by Bob Barr | Oct 11, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Apparently unconcerned about California’s population decline, which most observers attribute to the state’s high taxes and excessive regulation, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom last weekend signed into law a passel of new mandates, some of which appear crazy even by the Golden State’s liberal standards. Based on a “finding” that having “Boys” and “Girls” toy aisles in large retail stores is “stigmatizing,” Newsom signed into law a requirement that, beginning in 2024, large retail stores in California must have “gender-neutral” toy sections. The LGBTQ lobby in the state lauded the move, claiming it will reduce “pressure [on] children to conform to gender stereotypes.” Where such nonsense comes from remains a mystery to many of us not living inside California’s bubble, but it has come to infect virtually every aspect of life within the state. One of the strangest pieces of what the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday called “impactful” legislation signed by Newsom, is one that outlaws “stealthing.” Lest one make the same mistake I did when first seeing that term in the article, thinking it had to do with military stealth technology, it actually (in California, at least) has to do with … sexual intercourse. With the stroke of a pen, however, Newsom may have solved the awful problem of sexual “stealthing.” According to the Chronicle, AB453 “criminalizes the nonconsensual removal of condoms during sexual intercourse, an act known as ‘stealthing.’” This conduct apparently has become such a serious and widespread problem in the Golden States that it requires a state-level prohibition to correct. Indeed, according to Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia, who hails from Los Angeles, if...
by Bob Barr | Oct 4, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller In the latest round of negotiations over President Joe Biden’s proposal to raise taxes by $2.1 trillion, Democrats have struck a moderate, but hypocritical, compromise. According to The New York Times, the agreed-upon funding scheme will target “the merely rich more than the fabulously rich” by “raising tax rates on income rather than targeting wealth itself.” Off to the side, one can hear Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk sighing with relief. As Newsmax reported, their plan “largely leaves technology tycoons like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk untouched.” This news comes just months after a Pro Publica exposé demonstrated how the two mega tycoons pay very little, if anything, in federal income tax. Why would the so-called “Tax the Rich” Democrats leave the fortunes of two of the richest men in the world largely untouched? For the same reason that they allow these same billionaires to evade federal regulatory rules, such as Musk’s deliberate disregard of spaceflight safety standards, which has led to fiery explosions. And, coincidentally, these people contribute generously to Democratic campaigns and causes. Staff from Bezos’ Amazon provided over $2.2 million to the Biden campaign and nearly $1.0 million to the DNC Services Corp. Those at Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla provided more than $210,000 and $106,000 to the DNC Services Corp. While these billionaires may have bought themselves a reprieve from the Democrats’ progressive tax agenda, not so lucky are the people historian Patrick Wyman refers to as “the American gentry.” These are the “single-digit millionaires” who own concrete assets like farmland, apartment buildings and construction companies, and live in unfashionable cities like Allentown, Pennsylvania....
by Bob Barr | Sep 27, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller On Nov. 3, exactly one year from last year’s presidential election, the United States Supreme Court will hear arguments on a landmark Second Amendment case challenging New York’s century-old law making it next-to impossible for the average citizen to obtain a permit to lawfully possess a handgun outside their home. To no one’s real surprise, the Biden administration last week filed a brief urging the High Court to dismiss the challenge to New York’s restrictive handgun law. What is interesting are the absurd, bordering on laughable, arguments the Biden Department of Justice makes in support of its position. If one were to take the administration’s legal brief as historically correct, one would conclude that the United States is a nation founded on firearms restrictions rather than firearms freedom. Moreover, the Justice Department lawyers declare that New York’s highly prohibitory handgun permitting law is “most modest”! To this Justice Department, giving state bureaucrats near-absolute power to decide whether a law-abiding citizen may exercise his constitutionally guaranteed right to possess a handgun for self-defense “fits comfortably” within what the Department considers the long “history and tradition” of government regulation of weaponry, going all the way back to at least 1285. That was the year, according to our Justice Department, when the British Parliament prohibited Englishmen from “wandering” around London after curfew carrying swords or other arms “for doing mischief.” British royals prohibiting the carrying of weaponry, as cited by Biden’s legal eagles, include King Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth I, King James I, and others. With a pedigree such as these rulers preventing their subjects from carrying “little short handguns” and “pocket daggers,”...
