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Monthly Archives

September 2014

From the Desk of Bob Barr

The Emperor’s New Climate

by Liberty Guard Author September 24, 2014
written by Liberty Guard Author

Last weekend, an estimated 300,000 “climate change” evangelists flooded the streets of New York City, creating traffic jams and leaving the streets littered withtrash and waste. Their publicly-stated goal? — to raise awareness about “climate change,” as if decades of yelling, bullying, and name-calling has not left the public well-aware of the movement’s agenda. As expected, the march attracted its usual suspects clothed in their standard green hypocrisy. Al Gore left the march in an SUV. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer, got testy with a reporterwhen asked if he was going to “lead by example” and give up his cell phone.

Even employing its self-avowed standards of calculating the “environmental impact” of actions, the march itself, with hundreds of thousands of people from across the globe descending upon the city, was an environmental disaster.

Of course, facts, history and logic are not elements readily apparent within this crowd, especially among those who dare not question the fanatical claims about the consequences if immediate action is not taken to put a stop to what used to be known as “global warming,” but now is referred to more vaguely as “climate change.” Furthermore, the “immediate action” for which these environmental zealots clamor is well known as liberal-speak for “government regulation;” their panacea for everything under the sun.

The fact is, “environmental conservation” is not a social good owned exclusively by liberals. Every hunter and sportsman appreciates the importance of protecting Earth’s natural resources. It is also one of the many important lessons taught over the past century by the Boy Scouts. “Appreciation for our natural environment and a knowledge of the interrelationships of nature bolster our respect and reverence toward the environment and nature,” say the Scouts.

The common-sense notion of personal environmental stewardship as practiced for generations by the Scouts reflects a community effort to keep our environment clean, and leaving the world better than when we found it. Unfortunately, true concern for the environment is not the objective of today’s environmental warriors, like those who marched in the Big Apple last weekend.

Radical environmentalism, not unlike many of the Left’s other crusades, is a thinly veiled cover for a brand of forced living standards and mandated anti-capitalism not at all unlike traditional Communism. Today, “environmentalism” is less about taking common sense, personal steps toward environmental stewardship, than it is throwing a monkey wrench into the industrial world and bringing technological progress to a grinding stop, regardless of the impact on humanity.

This anti-corporate, anti-freedom “progressive” movement is made effective not by rational argument, but by acid rhetoric, propaganda, and both academic and monetary fraud. Its proponents use these tools purposefully to create a false dichotomy in which the only “moral” position is to agree with them, lest one be labeled a climate change “denier” or “skeptic” – environmentalist jargon used by the Mainstream Media to insinuate that global warming critics are Neanderthals who reject “proven science.”

It is a modern day version of the old tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Of course, even when significant, and damning, progress is made by critics atdebunking the junk science used by global warming alarmists to justify all manner of social re-engineering, the goalposts are simply moved, and the script is altered to keep their game alive. It does not matter that the Earth has been cooling over the last decade — they simply change the nomenclature of the debate from “global warming” to “climate change,” according to which you will always be right because the climate always will change, even if not known in what direction. In this environmental Bizarro World manipulation is condoned because the laudable goal of these “scientists” is to save the planet.

Periodically, Hollywood A-Listers will step forward to hold fund-raisers, bloviate about how they love Planet Earth, and spend millions making another sci-fi spectacular about how political and corporate bad guys have destroyed Earth. Man-made global warming may be a myth, but the agenda of these enviro-socialists is very real.

In the short term, the goal of these anti-capitalist crusaders is a global initiative, marked most recently by Obama’s visit on Tuesday with U.N. leaders to address a “global framework” for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. President Obama has shown little restraint in using costly, job-killing environmental regulations (or, in the case of the Keystone Pipeline, taking no action at all) to appease his liberal base. In an election year in which Democrats are struggling to paper over the vast failures of this Administration, it is virtually certain American businesses and taxpayers will be hit with even more of this costly and counter-productive environmental chicanery.

September 24, 2014 0 comment
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From the Desk of Bob Barr

In Defeating ISIS, We Must Not Defeat Ourselves

by Liberty Guard Author September 17, 2014
written by Liberty Guard Author

“Terror is theater,” New York Times columnist Roger Cohen wrote on Monday. “Burning skyscrapers, severed heads: The terrorist takes movie images of unbearable lightness and gives them weight enough to embed themselves in the psyche.” Over the weekend, ISIS, the newest terror kid on the block, posted another one of its beheading videos to the Internet, marking the third hostage to die in the organization’s effort to send chills down the spine of the Western World.

