Bob Lord

Bob has mostly wound down his 39-year career as a tax and business lawyer (with a 1-year interruption to run for Congress in 2008 (CD3), when he tried to unseat John Shadegg. Bob now serves as the senior advisor on tax policy for the Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy Americans who believe the light taxation of America's rich is destabilizing our democracy, and as an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. Bob has been writing for Blog For Arizona since late 2011, concentrating mostly on federal issues, with an occasional foray into Arizona state politics.

Diane Feinstein Jumps The Shark

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Posted by Bob Lord This is the most moronic statement I've seen from a pol in quite awhile, and that's saying something (from today's Times lead editorial): The defense of this practice offered by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who as chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be preventing this sort of … Read more

America’s Decline At The Micro Level

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Posted by Bob Lord

The debate about America's decline has been going on for years. It's predicted from both the right and left. Pat Buchanan's books, Where The Right Went Wrong and Day of Reckoning, both are excellent, if you put aside the racist screed in Day of Reckoning. Kevin Philips', American Theocracy, is excellent as well.

The debate takes place at the macro level. The focus is on developments such as military over-engagement, contraction in the manufacturing sector, a bloated, unproductive financial sector, or the dependence on an outdated form of energy. Those who believe we're in decline draw parallels to the decline of earlier societies. Buchanan made the point that both Britain and Germany ensured their own declines by exhausting themselves in World Wars One and Two, and America is doing the same now with its endless wars. Philips points out how America, like Britain and Spain before it, believes it can survive economically by acting as the banker of the world, while it consumes more than it produces. 

But what happens at the micro-level?

Follow Up On Obama Torture (Yes, It Sucks Even Worse)

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Posted by Bob Lord

I posted a few days back on the Obama administration's use of torture at Guantanamo. This a follow-up.

I'm part way through Jeremy Scahill's, Dirty Wars, and came upon this quote from Lawrence Wilkerson, describing the reliance by Special Ops forces on faulty intelligence:

You go in and you get some intelligence, and usually your intelligence comes through this apparatus too, and so you say, 'Oh, this is really good actionable intelligence. Here's "Operation Blue Thuder." Go do it.' And they go do it, and they kill 27, 30, 40 people, whatever, and they capture seven or eight. Then you find out that the intelligence was bad and you killed a bunch of innocent people and you have a bunch of innocent people on your hands, so you stuff 'em in Guantanamo. No one knows anything about that. (emphasis mine)

When you put that next to what's happened with the Guantanamo detainees, it's ugly. Ugly as in "this is what the history books will say about America 50 years from now."

Success, At Last, Sort Of

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Posted by Bob Lord I really don't have huge aspirations as a writer. My style is far too wooden, and it takes me far too long to crank out a few measly paragraphs. My only two goals, and this is admittedly goofy, have been to be published in a print newspaper and to have a … Read more