by Bob Barr | Sep 20, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Recently disclosed actions by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley highlight a serious fraying of the civilian-military structure at the very core of our constitutional republic and also reveal a deep public misunderstanding of that relationship. Combined, these factors pose a danger the likes of which the country has not witnessed in modern times, if ever. Our Constitution on this point is crystal clear. There is one commander-in-chief, and that person is the President of the United States. The decision to place the elected civilian leader of our country at the apex of the country’s armed forces was purposeful as a means of protecting the citizenry and the states from an overly-powerful national army that could undermine the constitutional order the Framers had so carefully constructed. Without this safeguard, the Constitution likely would not have been ratified in 1788. Notwithstanding this constitutional clarity on military matters, inter-service rivalries and bureaucratic shenanigans have cropped up throughout our history. In modern times, these practical problems led Congress to pass two major reorganizations of the military command structure. The first of these was the National Security Act of 1947, which clarified the chain of command from the president on down by establishing the Department of Defense headed by a cabinet-level Secretary. Then, in 1986 to address problems that hampered the conduct of the Vietnam conflict, and serious inter-service rivalries thereafter, Congress passed the Goldwater-Nichols Act. This law further clarified the lines of authority for military decision making, and made absolutely clear that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had no operational control or command over any military units or individuals....
by Bob Barr | Sep 13, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller If ever there was a federal agency supposed to be nonpartisan and apolitical, it would be the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), established in 1934 and with a current budget of nearly $370 million and more than 3,000 employees. During its existence, the Archives has been overseen by four presidentially appointed acting and ten Senate-confirmed archivists, many of whom served under successive presidents of both major political parties, reflecting the nonpartisan nature of its work. No more. The current Archivist of the United States is David Ferriero, appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009. Under his leadership, this once-apolitical entity designated to preserve the vital historic documents and exhibits of the United States has become a flashpoint for the same left-wing, racism-based ideology now coursing throughout the Biden administration. The prime catalyst for this ideological crusade by President Joe Biden was Executive Order 13985, the very first order he issued on his very first day in office. The document declared that systemic racism permeates the entire federal government, and directed every Executive Branch agency to develop a plan to address it. Some five months prior, however, in September 2020, Ferriero on his own had directed that a 35-member “Internal Task Force on Racism,” comprised mostly of Archives employees, would advance a plan to identify evidence of “systemic racism” and “White supremacy” that he apparently believes undergirds not only the work of the National Archives, but the “vast majority of institutions in the United States.” The Task Force was directed also to recommend ways to address current and future racism. Ferriero’s group accomplished this mission with a...
by Bob Barr | Sep 7, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller After causing Americans to suffer whiplash over the past year and a half with conflicting and at times openly contradictory statements on how to deal with COVID-19, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), seems now to have shifted focus to issues that more easily fit within the overarching themes driving the Biden-Harris administration: Racism, guns and climate change. Not coincidentally, for an agency that urges everyone except itself to “follow the science,” there is far less need to do so when pontificating on racism, guns and the climate, because there really is no “science” involved. In April, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky declared that “racism is a serious public health threat” that has become an “epidemic impacting public health.” As overseer of the 13,000 employees at CDC, Walensky directed that every component of the agency, which has been headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia since its founding 75 years ago, must consider racism as a top priority. In late August, Walensky explained in a CNN interview that “preventing gun violence and gun deaths” has shot to the top tier of priorities at the CDC, which has been chomping at the bit to jump back into the “gun violence” business after having been prevented from using taxpayer money to do so since the late 1990s. As for climate change, or the climate crisis as this administration has now rebranded the issue, the creation of a new “Office of Climate Change and Health Equity” within the Department of health and Human Services, of which CDC is a part, will provide many new avenues for Dr. Walensky and her cohorts to save the...