And, once again, it worked.

Ask any American right now about the top issue facing the country, and his answer is likely not to be a still-struggling economy, a healthcare system crumbling under ObamaCare, a flood of illegal immigrants at the border and the unprecedented Executive action granting them amnesty, or any number of serious, domesticissues yet-to-be-solved by Congress or the President. Instead, most Americans would suggest the biggest, most direct problem facing the nation is a terror organization as to which our national intelligence agencies remain divided on what threat, if any, it poses to American interests outside of the region currently under its control in the Middle East.

Nevertheless, with each online video, or mysterious “note” left along a border fence, Americans predictably are succumbing to this “terror theater,” especially as ISIS gains traction in a ratings-hungry Mainstream Media. The effects of this fear mongering are already noticeable; a recent Pew poll found that 62 percent of Americans are “very concerned” about the rise of Islamic extremism in the Middle East. While that might not surprise given recent events, what is alarming is the shift of the population back to a post-9/11 mindset that government can, and should, do “whatever it takes” to protect the nation, regardless of constitutionality or actual effectiveness.

Thanks to the revelations last year by Edward Snowden, we know where this type of “Nanny State” mindset will lead. For years, privacy watchdogs suspected exactly what Snowden revealed: the U.S. government is actively collecting, analyzing, and storing the digital communications of hundreds of millions of U.S. citizens, with virtually no court oversight or suspicion of wrong doing on the part of these citizens. We now know also that the CIA has been illegally hacking into the computers of the U.S. Senate committee tasked with the oversight of intelligence agencies.

To top it all off, when questioned about these clear violations of the Constitution, the top brass of America’s intelligence communities perjured themselves in front of Congress.

As a result of these revelations, for a brief moment there seemed to be a real opportunity to win back some of the freedom lost during the post-9/11 terror hysteria, when fear enabled the creation of today’s surveillance Leviathan. Headlines detailing the extent to which the federal government shredded the Constitution in pursuit of “terrorists” led to what Pew described as the “first time in nearly a decade . . . that more [people] expressed concern over civil liberties than protection against terrorism.”

Sadly, in the end, all President Obama and the Congress had to do was wait for the headlines to shift to the next emergency du jour, and their shenanigans would once again fade from the public’s radar.

As I wrote last week, fear is a powerful tool, and one used often by the government following 9/11 to diminish individual liberty in exchange for the promise of security. Clearly, the more government officials fan the flames of terror hysteria, the more willing Americans became to surrender their freedom for this illusion, as the recent Pew poll demonstrates, and makes us less reluctant to put a stop to the unconstitutional behavior of our government.

In a 2003 interview, General Tommy Franks described his top concern for America not as being an act of terrorism, but a “massive casualty-producing event somewhere in the western world . . . that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass-casualty-producing event.” A decade later, we see it does not take an event as devastating as a mass-casualty attack to shake our understanding that protecting liberty, not achieving “security,” is the real responsibility of government.

Global terrorism may be a modern problem, but our Founding Fathers warned about the desire to trade freedom for security. They also knew that freedom, once relinquished, is rarely, if ever, returned to the people.

This is precisely why civil liberties deserve a consistent and high level of concern by the citizenry. Our basic freedoms are not commodities that can be pawned, or loaned, whenever the real world out there rears its ugly head and we need a little extra “security.”

How America responds to ISIS is not just a test of the President, but of America as well. We should, and will – if the proper mix of special ops actions and targeted military training and equipment is put in place — defeat ISIS; but in allowing the irrational fear of terrorism to penetrate our imagination and once again grant the government a blank check of power, we will ultimately defeat ourselves.

September 17, 2014 0 comment
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From the Desk of Bob Barr

Can We Survive A Feckless, Egotistic President Afraid To Lead?

by Liberty Guard Author September 10, 2014
written by Liberty Guard Author

Fear. It is a basic, primitive emotion common to every living species on planet earth. It is the instinctual response that keeps animals alive in nature, and influences the thoughts and actions of humans. Edmund Burke once described the potency of fear saying, “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” Burke’s observations ring especially true in today’s hypersensitive, hyper-connected world of 24-hour news channels and social media, in which the flames of fear can be fanned in ways only dreamed of in ages past.

Our fear of illness feeds the hype about an Ebola virus “epidemic” sweeping across America. International headlines appear anytime someone vomits on a plane. Overlooked is the reality that Ebola thrives only in areas with poor sanitation, nutrition, and healthcare access; and can in fact be prevented and contained in societies like ours where proper sanitation, nutrition and healthcare are the norm.

