by Bob Barr | May 23, 2022 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller The New York Court of Appeals soon may decide whether “Happy,” a 50-something-year-old elephant in the Bronx Zoo, possesses human rights. While this may appear on its face to be a preposterous proposition, it is one being considered seriously by the highest court in the state of New York. The case in favor of granting human rights to non-human animals is being pressed by the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) via a habeas corpus petition, the ancient and constitutionally enshrined principle that an individual has a fundamental right to force the government to prove it has a legal right to detain that person. The question as to whether animals possess or should be granted “rights,” has been a topic of debate going back at least to the mid-18th century in England. Only recently, with the 2007 establishment of NhRP (originally called the Center for the Expansion of Fundamental Rights), has the issue gained legal traction in the United States. Not surprisingly, these earlier lawsuits filed by NhRP were docketed in New York state courts on behalf of chimpanzees Tommy, Kiko, Hercules and Leo. While these habeas corpus petitions were not granted by the New York court at the time, as with many fringe legal theories, if advocates press their theories consistently and patiently, the odds for a favorable result increases. Hence, the current case on behalf of Happy the elephant. It is easy to dismiss the legal theory that non-human animals should be recognized as having human legal rights. The consequences of permitting such a principle to advance and take hold even to a limited extent in our judicial system, however, are profound. The...
by Bob Barr | May 16, 2022 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller On two successive Saturdays in May, we were witness to the heights of heroic sportsmanship and the depths of human depravity. From the Kentucky Derby in Louisville, Kentucky, on May 7 to the mass murder at the Tops Friendly Supermarket in Buffalo, New York, exactly one week later, we saw the best and the absolute worst that can happen in 21st century America. At 80 to 1 — the longest of long shots — a horse named Rich Strike ridden with masterful precision by unheralded Jockey Sonny Leon won the Race for the Roses in a way that every underdog dreams of. A mere seven days later, a heretofore unknown 18-year-old loner, Payton Gendron, allegedly walked into a nondescript supermarket intent on methodically murdering as many innocent victims as he could manage before the police stopped him. The alleged shooter was festooned in black tactical gear – a favorite of many white supremacists eager to display their false bravado to those around them – along with a video camera mounted on his head so those on the streaming service Twitch could watch his cowardly actions. It took jockey Sonny Leon just two minutes to enthrall the sporting world with what a determined rider astride an eager three-year old colt can do when they set their minds to it. It took the alleged Buffalo murderer four minutes longer – about six minutes – to shoot 13 innocent shoppers and one brave security guard. Ten of those people died as a result of merely being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sonny Leon was born in Venezuela...
by Bob Barr | May 9, 2022 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller You have to admire the Biden administration’s chutzpah. Just as the left is having conniption fits over the possibility that entrepreneur Elon Musk might buy one of the left’s favored social media “disinformation sites” as a way to pull it kicking and screaming into the open public arena, government gatekeepers at the massive Department of Homeland Security announced the birth of an “official” disinformation office. The public first learned of this new office, the “Disinformation Governance Board” or “DGB,” on April 27 when DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas almost casually mentioned it while he was testifying before a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee considering the department’s 2023 budget. The on-the-record mention about DGB that took place between Mayorkas and Democratic Illinois Rep. Lauren Underwood, appeared to have been orchestrated beforehand, and was neatly slipped in during a conversation about “minority communities . . . being targeted [by] misinformation”; itself a rather odd topic to crop up during a hearing about Homeland Security’s budget. Unlike other “review boards” created by federal agencies, such as the Homeland Security Department’s February 3, 2022 announcement in the Federal Register that a “Cyber Safety Review Board” had been established, no such formal announcement accompanied the birth of this new “disinformation” bureaucracy. The omission was not likely the result of a bureaucratic oversight, but rather a tacit acknowledgment of the extremely controversial nature of the new “governance” board. It also is hardly to be considered a coincidence that DGB’s birth announcement came just two days after Musk’s announced plan to buy the giant social media platform Twitter. The unconventional manner by which the Biden administration unveiled the...
