Free Republic

I'll make you a deal: I'll quit accusing Democrats of obstructing spending and entitlement reform when they quit obstructing spending and entitlement reform. Now we even have the nonpartisan, sterile, unflappable Congressional Budget Office virtually predicting a "fiscal crisis," yet the Democratic Senate hasn't passed a budget for 785 days. There ought to be a law. At what point will we go into panic mode? Frankly, I can't comprehend how people are so calm now. The major components of this fiscal doomsday outlook are entitlements -- the unfunded promises approaching $100 trillion. We need to restructure those -- radically --...

The left's assault on liberty never rests, so don't ever be sucked into supporting the dangerous idea of a new constitutional convention, even if its stated purposes purport to be limited. Recently, CNN's Fareed Zakaria spoke admiringly of how "Iceland is actually junking its own constitution and starting anew and ... soliciting ideas from all of Iceland's 320,000 citizens, with the help of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube." Zakaria beamed as he ticked off some of the wonderful ideas proposed by Icelanders, such as "guaranteed good health care" and "campaign finance systems that make corporate donations illegal." Putting aside the obvious...

If you compare the Carter malaise with the Obama debt doomsday machine, any GOP 2012 presidential candidate should sail to victory with greater facility than Ronald Reagan did in 1980. But will she or he? I am optimistic but also believe that in making his economic case, the Republican candidate will have different challenges because of the ongoing growth of our welfare state and the attitudes it has ushered in, along with heightened class warfare. We could be seeing a paradigm shift in the way people view their social compact with government. More and more people believe that government exists...

If I'd heard the following words, instead of reading them, I might have assumed they were being delivered by a President Obama impressionist on "Saturday Night Live." But the words were from Obama himself in his latest weekly radio address. "I wish I could tell you there was a quick fix to our economic problems," he said. "But the truth is we didn't get into this mess overnight, and we won't get out of it overnight. It's going to take time." Obama has repeated this line ad nauseam ever since it became impossible to deny that reality had shattered his...

Ann Coulter's chilling two-chapter recapitulation of the French Revolution is worth well more than the price of her new book, "Demonic," but that's just a bonus. Also priceless are Coulter's plethora of one-liner skewerings of the liberal mob, but I digress. What make this her best book are her incisive demonstration that the revolution was the mother of the many totalitarian "revolutions" it spawned in the name of the people, her dissection of the mob mentality that drove it, and her case against today's American liberals as exemplars of this mob mentality. She first establishes her base line, defining the...

The liberal media's most recent effort to turn Sarah Palin into a dolt over her version of Paul Revere, on which historians are now defending her, has prompted me to share with you some confusing points of European history I have recently re-encountered in my lay study of the subject. With apologies in advance to professional and amateur historians, here are a few fun "facts." First, the nutshell version: The Roman Empire is not to be confused with the Roman Republic, except that the latter was an extension of the former and is sometimes included in a broader definition of...

Do you think it's conceivable that yet another round of dismal economic news might cause President Obama to finally dig deeply enough in his id to find some hidden humility and consider reversing course? Let's be serious. Why should he do that when it's much easier -- and more profitable politically -- to just demonize Republicans? But will there ever be a time when the inescapable reality of our impending financial panic will compel him and other Democrats to act like grown-ups and help solve this problem before it "solves" itself and destroys countless people and institutions in its wake?...

My advice for the GOP: No more Mr. Nice Guy. No more putting the pretense of civility above the best interests of the nation. Democrats are playing cynical games with our national debt crisis, and it's time they were called out on them -- directly, volubly and repeatedly. Senate Democrats haven't passed their own budget plan in more than two years, despite having strong control of that body. Meanwhile, the nation is teetering on bankruptcy. I don't make that statement lightly. Our national debt is $14.3 trillion, and our federal deficit is $1.65 trillion. This might be less shocking but...

onservatives are worried that an ideal Reagan conservative has yet to emerge and lead the 2012 GOP presidential field. But are we allowing the liberal media (and establishment Republicans) to manipulate the narrative to prevent such a result? Obviously, the liberal media do not have the best interests of Reagan conservatives in mind when they do their "reporting." So when they tell us certain GOP candidates are unelectable or electable, common sense would counsel us to take their advice with mounds of salt. But do we? Surely Ronald Reagan isn't the only qualified, electable Reagan conservative in our lifetimes. Nonetheless,...

What kind of surreal world are we inhabiting where the political party that is trying to address our debt problem is on the defensive at the hands of the reckless party that chooses to mock, demagogue and delay? The national dialogue, at least the one being choreographed by Democrats and their amen chorus in the liberal Beltway media, has been distorted beyond measure. We are asking the wrong questions and getting the wrong answers. Let's focus on the real problem. We are in a national debt crisis -- present tense; this is not something that might occur in the future....

