Free Republic

A British court has held that Britain’s National Health Service, which has long been the gold standard of socialized medicine, can stop treating a 19-year-old woman who is conscious and wants to live. This is the natural endpoint of the rationing that is inherent in socialized medicine. Ostensibly, socialized medicine promises to give top-quality healthcare to everyone. And if you’re a national treasure like Stephen Hawking, you will get that type of care, because it looks really bad if the government lets a renowned physicist with a degenerative disease die because treating him sucks up too many government resources. However,...

Will he choose who would be best for the country, or will it be someone who appeals to a special demographic group? The latter would be misguided. Women do not necessarily vote for women, for example.

Does anybody else think all the righteous indignation over the video parody of Leroy Brown at a retired cop's party - including calls for attendees to be fired, lose their pensions, etc., and the Elks Club somehow to be punished - is awfully odd, considering the recent hoo-ha over "The Interview" and all the demands for Sony, in the name of the First Amendment and creative freedom, not to let North Korean hackers push us around ? Or is it only me?

President Obama is auditioning American Idle contestants. These non-producers of our society stole the show at his town meeting in Ft. Meyers, Florida on February 10, 2009. It was like watching a Saturday Night Live skit when a parade of sad sacks asked for handouts. Henrietta Hughes tearfully begged the President for a car, a kitchen and a bathroom. Julio Osegueda, overcome in spontaneous euphoria, asked the president what his plans are for giving him better benefits at his job for McDonald's. A man, who was recently laid off and receiving the forced generosity of the American people through his...

The stock market has not run into problems because the government hasn't done enough to support the financial system. It has fallen off a cliff because monetary and fiscal authorities are doing the wrong things. America's two most powerful economic officials, both unelected, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, embrace a 21st - century "New Deal," when our problems cry out for economic Darwinism. The Paulson - Bernanke prescriptions are the problem and the stock market knows it.

Hollywood used to be called the Dream Factory, but nowadays it seems to be grinding out as much propaganda as anything else. Next off the weary assembly line: Oliver Stone's "W.," which opens on Friday. If the trailer is any indication, this movie will depict our current president's life as an evolution from drunken loser to dangerous idiot -- and just in time for the election, too. The director of "Nixon" and "JFK," Stone has shown himself to be a master of rewriting reality until it resembles his left-wing ideology, but he's by no means alone. For the past 30...

The bailouts of individual firms and the $700 billion Treasury package AVOID market pricing of assets and assure that essential information is kept from the markets, lenders and everyone else. Money is unavailable to many. This is occurring in an economy flush with cash, much of which will be used to purchase government securities. In other words, the Fed has flooded the system with liquidity, while at the same time preventing the needed market transactions to price hard - to -value mortgage-backed and other assets. Liquidity is not going to support productive economic activity, it is going into government bonds....

Watch this. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=418_1176494781

The novel, it used to be said, brings the news about our social and moral condition. In the West, many novelists have taken to abdicating that role in favor of political fantasy, epistemological sport, or the fingering of psychosexual wounds. But in the Islamic world, or so it would seem from a number of recently published translations, novels still focus on the great public questions as they shape individual consciousness and conduct. As a way into that world’s understanding of itself, fiction may afford a deeper and more variegated view of reality than the one that comes to us on...

Has anybody heard the overnight talk show on KGO (San Francisco, where else), hosted by Ray Tagliafero? The guy is rabid and full of out-and-out lies. He is the nastiest person I've ever heard if somebody calls to disagree with him, no matter how polite. Prager, Medved and Limbaugh are very courteous with disagreeing callers, letting them talk and having genuine discourse with them. Tagliafero uses sophistry, interruption, ridicule and a loud, resonant voice, then he hangs up and spends the next 10 minutes badmouthing the caller (who then cannot defend himself). He is just disgusting. I would be interested...