We fear mass shootings. Although such incidents are extremely rare, and almost always perpetrated by an individual suffering from mental health issues, schools now are mobilized to routinely practice “lock downs,” and have implemented idiotic “zero tolerance” programs with unthinkingly absurd results – such as suspending a child for making hand gestures in the shape of a gun while playing at recess.

Our fear of airline crashes, stoked by the recent disasters involving Malaysian Airlines planes, has recently led to three commercial airliners landing prematurely because of arguments between passengers over reclining seats.

Fear mongering unfortunately is a highly effective tool of government; well-known to the current and previous administrations, which have used Americans’ fear of terror attacks since 9/11 to dramatically and dangerously increase government power in ways previously considered far out of limits, both legally and morally.

As the United States government has engaged in fear mongering to achieve political gains domestically, so have governments and organizations in other parts of the world. Even a relatively small terror organization, ISIS, demonstrated clearly its understanding of the power of fear, in releasing online videos of beheadings to create an image of power. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has kept the international community trapped in a game of cat and mouse with that country’s escalation of tensions in Ukraine, through the savvy use of media and machismo.

Were Ronald Reagan in power today, such displays of terror from these regimes and terror outfits would have been quickly assessed and responded to with clarity of purpose and result. When two U.S. servicemen were killed in the 1986 bombing of a Berlin nightclub, it took Reagan only 10 days to launch airstrikes against the responsible party, Muammar Gaddafi, very nearly killing him in the attack.

Unfortunately, none of Reagan’s hallmark traits of poise and resolve resonate in today’s Oval Office. Instead, we have Barack Obama – a president so thoroughly disinterested in projecting even the appearance of leadership that a round of golf trumps serious consideration of dealing with blatant terrorist acts targeting American citizens. A president so afraid to lead in the international arena, that the response to terror attacks on American citizens such as those by ISIS, is to wait and see whether the “international community” will first “come together” to help “degrade” and “manage” such attacks on US citizens and against his policies directly. A president whose avowed goal is to eventually bring terrorists “to justice” rather than killing them, destroying their sanctuaries and hunting them down like the curs they are.

Can one even imagine a Ronald Reagan, or Margaret Thatcher, mouthing such nonsense? Reagan did not exhibit fear or allow fear to direct his actions as commander in chief in dealing with terror threats from Qaddafi, or when confronting far broader foreign policy issues, such as standing toe-to-toe with the Soviet Union and forcing the “evil empire” to its knees? Reagan never was satisfied with “degrading” the Soviet Union or Qaddafi; his aim in fact and in rhetoric was to defeat them completely. Reagan was a leader who – importantly – knew how to lead; no metrosexual president he.

Is it any wonder Putin does as he pleases, or why terrorists in Iraq openly taunt Obama by name with the severed heads of American journalists? What have they to fear when they know that even as a U.S. Ambassador was assassinated in a terror attack in Benghazi, this Administration’s first, and virtually only, response was to duck responsibility with lies and misinformation?

Even at home, Obama’s fecklessness defines his Administration. This is obvious repeatedly in his utter refusal to work to accomplish anything of substance by actually acting as president. Being president is easy once you have been elected to that high post. Actually serving as president – proposing specific programs and legislation, and then working with the Congress, the media and interest groups actually to accomplish those — takes hard work. Contrary to the liberal myth that Obama is a great “leader,” his only substantive domestic accomplishments came during his first term when Democrats had control of the House and the Senate. Although his actual accomplishments during that interregnum were disastrous substantively — ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank – these were actual accomplishments. But, even so, it was not in fact Obama himself who lent the horsepower to achieve the results; it was the Democrat leaders in the Congress who did the heavy lifting.

Unlike other presidents during whose administrations major legislative victories were had – LBJ and the “Great Society,” or Ronald Reagan’s rebuilding of the domestic economy and America’s military power – Obama shuns the hard work necessary to achieve such results. Instead, he relies on speechifying and unilateral action. Signing executive orders and other presidential documents is easy (even if unlawful and unconstitutional). Such actions demand nothing of a president — none of the hard work on the Hill his predecessors, both liberal and conservative, engaged in to avoid gridlock when power was not firmly in the grip of their political party.

We have survived inept presidents, like Jimmy Carter. We have survived really bad presidents, like Woodrow Wilson. And we have survived narcissist presidents such as Bill Clinton. However, America has never endured a president, who appears so afraid, so egotistical and so seemingly disinterested as this one. We must pray we can survive such a man for the next two years.