We are living in strange times indeed when it's not laughable to suggest that President Obama will be difficult to beat in 2012. Well, I'm not buying it, even considering any positive (but inevitably temporary) surge Obama may receive with Osama bin Laden's death. In 2008, as an economic crisis played into his hands, Obama ran against an uninspiring opponent in John McCain, campaigned on grandiose promises in lieu of a record, and cultivated and rode a mainstream media wave based on a myth of his messiahship. Yet he still only won with 53 percent of the vote. Obama had...

The governing class in Washington has no excuse for not having addressed our spending issues and formulating a comprehensive federal debt retirement plan before we approached another debt ceiling threshold. At every possible opportunity, politicians convince themselves that it's always better to kick the can down the road -- Democrats because they aren't remotely serious about debt reduction, Republicans because they're afraid of their own shadow. Democrats don't need an excuse. It's a given that they would rather continue printing money and hurtle the nation toward financial bankruptcy in the name of compassion. They want to keep paying their constituents...

Everyone but the blind and reckless agrees that the United States faces a dire financial crisis. But only one of the two major political parties is offering a plan that has a reasonable chance of averting this crisis and restoring the nation to financial health. Obama's ever-changing proposals, allegedly designed to tackle the problem, simply could not work. One of the following must be true: He doesn't agree that the crisis is grave, doesn't understand that his policies can't work, doesn't have the same vision about America as most of us, or doesn't intend for his policies to work. Some...

I am beginning to wonder whether President Obama is so cocky about his 2012 re-election prospects that he thinks he doesn't even have to be serious in his budget plan offerings. Unfortunately, the nation's unfunded liabilities aren't so casual as the president; they are growing by more than $10 trillion per year, which means that our looming debt crisis becomes far more problematic with each passing day. I invite you to compare Obama's recently submitted plans with either Paul Ryan's "Path to Prosperity" or his own bipartisan deficit commission's recommendations. Or, if you're the risk-taking type, you may want to...

In my book "Crimes Against Liberty," I described President Obama as dishonest, hyper-partisan, a bully, a narcissist and a hard-core left-wing ideologue. Anyone who thinks my description is exaggerated or too harsh didn't hear his Wednesday speech on the budget. One might have expected that a newly elected president who had "inherited" such a disturbingly high deficit, a growing national debt, and a forecast of unfunded entitlements soon to explode because of baby boomer demographics alone would roll up his sleeves and tackle this deficit and debt problem. Instead, Obama saw that $1.3 trillion deficit, licked his Marxist chops, and...

The Republicans did not win this budget fight, but the cuts they were able to extract illustrate, ironically, that Democrats are finally on the defensive. Scorekeeping aside, we must build on this non-victory because it was also a Democratic retreat. Last week, I argued that the GOP should not cave on the budget negotiations for many reasons, including that today is not 1995-96. Things are so much different now, especially because of the existential threat to the republic that the exploding national debt represents. Not surprisingly, my position didn't prevail. The Republicans reneged on their promise to cut $100 billion...

My brother, Rush, said on his program Thursday that Donald Trump, in taking the fight directly to President Obama, has provided a winning blueprint for defeating him in 2012. Rush was referring to the way in which Trump -- think what you will about him and his politics -- has boldly challenged President Obama on a number of issues, including the notorious birth certificate fracas, obviously unconcerned about fallout from the liberal media. The issue here is not Obama's birth certificate; it is Trump's aggressive, offensive posture in challenging Obama across the board. He rightly recognizes that America's financial condition...

Do you believe Rep. Paul Ryan when he says we only have a few years left to get our fiscal house in order, or we're going to face European-type austerity? How about the co-chairmen of the bipartisan deficit commission, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, who have essentially issued the same warning? Have you taken a hard look at President Obama's 10-year budget with a view to whether it would marginally address the crisis? Are you aware of the gargantuan deficits it projects -- averaging some $1 trillion per year -- and that this is before considering the Congressional Budget Office's...

President Obama's decision to bomb Libya is not even so multilateral as President George W. Bush's decision to attack Iraq. Nor is it ultimately driven by humanitarian concerns -- and certainly not by any vital U.S. national interest. Despite Obama's vilification of Bush for his alleged unilateralism, "Obama's 'coalition of the willing,'" according to foreign policy reporter Josh Rogin, "is smaller than any major multilateral operation since the end of the Cold War." Obama's Libyan intervention is more unilateral than Dubya's in another respect, as well: Obama has brazenly refused even to consult Congress, much less seek its blessing. As...

Everyone seems to have a different theory about why President Obama attacked Libya when he did and what his ultimate purpose is, because he has been so adamantly against similar uses of military force and reluctant even to voice his support for some democratic movements. I don't think it's that mysterious. Commentators have been mystified by Obama's vacillation, his indecisiveness and his apparent apathy about foreign policy. I do think that Obama far prefers domestic policy to foreign policy and that he wants to focus most of his attention on redistributing wealth, administering "economic justice" and otherwise fundamentally changing America....