index -- Price of Liberty

12/03/08

The Draft Threat Is NOT A Hoax
By Carl F. Worden

Of all the articles I’ve published in the Federal Observer, the two that keep getting hits and comments are, “There Is No Terrorist Threat” and, “Will Bush Reinstate The Draft?” Of the two, the latter has gotten more hits and comments recently than I ever expected, considering I wrote that piece back in July of last year. Apparently, it really hit a nerve with a lot of young voters.

We denizens of the Cyberspace Blog community know how easily false rumors get started and how easily those fake rumors get legs. We also know by experience just how fragile those hoaxes are when challenged with common sense.

The “Million man Chinese army waiting to pounce across the border from Mexico” hoax is a prime example. Once people were made to consider the logistical requirements of such a “stealth” invasion, such as bathroom accommodations, housing, food, clothing, entertainment, zero witnesses coming in illegally from Mexico, etc., etc., you folks realized just how preposterous that hoax was, and I hope you made note of the writers promoting it for future reference. If those writers are going to promote such nonsense, they deserve to have lost all credibility with their former readers. (Read the rest here)

The Bumbling Brontosaurus of Bureaucracy
by Bob Wallace

Tell you what. I think bureaucracy killed the dinosaurs. Not a meteorite that plowed into the earth, or cigarettes the way Gary Larson snickered in one of his Far Side cartoons, but bureaucracy, just like the kind you run into at the Department of Motor Vehicles when you walk in with a big wad of documents and see a big Conga-line of people waiting to talk to some cube-shaped lady with an out-of-style hairdo like concrete with Dippity Do.

Now you might be thinking I'm next going to very dramatically say, "If we don't watch it, we could be next." I'm not, because we're not. But some of our institutions have dinosaurish aspects to them, and that's what does them in. And us, too. (Read the rest here)

Bush's Brave New World
by Sheldon Richman

President Bush's little-publicized New Freedom Commission on Mental Health has proposed comprehensive mental-illness screening for all Americans. If this proposal is carried out, which is Bush's intention, no adult or child will be safe from intrusive probing by "experts," backed by drug companies, who believe that mental illness is woefully underdiagnosed and therefore that many millions of people ought to be taking powerful and expensive psychiatric drugs. Schools and doctors' offices will become quasi-psychiatric monitoring stations.

Rep. Ron Paul of Texas tried to forbid the federal government from funding mental-health screening, but the House turned down his amendment to the appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services. Paul, a physician, said the program was a usurpation of parental rights, pointing out that parents can already be charged with child abuse for refusing to give their children Ritalin for alleged attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. He said, "Psychotropic drugs are increasingly prescribed for children who show nothing more than children's typical rambunctious behavior. Many children have suffered harmful effects from these drugs." (Read the rest here)

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