Host Ernest Hancock interviews guest James Bovard (Libertarian Author) on William Barr, Harris Wofford's legacy
Declare Your Independence with Ernest Hancock Radio Show: https://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Program-Page.htm?No=1
Show Archive Page: https://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Media/255310-2019-01-30-01-30-19-james-mccanney-james-bovard-dr-judy-mikovits.htm
James Bovard
Libertarian Author
Webpage: JimBovard.Com
James Bovard is the author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), The Bush Betrayal (2004), and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994). He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader's Digest, and many other publications. His books have been translated into Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, and Korean. He is a contributing editor for American Conservative magazine and The Freeman and a regular contributor to the Future of Freedom magazine.
The Wall Street Journal called Bovard "the roving inspector general of the modern state," the New York Times tagged him "an anti-czar Czar," and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a "one-man truth squad." His 1994 book Lost Rights received the Free Press Association's Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism and Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner Award for the Best Book on Liberty in 2003. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought, and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association.
His writings have been publicly denounced by the chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secretary of Labor, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, U.S. Agency for International Development, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by the Sierra Club, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Washington Post.
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TOPICS AND ARTICLES DISCUSSED ON TODAY'S SHOW...
- William Barr's Connection to Ruby Ridge, Defending FBI Snipers
01-18-2019 • By James Bovard The American Conservative
The Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for Attorney General nominee William Barr have focused heavily on Barr's views on Special Counsel Robert Mueller. But nobody is asking about Barr's legal crusade for blanket immunity for federal agents who killed American citizens.
Barr received a routine questionnaire from the Judiciary Committee asking him to disclose his past work including pro bono activities "serving the disadvantaged." The "disadvantaged" that Barr spent the most time helping was an FBI agent who slayed an Idaho mother holding her baby in 1992. Barr spent two weeks organizing former Attorneys General and others to support "an FBI sniper in defending against criminal charges in connection with the Ruby Ridge incident." Barr also "assisted in framing legal arguments advanced… in the district court and the subsequent appeal to the Ninth Circuit," he told the committee.
That charitable work (for an FBI agent who already had a federally-paid law firm defending him) helped tamp down one of the biggest scandals during Barr's time as Attorney General from 1991 to early 1993. Barr was responsible for both the U.S. Marshals Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, two federal agencies whose misconduct at Ruby Ridge "helped to weaken the bond of trust that must exist between ordinary Americans and our law enforcement agencies," according to a 1995 Senate Judiciary Committee report.
After Randy Weaver, an outspoken white separatist living on a mountaintop in northern Idaho, was entrapped by an undercover federal agent, U.S. marshals trespassed on Weaver's land and killed his 14-year-old son, Sammy. The following day, FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi killed his wife, Vicki, as she was standing in the cabin doorway. Horiuchi had previously shot Randy Weaver in the back after he stepped out of the cabin. The suspects were never given a warning or a chance to surrender and had taken no action against FBI agents. Weaver survived.
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- Remembering an AmeriCorps Boondoggle Boss
Harris Wofford's legacy: super expensive, government-directed "service" for silly, politically approved causes.
By James Bovard • January 30, 2019
Harris Wofford, a former U.S. senator and long-time Democratic political operative who ran AmeriCorps from 1995 to 2001, died last week at the age of 92. The New York Times hailed Wofford as "America's volunteer in chief" and Clinton administration fixer Paul Begala saluted him as "a pragmatic idealist" who "believed in progress, not perfection." Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson gushed, "Cynicism melted around Wofford as if he were a bonfire in the snow."
Not for me. When Wofford was AmeriCorps boss, I battered his program in Playboy ("The Return of the Hitler Youth?"), American Spectator, and The Washington Times, and later flogged it in the The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. I hammered him for more than an hour in a September 1999 interview that I believe exposed his cluelessness about AmeriCorps and his contempt for anyone who failed to venerate his program. Wofford seemed unable to see past his own trumpeted good intentions.
From the start, AmeriCorps has been a laughingstock and boondoggle. In Buffalo, AmeriCorps members helped run a program giving children $5 for each toy gun they turned in and a certificate "praising their decision not to play with toy guns." In San Diego, AmeriCorps members busied themselves collecting used bras and panties for a homeless shelter. In Indianapolis, Americorps recruits painted a giant mural on the side of a pawnshop.
AmeriCorps thrived politically in part because the media mindlessly echoed its endless ludicrous success claims. President Bill Clinton asserted in 1999 that AmeriCorps members "have taught millions of children to read." The previous year, Wofford boasted to Congress that AmeriCorps had set a goal of "effective education and literacy for every child."
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