by Bob Barr | Apr 25, 2022 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Few people realize that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was founded in the immediate aftermath of World War II for a limited and very specific purpose – to eradicate malaria. In recent decades, however, the Atlanta-based bureaucracy has become the poster child for regulatory mission creep. Its huge regulatory wings need to be clipped. CDC was established in 1946 to attack and control malaria, which at the time was endemic in the southern United States (hence the agency’s being headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, rather than Washington, D.C.). The bureaucracy set out to accomplish its limited mission with 369 employees and a budget of $1 million. The CDC actually was quite successful at eradicating malaria as a significant health concern, largely by attacking breeding areas for mosquitos with the insecticide DDT (which, since the early 1970s has been banned by the EPA). After achieving its statutorily defined goal within a few years, like any worthy bureaucracy, the leadership of the CDC set about searching for new responsibilities to assume, and for which – of course – more taxpayer funding was needed. Thus was launched one of the great examples of government “mission creep.” From that early staff of 369 employees, the CDC has mushroomed into a sprawling bureaucratic behemoth with myriad components, populated by more than 21,000 full-time employees and a budget as proposed for FY 2023 of nearly $47.5 billion. Along the way it has managed to pull into its bureaucratic orbit such non-disease related responsibilities as traffic accidents, obesity, and, of course, gun control. The bureaucratic staying power wielded by the CDC is best illustrated in the fact that, despite...
by Bob Barr | Apr 18, 2022 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Just as “communism” is no longer seen in a negative light by many younger Americans, “atheism” no longer carries with it the adverse connotations that it held in the 1960s. Madalyn Murray O’Hair, founder of American Atheists, won the sobriquet the “most hated woman in America.” In fact, according to recent studies, atheism, Wicca and other forms of paganism are growing faster among Millennials and Generation Z than any other demographic groups. Emory Professor Mark Bauerlein has studied these matters at length, and as noted in his new book, “The Dumbest Generation Grows Up,” America’s youth clearly seem to no longer possess the “spiritualism” that Alexis de Tocqueville recognized as a national strength in his seminal work, “Democracy in America.” As the “metaverse” increases in popularity and as the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans increases, the trend about which Bauerlein writes is likely to accelerate, and with it, the further erosion of an historic and moral underpinning of our representative democratic political system. Regardless of whether one practices or is affiliated with one or another of the world’s great religions, being thus affiliated provides at least the nucleus of morality and ethics on which a freedom-based political and social system can grow and prosper. Becoming unmoored from both history and religion will, again as Bauerlein posits, result in citizenry, particularly the younger generations, searching for “happiness” in all the wrong places, especially the digital world. Interestingly, there already are emerging debates about whether “committing” criminal acts in the metaverse can, or even should be punished. Regardless of how such a question as this may be answered, the simple fact that users immersing themselves in the metaverse are committing...
by Bob Barr | Apr 11, 2022 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller The increased defense spending in the Biden administration’s recently released FY 2023 Budget may have upset the radical left wing of the Democrat Party, but U.S. military policy continues to flounder under the leadership of President Biden and his “woke” Defense Department team. The setting for what has become an embarrassing national defense posture was laid out at the very start of Biden’s tenure and has only worsened since then. But first, the numbers. In the budget sent to the Congress at the end of March, the president proposed to spend $831 billion for defense, a number that drew a harsh rebuke from the Congressional Progressive Caucus. It is all for show. While the administration’s proposed 4% increase in defense spending angered the likes of Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, the fact is that a 4% increase in spending for the next fiscal year does not come even close to accounting for loss of military buying power due to the record level of inflation we are experiencing; now close to 8%. The actual weaknesses in the proposed defense budget are now becoming clear. For example, immediately after the anemic 4% defense spending increase was announced, the Department of the Army stated that its active-duty troop strength would be reduced to what is reported to be the lowest number since just before WW II – 473,000. A top Pentagon official, Army Undersecretary Gabe Camarillo, declared that cutting the service’s active troop strength was not a “budget-driven decision.” If not in fact budget-related, such a statement raises major questions about precisely what factors are “driving” this administration’s national defense policies. At the very same time...
