by Bob Barr | Aug 1, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Sunday, July 30 was our nation’s tenth “National Whistleblower Appreciation Day.” For those who may not care so much for whistleblowers these days, including perhaps Joe and Hunter Biden, July 30 also serves as “National Cheesecake Day.” I like cheesecake and I have nothing against legitimate whistleblowers, but there are so many of them these days that it is becoming a bit difficult to sort them all out. Whistleblowers long-predate formation of our country, going back many centuries to medieval England, when individuals who snitched on their fellow Brits for working on the Sabbath, were entitled to half the perpetrators’ ill-gotten profits. Unsurprisingly, it was Benjamin Franklin who, three years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, popularized the notion that the public good should not only encourage, but reward citizens who exposed government wrongdoing. In fact, this very principle was incorporated legislatively by the Second Continental Congress in 1778 and signed by then-President Henry Laurens. Privateering and price gouging during the Civil War became so widespread that Congress in 1863 passed the False Claims Act, pursuant to which a private citizen could initiate a civil action against government-employee scams, and be entitled to a significant cut of any monies eventually awarded. It was not, however, until more than a century later that the act of being a recognized “whistleblower” achieved significant public and political notoriety. In 1989 the “Whistleblower Protection Act” was signed into law, providing meaningful protection against retaliation for any federal employee who discloses wrongdoing to the Congress. Ten years later, similar legal protection was extended to employees of intelligence agencies who disclosed “urgent” wrongdoing to the specified congressional committees through...
by Bob Barr | Jul 25, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller At least three of our military services – Army, Navy, and Air Force – are on track to miss their 2023 recruiting goals; not just by a little, but by many thousands. While these shortfalls pose a serious risk to our nation’s military readiness, the problems in our armed services go far deeper, and suggest serious issues with the type of individuals we are allowing to serve. Calls to prioritize diversity in recruitment and promotions, including by the Air Force general President Biden is pushing for the post of his top military advisor are not helping, nor are the lingering aftereffects of forcing thousands of active duty personnel out of the services because they refused to take the COVID inoculation as mandated in 2021. Broadly, the shortcomings in military recruitment and retention reflect a series of fundamental changes in our nation’s culture, with fewer and fewer recruitment-age young people growing up in households in which close relatives served in the military, and a recent dramatic decline in the percent of Americans who trust and have confidence in the military, now at a disconcerting 45%. Addressing these myriad problems by lowering recruitment standards further, however, risks making some matters worse,. For example, the Pentagon apparently has been considering discarding or at least waiving a long-standing health barrier for entry into the military – individuals who suffer from ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). In another potentially problematic maneuver designed to boost recruitment and retention, military leaders may decide that it is acceptable after all for active and reserve duty service members to use the Communist Chinese-controlled social media platform...
by Bob Barr | Jul 11, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Privacy, or at least the yearning for privacy is a funny thing. When asked whether they support “privacy,” historically most individuals have said “sure.” In a recent survey, however, “security” trumped “privacy” among nearly 30% of Americans under the age of 30, who declared support for government surveillance inside households as a way to improve the security of those living within those homes. That 3 in 10 group of young American adults may be the leading edge of an anti-privacy movement that clearly has taken hold in France, where that country’s parliament just passed legislation permitting police to not only access data contained in individuals’ electronic devices, but to turn on such devices in order to record conversations and videos without the knowledge or consent of the devices’ owners. French President Macron has signaled his approval of the privacy-invasive measure. American Generation Z-ers would feel right at home visiting France. Much has changed since 2013, when Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. government was engaged in an extensive surveillance program gathering cell phone records on American citizens without warrants. At the time, according to a CBS News poll, “nearly 6 in 10 Americans said they disapproved” of the program. What has not changed here in America, is the language of the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution, which broadly protects us from government surveillance of our “persons, houses, papers, and effects” without a warrant, or at a bare minimum absent “reasonable suspicion” that a crime has been committed. In fact, a seminal 2018 Supreme Court decision explicitly held that law enforcement could not access an individual’s cell phone records without first obtaining a search warrant. Things are...
