The Barr Code

A soap opera is playing itself out along our southwest border; a comedy of errors with serious repercussions for efforts to stem illegal immigration into the United States from Mexico.  The contest is pitting federal officials with responsibility for enforcing environmental and endangered species laws, against those responsible for monitoring and enforcing border security.  Thus far, the environmentalists appear to be winning.

Three years ago, President George W. Bush signed into law a measure mandating construction of a fence along the US-Mexico border.  Combining physical barriers along part of its length, with high-tech “virtual fence” mechanisms in other, more remote areas, the project has been plagued with cost overruns, lengthy delays, frequent breaches, and expensive repairs. 

Yet perhaps the most serious monkey wrench that has been lobbed into this massively expensive and complex project, is the one that pits the Department of Homeland Security against a …

Continue reading Environmental soap opera along US-Mexico border »

Knee-jerk reactions by the Congress to particular problems have given us some really bad laws over the years.  However, one of the worst examples of such reactive legislation to come down the pike in a long time, has to be something called the “Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act,” introduced earlier this year by US Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.).  Thankfully, the bill’s author has secured the support of less than a dozen co-sponsors, a fact that greatly diminishes the chances it will pass the House and eventually be signed into law.  However, other really bad legislative proposals have snuck through both houses of Congress with little obvious supprt, and been signed into law by various presidents wanting to prove themselves as “tough on crime” as the legislators who voted for the proposals.

This “cyberbullying” proposal is particularly hare-brained; but, as with many such proposals, it tugs at the heartstrings and cites for its justification a particularly …

Continue reading Really dumb legislation — “cyberbullying prevention” »

This month’s tragic — and probably preventable — mass shooting at Ft. Hood, Texas, certainly raises questions about why a lone shooter was able to unload not one but several magazines of ammunition over a several minute period – shooting  and wounding more than 30 soldiers and killing 13, at a heavily restricted US Army base.   Just as legitimate questions were raised following the mass killings on the Virginia Tech campus in 2007, both military personnel and civilian citizens alike ought now to be asking of themselves and our elected and appointed leaders, not only whether the perpetrators of such carnage could reasonably and appropriately have been identified in advance and prevented  from carrying out their obviously well-planned mass murders; but also, whether it makes sense to disarm a captive group of citizens (at Virginia Tech, the student body; at Ft. Hood, the military personnel assigned to the base).

In the case of Ft. Hood, it is important to bear in mind …

Continue reading Time to revisit firearms policies on military posts »

It has been a generation since one of the 20th century’s most widely read and well-known philosophers, Ayn Rand, died. And it has been more than a half-century since her most well-known novel, “Atlas Shrugged,” was first published. Yet Rand’s philosophy of objectivism, based on the moral value and supremacy of rational self-interest and free-market capitalism, is enjoying a major revival of interest.
Yaron Brook heads the Ayn Rand Institute, headquartered in Irvine, Calif., but this 48-year-old Ph.D. permits little grass to grow under his feet. His zeal to spread the philosophy and ethic of Rand takes him across the country and around the world. It brought him earlier this month to Atlanta.
In addition to delivering to students in a packed Georgia Tech classroom a speech containing the elements of Rand’s philosophy, Brook fielded tough questions for over an hour. He parried with the students on topics ranging from the industrial revolution to global warming, and from …

Continue reading Rand disciple spreads her word »

In a recent ACLU case, Lily Haskell was arrested for attending a protest of the Iraq War, but was never charged with anything.   When she was required by police to provide DNA, she requested a lawyer, and at that point she was told that she would be charged with a misdemeanor if she did not provide a DNA sample.  This raises the question: why was a person who was only exercising her right as an American to protest, treated the same as every other criminal in America.  For merely attending a protest event, she was arrested and forced to provide DNA to law enforcement.   What happened to Ms. Haskell can and is happening to people across our nation.  Government is finding any excuse possible to collect your DNA. 

