by Bob Barr | Jan 4, 2022 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller As the Biden administration nears the end of its first year, the focus of its Department of Defense appears not to be on meeting our military’s ability to defeat real and potential foes. Instead, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin continues his high-priority campaign to chase “extremism” within the ranks. Austin relentlessly pursues this boogeyman notwithstanding that the most recent Defense Department report on “extremism,” published just last month, conceded that over the course of its nearly year-long study, it could find “less than 100” incidents of such behavior among active duty and reserve personnel (which totals some 2,145,900 men and women across all military branches). The current administration’s apparent obsession with ferreting out “extremism” among active duty and reserve personnel, including civilian military contract personnel and the many more millions of veterans, comes even as recent evaluations of America’s military readiness shows serious deficiencies. Despite this, non-governmental groups to which Austin’s Defense Department continues to turn for data and approval – including the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) – lament that even more is not being done to ensure a fully “woke” military. The term “woke” is not used in either the December 2021 Defense Department report, or in a lengthy investigative analysis of “extremism” in the military published by The Associated Press just last week. “Wokeness,” however, is the clear goal of this crusade to identify and rid the armed forces of those with views disfavored by the like of both the SPLC and the Biden administration. The new definition of “Extremist Activities” now to govern backgrounds and activities of military personnel as well as those civilians...
by Bob Barr | Dec 27, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller For as long as I can remember, whenever I went through the checkout line at our local supermarket, the cashier would ask politely, “Did you find everything you were looking for, Sir?” Until recently, I routinely answered, “Yes, thank you,” although I would think to myself, Of course I found everything, this is the United States. No longer. For the past year, when I am asked that question by the always very polite supermarket cashier, my answer has become, “No, but thank you for asking.” In my mind, I find myself wanting to ask the cashier, have we become a Third World country? Welcome to the Brave New World of Biden’s America, where empty grocery store shelves and gas station pumps festooned with the little yellow bags indicating empty pumps have become the norm. Dealing with empty grocery store shelves and gas pumps, however, is not the only or even the most serious evidence that America today is not the America of previous eras, especially the nation that, since the end of WW II, has served as the world’s beacon of political and economic freedom. Having to circumvent shortages of one product or another in food purchases or searching for a full gas pump are things that can be dealt with, at least in the short term. Working around more serious indications of the decline in our heretofore expected standard of living are problems not so easily dismissed. Inflation, long a hallmark of economies of developing and Third World countries unable or unwilling to rein in impediments to free market economics, is now in the United States at levels not...
by Bob Barr | Dec 20, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller President Joe Biden is 79. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is 81. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is 79, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, at 71 years old, is the baby of the bunch. The average age of America’s top political leadership is a whopping 77.5 years old. This is nearly 40 years older than the median age of the U.S. population, which stands currently at 38.1 years. This trend may change after Biden’s first term ends in January 2025, but only if both major political parties choose to nominate younger candidates. The problem, as we close in on the end of Biden’s first year in office, is that the two most talked-about 2024 candidates would themselves be approaching octogenarian status in three years — Hillary Clinton at 77 and Donald Trump at 78. 2024 is a long way off, and Republicans might decide to break the Trump hold on the Party and opt for a younger candidate plucked from the GOP’s solid farm team. One top contender, for example, is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who will turn a youthful 46 in 2024. The potential, anyone-but-Hillary 2024 Democrat nominee field remains foggy, but if Vice President Kamala Harris opts to run, she will just have celebrated her 60th birthday by election day 2024. If former presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren were to vie for the office again in 2024, at 77 she would be the same age as Hillary. Sen. Bernie Sanders will be a mind-blowing 83 years old in 2024, and he shows no sign of losing his desire for higher office. There are, of course, other...
by Bob Barr | Dec 13, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller It is a metal that floats in water. It sparkles a beautiful red color when ignited. It is found in abundance in sea water and brine, as well as on lands in every continent other than Antarctica. It is lithium, and it is fast outpacing oil as the prime target of New Left environmentalists, even as it pits environmentalists against manufacturers of batteries used to power “environmentally friendly” electric vehicles so loved by the Biden administration. Major industrial countries across the globe are fighting for ever more access to quantities of this metal, known as “white gold,” but none so seriously or successfully as China. The battle being waged over lithium production is a serious one, with not only environmental issues at stake, but military and geopolitical ones as well. Despite this, it is not at all certain that the Biden administration will recognize its value and push back against those trying to limit or even halt domestic lithium production. If the administration treats lithium with the same degree of disdain with which it has targeted oil and natural gas production, however, it will have correspondingly grave consequences far beyond the problems created for the electric vehicle industry. Discovered and isolated as a unique metal early in the 19th century, lithium until recently was considered a cheap commodity in world markets. Large lithium mines and brine extraction facilities operated largely free from protests in the United States, South America, Australia, China and elsewhere. Due to its use as a component in the production of nuclear weapons, the U.S. became the world’s largest producer of the light metal...
by Bob Barr | Dec 6, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Most Americans believe that if they have been seriously harmed by actions of the federal government, they are at least entitled to bring their claim before a court of law and have it fairly and transparently decided. They would be wrong. Thanks to a seven decades-old doctrine, called the “state secrets privilege,” all that government lawyers need to do to prevent a case against the government from proceeding is to claim that national security information would be revealed, and the case is stopped dead in its tracks regardless of the merits. As outrageous as this doctrine is, federal courts for decades have permitted Uncle Sam to escape being held accountable for misdeeds, such as unlawfully surveilling individuals, by claiming “state secrets.” There is a case now before the U.S. Supreme Court, however, that might at long last and to some degree limit the government’s power to assert this blanket defense. Holding the federal government accountable in a court of law never has been easy. An aggrieved person has to overcome numerous legal hurdles, not the least of which is sovereign immunity, a principle we inherited from our former English masters, which shields government officials from many, if not most, civil legal actions. Beyond piercing the sovereign immunity shield, a person asserting a claim against a government agent or agency for violation of his constitutional rights must surmount other difficult hurdles, including standing and timeliness, among others. Notwithstanding these legal roadblocks, however, there is opportunity for an individual asserting that his constitutional rights have been injured by actions of the federal government to bring legal action and to...
by Bob Barr | Nov 29, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Buried deep within the massive infrastructure legislation recently signed by President Joe Biden is a little-noticed “safety” measure that will take effect in five years. Marketed to Congress as a benign tool to help prevent drunk driving, the measure will mandate that automobile manufacturers build into every car what amounts to a “vehicle kill switch.” As has become standard for legislative mandates passed by Congress, this measure is disturbingly short on details. What we do know is that the “safety” device must “passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired.” Everything about this mandatory measure should set off red flares. First, use of the word “passively” suggests the system will always be on and constantly monitoring the vehicle. Secondly, the system must connect to the vehicle’s operational controls, so as to disable the vehicle either before driving or during, when impairment is detected. Thirdly, it will be an “open” system, or at least one with a backdoor, meaning authorized (or unauthorized) third-parties can remotely access the system’s data at any time. This is a privacy disaster in the making, and the fact that the provision made it through the Congress reveals — yet again — how little its members care about the privacy of their constituents. The lack of ultimate control over one’s vehicle presents numerous and extremely serious safety issues; issues that should have been obvious to Members of Congress before they voted on the measure. For example, what if a driver is not drunk, but sleepy, and the car forces itself to the side of the road...
