyone out there. Chicken Little would feel right at home in today’s America, because wherever she might turn the proverbial sky is primed and ready to fall. The causes of this pervasive sense of fear and foreboding infecting our society are many, but topping the list would be the rise of social media and the expansion of government regulations (backed up with threats of fines and jail). Query: is there any aspect of a citizen’s daily existence...
by Bob Barr | Aug 29, 2022 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller The name-calling, mistrust, and downright hatred with which the former president and his supporters are dealing with the execution of the warrant execution at his Mar-a-Lago home/resort three weeks ago – and the the current administration‘s less-than-productive responses – exemplify the toxic and dysfunctional state of American political discourse. The former president of the United States of America calls FBI “hacks and thugs” in the wake of the Aug. 8 search of his living quarters at the Mar-a-Lago resort pursuant to a lawfully executed warrant. The sitting president of the United States returns the insult by referring to support for his predecessor as “semi-fascism.” It is difficult to see things getting better any time soon. I am among the many Americans who find fault with the FBI and other federal agencies’ abuse of power in recent years. In fact our country has been dealing (or not dealing) with this problem for three decades, at least since the Justice Department-initiated tragedies at Ruby Ridge and Waco in the early 1990s. As a sitting Member of Congress, I was a harsh critic of the FBI and the ATF during the 1995 oversight hearings into the Branch Davidian debacle. Today, nearly two decades after those hearings revealed serious abuses of power by the Attorney General, the FBI, the ATF, and our military, the leadership of the FBI exhibits greater evidence of being deeply infected with partisan politics and institutional hubris. Contrary to popular belief, however, and contrary to the views of many friends and colleagues of mine, there are ways to address these problems, even with a House of Representatives and a Senate...
by Bob Barr | Aug 24, 2022 | Townhall Article |
Townhall During the Cold War, which lasted for nearly half a century following the end of World War II, the small number of prisoner exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union were deadly serious affairs. Not so much now. Today, 31 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, there is a potential prisoner swap much in the news that bears no resemblance to the serious manner by which such exchanges took place in the past. In Russia’s corner, you have professional American female basketball player Brittney Griner, who recently pled guilty to the charge of bringing hashish oil into Russia. As a result of her plea, the six-foot, nine-inch player is serving a nine-year sentence in a Russian penal colony. In our corner is Russian citizen Viktor Bout, a notorious Russian arms dealer who, in 2011, was convicted in federal court of conspiring to kill Americans, and is mid-way through his 25-year sentence. In a bizarre twist to the widely publicized potential swap, former NBA star Dennis Rodman this week interjected himself into the thick of it. During the Cold War, such exchanges were taken most seriously at the highest levels in both Washington and Moscow, involving as they almost always did, clandestine espionage activities between the two superpowers. This was the case in the first and most famous of all spy-for-spy swaps — the 1962 deal that returned CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers to America from a Soviet prison and sent convicted Soviet master spy Rudolf Abel from a federal penitentiary to retirement in his native Russia. Negotiations for the Powers-Abel exchange, and the several other swaps...
by Bob Barr | Aug 23, 2022 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Uncle Sam’s irresponsible management of the massive student loan program, accelerated by the Biden administration’s loan “forgiveness” policies, will cost American taxpayers in excess of $311 billion – more than triple the annual budget for the sprawling U.S. Department of Education. The ballooning cost of the loan program, which includes previously projected income that will never materialize, plus nearly $200 billion in direct losses, has been calculated not by a Republican policy group aiming to undercut Biden’s pet student loan forgiveness policy, but by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office. Both Democrat and Republican administrations have endorsed and funded the government’s direct student loan program, first launched 30 years ago. Since then, it has grown beyond a secondary source of funding for students’ post-secondary education into the single largest source of federal funding for such pursuits. It has also become the second-largest consumer debt category nationally after home mortgages, but with an astronomically higher default rate — projected to reach 40% by next year. It is these troubling aspects of the loan program that have fueled pressure on the Biden administration to pursue a reckless loan forgiveness policy. Biden faces significant pressure from within the Democrat Party, most vocally from its hard-left wing, to take the leap and simply “forgive” the outstanding loans — or at least a significant portion of them for certain classes of borrowers or up to certain amounts. While the president appears both philosophically and politically inclined to jump into that financial morass, his actions so far have been more tentative. For example, the administration already has written off the books more than $30 billion based on allegations...
by Bob Barr | Aug 17, 2022 | Townhall Article |
Townhall With citizens across the country understandably focused on increased rates of urban violent crime, and with local and state law enforcement agencies suffering under manpower shortages, another crime headache could not come at a worse time. This is, however, what law enforcement may be facing in the coming months; and in fact, already is facing in Atlanta, Georgia – the resurgence of eco-terrorism. Just outside the bustling downtown environs of Atlanta, in a still-heavily wooded area known as “Intrenchment Creek Park,” a group of anarchists, environmental extremists, and anti-police activists have declared war on the construction of a new and desperately needed police training facility for the Atlanta Police Department. Breaking with the largely non-violent measures employed in recent years by environmental absolutists, this new generation of “forest defenders” has returned to the violent tactics that characterized the movement decades ago and saw multi-million dollar arson campaigns from Oregon to Colorado and beyond. While the overarching goal of these environmental extremists is claimed to be reducing the “threats” to the environment causing global warming, the group in Atlanta has updated and expanded that mission statement. In a new wrinkle on the environmental focus of these “green defenders,” the still-loose “movement” that has reared its head in Atlanta, claims as part of its mission protecting minority and native American communities against harm allegedly caused by law enforcement and by commercial development (in this case, the construction of a new movie studio in the same area as the police training center). The tactics of these post-2020 anti-police activists, however, are well-known to law enforcement officials who have followed the trail of burned buildings...