September 10, 2014 0 comment
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From the Desk of Bob Barr

Liberal “Faux Patriotism” On Display Against Burger King

by Liberty Guard Author September 3, 2014
written by Liberty Guard Author

The King is looking to move his court to Canada, and this has some of the villagers grabbing their pitchforks — digital pitchforks, that is. Sourcesclose to the recently-announced deal by Burger King suggest taxes actually had very little to do with the fast-food giant’s decision, adding it is more likely a concession to appease Canadian authorities. Facts, however, rarely get in the way of liberal critics of all things corporate; and in this instance, have not silenced a chorus of anti-American accusations being leveled at the company. “Add @BurgerKing to the tax traitor list,” tweets one Twitter user, as another user accuses the fast food company of moving to Canada to “avoid paying their fair share in taxes.”

Remarks such as these, based solely on the issue of taxes, illustrate clearly that for many, today’s measure of “patriotism” has little if anything to do with loyalty to America’s spirit of individualism and freedom, and far more to do with unquestioning fidelity in support of government. This “faux patriotism,” also explains why so many liberals still support President Obama despite irrefutable evidence of the President’s own betrayal of American values. The choleric, superficial howling with which many have responded to Burger King’s tactical move harkens to the days of the American Revolution, when Tories — those loyal to the British Crown — attempted to shame their next-door neighbors for opposing the Intolerable Acts cast upon Colonists by a vindictive King.

Loyalty to King and Crown now has morphed into Loyalty to President and the federal Tax Code.

Of course, few hurling insults at Burger King care to even define what is considered to be one’s “fair share” in taxes. The fundamental fact remains that looking at corporate tax rates across the globe, at 39.1 percent the United States in fact has the “least fair” tax rate of any modern industrialized nation. Even factoring for deductions and other write-offs, America’s corporate tax rate still is higher than countries like Ireland (12.5 percent), the United Kingdom (23 percent), and Canada (26.1 percent). Just as millionaires are fleeing liberal, high-tax states like New York and New Jersey for more reasonable tax climes in Republican-controlled states like Texas and Florida, American businesses increasingly are questioning the efficacy of doing business in a country where politicians have made it harder and more expensive to operate profitably; and where any effort lawfully to reduce such tax burdens are met with charges of “unpatriotic” or worse.

These “Tax Patriots” also fail to ask a very important question at the root of the debate over “inversion” — where companies move their headquarters outside the U.S. for tax reasons: Why is America’s corporate tax rate so high? Since large corporations typically bring in sizeable profits, they, along with wealthy Americans, have long been targeted by liberals in Congress as a revenue stream to fund bloated federal budgets. And, rather than find new ways to cut government spending, Democrats continue to invent new ways to make corporations pay more, evengoing so far as to making it more difficult for companies to relocate outside of the U.S. — the same as Obama has done for U.S. citizens wishing to renounce their citizenship, increasing those fees more than 400 percent.

“My attitude is I don’t care if it’s legal, it’s wrong,” Obama said in July, referring to companies that have moved their headquarters outside the U.S.; adding that he views them as “corporate deserters.” So, rather than addressing the problems that are leading to more people and companies wishing to leave the U.S. because of high tax rates, Obama hopes to trap them here with a regulatory version of the Berlin Wall; cheered on the whole way by people who appear to believe such coercion is patriotic.

“A man’s country is not a certain area of land, of mountains, rivers, and woods, but it is a principle,” wrote George William Curtis, a famous American writer and public speaker in the 19th Century, “and patriotism is loyalty to that principle.”

America is more than just land, mountains, rivers and woods. And, American “patriotism” is far more than a demonstration of loyalty to our country as a geographical or political entity. When we talk of patriotism, we should refer to the idea of America as a land of opportunity; opportunity that comes from the principles of free markets and capitalism, which can only thrive when regulations, taxes and the heavy hand of government are held to a minimum.

So, rather than shame businesses and business leaders for seeking lower taxes elsewhere, we should shame America’s deplorable tax system that chases corporations away. More than this, we should work to replace the “tax and spend” liberals responsible for these taxes in the first place; along with a number of Republicans in the House and the Senate, who refuse also to meaningfully simplify the Tax Code and reduce tax rates. Only by making America more competitive in the global marketplace, as a competitive marketplace, will the trend of inversion be stopped.

Politicians who raid the coffers of business, both small and large, are the true “traitors” to the American way. Not companies like Burger King.

September 3, 2014 0 comment
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