BY NOW IT'S UNDENIABLE: The New York Times is a national security threat. So drunk is it on its own power and so antagonistic to the Bush administration that it will expose every classified antiterror program it finds out about, no matter how legal the program, how carefully crafted to safeguard civil liberties, or how vital to protecting American lives. The Times's latest revelation of a national security secret appeared on last Friday's front page--where no al Qaeda operative could possibly miss it. Under the deliberately sensational headline, "Bank Data Sifted in Secret by U.S. to Block Terror," the Times...

THE BRITISH State has come under severe criticism following the Forest Gate raid for its intelligence failures in the fight against terrorism. But the biggest failure of all in the battle against Islamist extremism has gone practically unnoticed. Tony Blair has acknowledged that the fight against Islamist terrorism cannot be restricted to a police action against isolated individuals or small groups. Last summer he spelt out that a much broader effort is required to tackle, at root, the ideology of Islamism that has bewitched so many minds. But in the struggle against extremism the British State has failed to tackle...

I can see it now, I think. It is on the right-hand page of a book by or about Winston Churchill, and it is a quotation by Churchill on the subject of war. Specifically, what happens to a civilized society when it goes to war with a barbarous one. I can't find it (yet), but what I remember as being the main point was that if the civilized society is to prevail over the barbarous one, it will necessarily and tragically be degraded by the experience as a vital cost of victory. Partly, this is because civilized war tactics are...

THE PRESIDENT believes and often states, as if it were a self-evident truth, that "democracies are peaceful countries." This claim, which has been advanced in the past in regard to Christianity, socialism, Islam and ethical culture, is the postulate on which the foreign policy of the United States now rests. Balance of power, deterrence and punitive action have been abandoned in favor of a scheme to recast the political cultures of broad regions, something that would be difficult enough even with a flawless rationale because the power of even the most powerful country in the world is not adequate to...

Back to you, Mr BlairIt is wrong to put the onus on British Muslims to defeat terror Osama Saeed Saturday July 23, 2005 The GuardianFaced with the events of the past two weeks, it would be the easiest thing in the world for me to say the Muslim community must do more to combat terrorism. Many community figures have done just that. Shahid Malik MP told the Commons: "The challenge is straightforward - that those voices that we have tolerated will no longer be tolerated." This raises the question: did we really hear people planning violence in this country but...

Tomorrow the left wingers plan to inundate the White House and Congress with faxes and emails against the war.The silent majority must make itself heard! We should all start sending TODAY our faxes and emails of support for the president.

The familiar chorus of "tax cuts for the rich" has begun to ring out across the political landscape, in the wake of President Bush's proposals to boost the economy. The time is long overdue to expose some of the fallacies folded up inside that phrase. The dirty little secret is that those defined as "the rich" by liberal politicians include most of the American people, in the course of their lifetimes. Even people who were in the bottom 20 percent in income in 1975 were also in the top 20 percent at some point over the next two decades. There...

This year's General Assembly, which ended on Friday, marked a new low in United Nations bias against Jews and the Jewish state. The three resolutions passed in its final days are a disturbing commentary. On Wednesday, the General Assembly adopted a resolution on Palestinian children. This brings the number of resolutions on the human rights of children to three: one on the rights of the child, one on the "girl child," and one on Palestinian children -- the only children in the world subject to the specific concern of a General Assembly resolution. With its automatic majority on the Palestinian...

Sorry this isn't from print media, but I learned today from a panel consisting of Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, David Horowitz and Steven Emerson that Finland is refusing to sell Israel what are the best gas masks in the world so Israeli men, women and children can PROTECT themselves from (not attack) their enemies! Boycott Nokia.

There are certain moments emblazoned in our minds that we keep separate from the others. For me, they are (in no particular order) getting the game-winning hit in my little league championship game, graduating college, my wedding day, the birth of my children, attending the inauguration of our current president. Now I can add to that attending an event at the White House. I had the good fortune of being included in President Bush's Hanukkah Party at The White House this past week. It was his second annual Hanukkah Party. President Bush is the first President to have such an...