by Bob Barr | Jul 5, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Last week the Supreme Court declared President Biden’s plan to cancel $430 billion in student loan repayments unconstitutional. The President’s response was to immediately announce that his Administration would find a way to circumvent the decision — thereby further undermining respect for our courts and the judges who serve in them. Indeed, the previous day the President dismissed another ruling by the Court, this one on affirmative action, by disdainfully calling the Supreme Court of the United States “not a normal court” and impliedly unworthy of respect. It was no surprise, then, that the President’s challenge to the Court’s decisions prompted calls for those who would have had their debts wiped out by his plan, to simply refuse to make further payments. Who can blame them? Long gone are the days when political leaders would respond to a court ruling with which they disagreed by stating, “we disagree with the court’s decision but will of course abide by it.” Former Vice President Al Gore’s respectful acceptance of the December 2000 Supreme Court decision awarding the presidency to his rival George W. Bush, today would earn him the sobriquet of “wimp” by his Democrat colleagues. This latest round of disparaging judges and courts generally did not start with the current administration. Former President Trump was well-known for attacking judges who issued opinions with which he disagreed during his term in office. Few, however, have gone so far as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), when he threatened Associate Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh by name in 2020 at a pro-abortion rally on the steps of the Supreme Court. It is noteworthy also that Biden’s most recent...
by Bob Barr | Jun 27, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller In 1959, a young screenwriter named Rod Serling created what would become one of the 20th Century’s most iconic television series. “The Twilight Zone” has become so much a part of our culture that contemporary dictionaries include the term “twilight zone” as a defined noun, meaning “an area just beyond ordinary legal and ethical limits.” Considering recent cultural changes, America’s political system quite easily can fit within that very definition, insofar as “ordinary legal and ethical limits” seem no longer to apply. In one of the most recent examples of this phenomenon, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Republican Kevin McCarthy, declared something that historically, ethically, and legally would in the past have been considered laughable — erasing official actions taken previously by the Congress of the United States. More specifically, McCarthy last week publicly endorsed legislation that purports to remove from the official record of the House of Representatives the 2019 and 2021 impeachments of former President Donald Trump; expunging the record of those proceedings as if they never took place. A move such as McCarthy now supports would be in keeping with actions by Winston Smith, the protagonist in George Orwell’s prescient 1984. Smith’s job in that dystopian world was to cleanse history by erasing news accounts of disfavored past events or people. As an institution, the House of Representatives was deemed so important by the drafters of our Constitution, that its description in that document precedes that of all the other components of the federal government. To now have members of that body acting as modern-day Winston Smiths is disconcerting in the extreme, even if the measures fail to...
by Bob Barr | Jun 20, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller By this time the soma had begun to work. Eyes shone, cheeks were flushed, the inner light of universal benevolence broke out on every face in happy, friendly smiles. —“Brave New World,” Aldous Huxley (1932) “’Isn’t it amazing?’ she said. ‘It’s what everyone says about this damn drug, that it makes people feel love.’” — Harriet de Wit, quoted in “How a dose of MDMA transformed a white supremacist,” by Rachel Nuwer, BBC (June 14, 2023) Some things don’t change, as they say. So it is with attempts to alter human behavior. For millennia, people of various cultures and for various reasons — some good, some evil — have experimented with ways to alter human perception and behavior as a way to improve society. This was the premise of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World, published in 1932 and which described a society uniformly and purposefully addicted to and controlled by the drug “soma.” Now, almost a century later, there still are those trying to accomplish what Huxley wrote about as fiction. A recent study conducted by Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science Harriet de Wit at the University of Chicago used not the fictitious soma but a real drug — MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine) – in a study to determine its usefulness for increasing the “pleasantness of social touch.” MDMA has been around for quite some time, having been discovered early in the 20th Century by German chemists for possible pharmaceutical purposes. Decades later, the CIA conducted experiments with the drug, known commonly as “Molly” or “Ecstasy” rather than its lengthy scientific name. The experiments were part of the Agency’s notorious, top secret “MK-Ultra”...
