Free Republic

Demagoguery and propaganda are enemies of good governance, but nowhere is that more apparent than in the federal budget, on which Democrats are shameless and too many Republicans are feckless. Sages from American history presciently predicted that our republic would be in jeopardy if voters acquired the power to vote themselves money from the public trough. The U.S. Constitution did not contemplate that the federal government and federal politicians would be able to secure their elective offices through legislative transfers of wealth, but the sordid practice has been with us for decades, and we are paying the price. Politicians can...

Barack Obama's last budget is nothing if not is a grandiose visionary document. No one -- least of all, Congress -- paid much attention to it, because no one cares where this lame-duck president wants the country to go fiscally. But the $4.1 trillion Obama manifesto deserves some inspection, if only because it is crammed with so many awful ideas. Americans should be very clear about what the progressive left wants to do next if they retain the White House, and Obama has proudly shown his hand. I should say at the outset that Republicans have been no fiscal...

On July 3, 2008, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama infamously called President George W. Bush “unpatriotic,” and his polices “irresponsible” for adding $4 Trillion to the country's "credit card." This was almost more than all other US presidents combined, he argued, and therefore was putting America on a dangerous path to fiscal insolvency. Less than six years into his own administration, however, the president has failed to reverse the untenable course set by his predecessor; and, indeed, is making America's heavy debt burden even worse. CNS News reports: The total federal debt of the U.S. government has now increased more than...

A little publicized IRS decision should have conservatives who write about politics very alarmed. The IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of a conservative political organization, the Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty (PHCIL), due to a handful of articles that founder Gary Aldrich wrote in his personal capacity. His decade-old articles simply criticized Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, which the IRS claimed constituted electioneering. The articles were linked to as "alerts" from the PHCIL website. The American Spectator noted, “Although the literature demands that those like Clinton and Kerry be kept out of power, it never specifically says, ‘Don’t vote...

As Democrats begin maneuvering for the 2016 presidential race, there isn't one who would think of disparaging John F. Kennedy's stature as a Democratic Party hero. Yet it's a pretty safe bet that none would dream of running on Kennedy's approach to government or embrace his political beliefs. Today's Democratic Party — the home of Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Al Gore — wouldn't give the time of day to a candidate like JFK. The 35th president was an ardent tax-cutter who championed across-the-board, top-to-bottom reductions in personal and corporate tax rates, slashed tariffs to promote free trade, and even...

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free. -- Ronald Reagan Those who attack American culture and tradition should recall that historically, freedom and prosperity are the aberrations, not servitude and poverty. Our nation's success is not a happy accident or part of...

Well apparently a president can’t just make new lows for respect of American moral authority in one single term and then let it go at that. Nope. Apparently after getting stiff-armed by our ideological enemies once in the first Obama term- turning his back on American values and getting called out on it- the administration felt the need to demonstrate crumbling American might and values by going back to that well early in the second term too. During the first term, we suffered the embarrassment of the Chinese Communist who publicly lectured Obama about straying away from capitalism and taking...

Well apparently a president can’t just make new lows for respect of American moral authority in one single term and then let it go at that. Nope. Apparently after getting stiff-armed by our ideological enemies once in the first Obama term- turning his back on American values and getting called out on it- the administration felt the need to demonstrate crumbling American might and values by going back to that well early in the second term too. During the first term, we suffered the embarrassment of the Chinese Communist who publicly lectured Obama about straying away from capitalism and taking...

PinocchiObama is at it again, using his weekly address to the nation to spin tall tales, demonize and scapegoat Republicans, misidentify the nation's problems, and propose the exact wrong solutions. He opened up this week's fiction with the umpteenth repetition of his empty claim that the nation's top priority "must be growing the economy, creating good jobs and rebuilding opportunity for the middle class." How many times has Obama promised to "pivot" toward a "laserlike focus" on jobs? How interesting that he chose to repeat this very same claim just as the Government Accountability Institute released a report concluding that...

If you are a regular reader of this column, you know, unfortunately, there is a consistent theme that derives from the Left’s constant attempt to develop new rationale to extract money for the ever-expanding cost of government. President Obama dropped his latest stink bomb on hard working Americans with the release of his delinquent budget. He is coming after your 401 (k). This was a shocking development to us, but apparently this idea has been floating around the “Leftist-sphere.” While researching the proposal we read a column from the Brookings Institute touting the proposal to cap the amount of money...

