“If you’re not a terrorist, if you’re not a threat, prove it. This is the price you pay to live in free society right now. It’s just the way it is.”—Sergeant Ed Mullins of the New York Police Department Immediately following the devastating 9/11 attacks, which destroyed the illusion of invulnerability which had defined …
Continue reading “The Surveillance State: Is This the Price of Living in a ‘Free, Safe’ Society?”
A number of articles about the Boston terrorist attack that I have read recently reminded me that what is either kept out of the media or otherwise hidden is often more important than what actually appears. One was a feature article entitled “Ron Paul Slams Boston Police. Has he Gone too Far?” by Peter Grier …
Continue reading “Boston Becomes Toxic”
Government is bad for personal freedom. That argument is premised upon the truism that everything government does interferes with freedom because it either prohibits or compels. Everything it owns it has taken from others. Much of what it says is divorced from the truth. President Obama, like President George W. Bush, has argued that his …
Continue reading “Storm Clouds Gathering”
North Korea’s nuclear weapons and Iran’s purported nuclear ambitions are the subject of constant speculation by Western pundits. However, the connection between the two is often overlooked. Although Northeast Asia and the Middle East are home to different geopolitical realities, the resolution of tensions on the Korean peninsula will almost certainly influence calculations made in …
Continue reading “In Tehran, All Eyes on North Korea”
Every now and then, news about U.S. military bases abroad actually gets a little attention. The most recent example: Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s announcement that the U.S. will be able to keep nine bases after the 2014 withdrawal of its combat troops. (“‘They want nine bases… across the country, in Kabul, Bagram, Mazar, Jalalabad, Gardez, Kandahar, Helmand, …
Continue reading “Who’s Profitting From America’s Empire of Bases?”
Bombs targeted Shi’ite districts in Baghdad.
While preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon is preferable, the United States could successfully contain a nuclear Iran, according to a new report released here Monday by the Center for a New American Security, an influential think tank close to the administration of President Barack Obama. The report, “If All Else Fails: The Challenges …
Continue reading “Nuclear Iran Can Be Contained and Deterred, Says Report”
If after the debacles in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya (dare I say Vietnam?) some people still want the U.S. government to intervene — further — in the war inside Syria (but fueled by outsiders), we must conclude, not that they can’t learn the lessons of recent history, but that they won’t because doing so would …
Continue reading “No Intervention in Syria”
Lt. Col. Jeffrey Kusinski was arrested the other day for groping a woman in a parking lot at one in the morning in Washington, D.C.’s Crystal City. Just another incident involving sexual coercion and an American solider, one of a number of recent incidents that have dramatized the alarming extent of the problem – except …
Continue reading “Raping the World”
Now that Republicans have legitimate and troubling scandals on which to criticize the Obama administration—the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups and the Justice Department’s broad seizure of the Associated Press’s phone records—hopefully they will forget their inane focus on the “cover up” involving the attack on the Benghazi diplomatic compound in Libya. But …
Continue reading “Benghazi: Who Cares?” 