All levels of government are beginning to maintain databases of citizens DNA.  Whereas in the past, the fingerprint was the method that law enforcement used to identify criminals; now, government is using any excuse necessary to extract and store one’s DNA. …

Continue reading Your DNA up for grabs »

An African American male construction worker trudges up the steps to the front porch of his house in a middle-class neighborhood of New York City; it is dusk and he’s had a hard day on the job at a construction site.  Dressed in work clothes, dog-tired, and with tools in hand he wearily approaches his front door.  As he fumbles with his keys to unlock the door of his house, a man dressed in a police uniform approaches and begins questioning him.   Quickly dismissing his initial thought that this was an Ashton Kutcher “punked” incident, the homeowner realizes he is being interrogated by a real police officer with a real gun ready at his side.

This scenario is not hypothetical.  It happens hundreds if not thousands of times each day in cities and communities across the country; and it is occurring with increasing frequency. Police are randomly stopping more than one million people, mostly minorities, throughout major U.S. cities each year.  Simply walking down the …

Continue reading Random police stops increasing fast »

Hello – is there anybody out there who still believes our leaders in Washington care about what the Constitution of the United States says?  Or what it was intended to mean?  Or even that it exists?  If there actually is anybody out there who still believes this, recent discussions on Capitol Hill about proposed federal legislation should dispel such thought from the minds of even the most die-hard optimists.

Legislation dealing with the delivery and cost of health care in the United States is nearing votes in both houses of the Congress.  Although differing significantly in their details, the primary proposals in both the House and the Senate establish clearly it will be the heavy hand of the federal government, not patients and their doctors, who will be controlling health care decision-making in the decades to come. 

With such a massively expensive and substantively far-reaching piece of legislation being debated at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, one would hope …

Continue reading Constitutional Ignorance Reigns Supreme on Capitol Hill »

The Food and Drug Administration, a federal regulatory agency perpetually in search of new products to regulate and new jurisdiction to conquer, last June received the gift it had coveted for decades.  On June 22, 2009, President Barack Obama signed into law the “Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act,” which gave the FDA legal power to regulate the manufacture, marketing and sale of tobacco products including, most importantly, cigarettes.

The regulators at FDA have wasted no time flexing their new regulatory muscles.  Their first target to vaporize?  Why, clove cigarettes, of course.  I’d not even heard of clove cigarettes until someone I know was smoking one outside a club at which I was attending an event in New Orleans last summer.  I was sitting there enjoying a good cigar, and this friend of mine was smoking what appeared to be a cigarette, but whose smoke smelled like no cigarette I’d ever been exposed to.  With my curiosity thus piqued, I asked what …

Continue reading FDA launches its attack on cigarettes »

In the 2008 general election, only about 57% of the country’s voting age population actually voted.  In Georgia, even fewer citizens — 54.7% of the “VAP” — felt it sufficiently important to actually cast a ballot.  Although Georgia’s voting percentage was better than Hawaii’s or Texas’ (45.1% and 45.6%, respectively), it’s still nothing to write home about.  Undaunted by the already low turnout, however, recently several municipalities in Georgia have decided to employ a decade-old state law that will almost certainly diminish voter interest and turnout even further. 

In 1998, the Georgia General Assembly passed legislation that permitted local governments to actually cancel elections.  This extraordinary power can be exercised if all candidates on a ballot in any particular voting precinct are unopposed.  This year, several governments in the Atlanta metropolitan area have opted to use this power and are then beating their chests and declaring to their constituents how …

Continue reading Dim-bulb law leads to cancelled elections »

Like the mythical phoenix that rises from the ashes, the USA PATRIOT Act just won’t go away.  After signing the massive piece of legislation into law on October 26, 2001, President George W. Bush and his attorneys general John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez (with considerable help from former Vice President Dick Cheney), tried repeatedly to expand its powers.  They did this both by seeking to amend the Act directly, as well as through other legislative vehicles such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).  They were occasionally successful and sometimes not; but they never stopped trying.

During the 2008 campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama made statements appearing to support moves to scale back these laws.  However, when the time came for a vote in the summer of 2008, he not only voted against scaling back FISA, but in favor of expanding its reach considerably.  In fact, he voted to grant immunity retroactively to telecommunications carriers that had …

Continue reading Patriot Act reform may be nearer »