House Speaker John Boehner took a lot of heat in January when he rubber-stamped the president’s job-crushing tax increases. Indeed, an entire movement sprang up on Twitter -- symbolized by the hashtag #FireBoehner -- in the weeks prior to the “compromise” urging conservative members of Congress to oust him from his position of leadership in part because he publicly proposed tax hikes as part of the negotiations. The initiative failed, of course, but that didn’t stop Republicans from bristling at Boehner’s supposed betrayal and questioning his leadership. Now, it seems, that’s all water under the bridge -- at least for...

As President Obama joined four ex-presidents for the dedication of a facility honoring his immediate predecessor, comparisons were unavoidable. Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were teenagers during the depression. The childhoods of Bill Clinton and the honoree, George W. Bush, spanned the 1950s. Generational and political differences jump out from any perusal of these five presidencies. But on a cool, sun-splashed morning in Dallas, there was harmony all around for the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Center. But as soon as the kind words of the morning were concluded, I dove back into the messy remains of...

This week, the Obama administration furloughed 14,500 air traffic controllers -- staffers will lose two days of work per month -- ostensibly to comply with the 2011 Budget Control Act's $85 billion in sequester cuts this year. The Federal Aviation Administration's share is $637 million. So expect delays at the airport. That's the idea, but it didn't have to be. The Obama administration has chosen to hold airline travel hostage in its never-ending effort to extort further tax increases from the GOP. The administration argues that its hands are tied. By law, the FAA must cut spending across the...

Documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that agents for the Internal Revenue Service are bypassing warrants and sifting through the email and other electronic communications of American citizens. Those documents disclosed that "agents were told they didn't need a warrant to root through emails, texts or Facebook pages of people (the IRS) is investigating," according to Fox News. Despite the fact that IRS email surveillance is a clear affront to privacy and civil liberties, last week, the IRS categorically stated that it has done nothing wrong. The agency denies countrywide accusations that it is violating the...

In the American Declaration of Independence, our Founding Fathers proclaimed that we are endowed by our Creator with the unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. Unfortunately, we have long forgotten what our Founders meant by that now iconic phrase—“the pursuit of happiness”—and, as a consequence, we are now in jeopardy of losing the very liberty our Founders purchased for us at the risk of their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. Indeed, if we properly understood what our Founding Fathers meant by the phrase “pursuit of happiness,” a photographer in New Mexico, a pastry business owner in Colorado,...

SO THE MAYOR OF BOSTON, channeling his inner Captain Renault, is shocked – shocked! – to find that Boston's taxi industry is a rigged and pitiless racket. Why, until he read about it in the Boston Globe, Tom Menino never had a clue that in the city he has presided over for 20 years, cabbies are commonly treated like serfs, abused by multimillionaire owners who flout the law with impunity. If it hadn't been for the Spotlight team's detailed exposé, the mayor still wouldn't know about all those besieged Boston cab drivers, most of them immigrants, who have to work...

Cyprus, an island most people have forgotten exists, became the center of the world when they put forward a bizarre plan to solve their economic crisis. The leaders of Cyprus proposed a wealth tax that would take funds directly from people’s bank accounts. The plan was abandoned, but the idea behind it still lives on. A recent run-in that we had with the Washington Post shows just how far they are willing to go to foist a bad idea upon us. The Left has been churning some ideas to change our society, most of which will expand the reach of...

It’s the easiest thing in the world to be a pessimist, and the least American. We’re optimists, and as tough as things are, as many skirmishes as we’ve lost, we haven’t lost this country to the left quite yet. If you had to choose between being them or us, you’d be crazy to choose being them. We’re going to win, and America is going to rise again. Pessimism is a cop-out, an excuse to do nothing and wait for the end instead of figuratively fixing bayonets and charging head-long into the enemy. That military metaphor is no accident, because...

In the balancing act going on in Washington right now, for one side the term is layered with meaning, while for the other, its meaning could not be clearer. For President Obama and the Democrats, first and foremost balance means making sure the “wealthiest Americans” ante up and pay their “fair share.” Never mind those in the highest tax brackets are now paying the highest rates that they have paid in over three decades, while middle and lower brackets are paying the lowest. As for applying the term to budgets, the Democrats take a far more libertine position. Barack Obama...

The seemingly omnipresent storm clouds hanging over the Constitution often make it hard to find a silver lining. Every day, the front page of The Drudge Report is littered with stories of government assaults on our civil liberties -- from local government officials all the way up to the Oval Office. Even heroic actions, such as Rand Paul’s recent filibuster in opposition to the unchecked use of drones on U.S. soil, are met by scornful catcalls from Grumpy Old Guard politicians who long ago seemed to have lost even the most basic understanding of our Bill of Rights. But,...