by Bob Barr | Sep 7, 2022 | Townhall Article |
Townhall Despite complaining about being the victim of inappropriate, if not unconstitutional abuse by the courts and the Biden Administration, former President Donald Trump on Monday was gifted a highly unusual, if not unprecedented favor by a federal judge that, at least temporarily halts the investigation into possible criminal mishandling of classified government documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort. As is by now well-known, FBI agents on August 8th conducted a search of the sprawling Florida resort, which includes living quarters used at times by Trump and his family. The agents removed some 22 boxes containing nearly 13,000 documents and other items of evidence from the resort, pursuant to a lawful search warrant signed by a federal magistrate. Ever since then, Trump and his supporters have engaged in a full-court press to convince the country that the FBI search was nothing more than an abusive and partisan action to weaken him as a possible 2024 presidential candidate. Two weeks after the search, Trump’s lawyers filed a motion with the U.S. District Court in West Palm Beach, demanding that the court appoint a “special master” to examine all the seized evidence and determine if any falls within categories otherwise protected against seizure, such as attorney-client communications. On Monday, Judge Aileen Cannon (who Trump nominated for the post shortly before he left office) did just that. Mr. Trump is being afforded extraordinarily preferential treatment, not only by way of the judge directing that an outside party be empowered to review each and every item seized by the FBI, but by the even more unusual step of explicitly suspending the government’s current criminal...
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 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 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...
by Bob Barr | Aug 10, 2022 | Townhall Article |
Townhall George Washington University, located in the heart of our nation’s Capital, is widely considered a top-tier institution of higher learning. It also is among the most expensive schools in the country. Notwithstanding such pedigree, the university in recent months has shown the country that both its student body and its board of trustees rank among the dumbest in our nation. Just two months ago, for example, the GW Board of Trustees decided to “retire” the school’s long-time moniker, the “Colonials.” This decision resulted from a three-year long study which concluded that trashing the mascot was essential because the term “colonial” triggered visions of slavery and colonization, and was therefore anathema to the “unifying” purpose of a school moniker. Meanwhile, as the trustees now turn their attention to finding a more soothing and less “divisive” moniker (a process proposed to consume another year or more of their time), George Washington’s student body has been busy trashing no less a distinguished constitutional law lecturer than Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who has taught a seminar at the university’s law school for more than a decade. While the vast majority of law schools in America would trip over themselves to have a Supreme Court justice lead a seminar on constitutional law – or would have done so before today’s “woke culture” turned academia on its head – GW students have just thumbed their collective nose at such a godsend. The reason for such a move by the students? Abortion — the new holy grail of leftwing politics. In late June, the High Court rendered a decision overturning the 1973 landmark abortion-rights case, Roe...
by Bob Barr | Aug 3, 2022 | Townhall Article |
Townhall There was a time long ago in America’s civic institutions, where men and women who had accomplished great things for our country and for mankind, were studied by students of all ages — George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Jonas Salk, and many other notables adorned classrooms and textbooks in schools across the country. Now, in an increasing number of public schools children are present with a far different role model. The age of the Drag Queen has arrived. This loony phenomenon, presented as lessons in “diversity” and “acceptance,” has even found its way into churches, and not just fringe religious sects, but mainstream denominations – Lutheran, Methodist, Catholic, and Episcopal — presented not only as lewd sideshows, but as official religious services. The United Methodist Church, for example, has accepted as a candidate for full pastoral ordination, a “Drag Queen Pastor” who proclaims himself a “dragavangelist” and laces his sermons with profanity and gibberish about “divine queerness.” It might be argued in defense of such activities that if adults wish to attend religious services extolling men dressed as women who prance down the aisle like court jesters, they are free to do so, as long as attendance is voluntary. Disturbingly, this lunacy goes beyond consensual adult activity, as with a Lutheran Church in Chicago recently hosting a “Drag Queen Prayer Time” for children during its Sunday service. As frequently happens with contemporary cultural phenomena, they tend to bleed across national boundaries, and churches in Canada reportedly are witnessing the same “Drag Queen Evangelism” infecting the U.S. Such expansive reach is made easy through social media, including...
