Free Republic

At 1:00p mountain time this afternoon a District Court Judge will hear arguments in a number of motions seeking a temporary restraining order to block enforcement of New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s authoritarian suspension of gun rights in the state’s largest city and county.

... A Once-in-a-Century FigureTrump vs DeSantis has long been billed as a battle between heavyweights. But is that putting too much expectation on the Florida governor?... The polls show the hill DeSantis has to climb.Right now, RealClearPolitics polling averages show Trump with a massive 37% lead over DeSantis, sitting at 56.3% support of GOP voters. DeSantis has dropped to 19.4%, Pence at 5.6%, Nikki Haley at 4.3%, Vivek Ramaswamy at 3.6% and Sen. Tim Scott at 1.8. (The poll period was from 4/21 to 5/18, before Scott’s announcement.)Which gets to our major point:DeSantis Has to Win the Not-Trump Position FirstDeSantis’s...

...When the VIP event was done, we had a half hour in the schedule for me to interview Tucker for an upcoming issue of Thinking Minnesota. His answers to my questions were breathtakingly candid. Several times I thought to myself, “Did he really just say that?”... At the same time, I could see that there was no sign of a speech tucked into his coat pocket. I began to worry about whether he had actually prepared a speech for our event. So I asked what he intended to talk about. “Oh, mostly just some recent developments in Washington,” he answered.Soon...

Whenever there is a mass shooting it is usually wise to wait until full details are available, as early reports are often wrong or incomplete. I did think it odd this morning that the mass shooter at the Christian school in Nashville was reported to be a female, as female mass shooters are extremely rare... Then it was reported that the shooter was transgender, and my first assumption was that the shooter was a male after all. But further information reveals that the shooter was in fact a female...Coincidentally, this morning before the gender angle to this shooting was revealed,...

As a follow up to our previous item asking questions about our grand strategy toward Russia, Iran, and the Ukranian war (such as whether the Biden Administration has a grand strategy at all), this item from today’s Wall Street Journal jumps out:Yet the largest ground war in Europe since World War II isn’t translating into boom times for U.S. defense contractors. Hobbled by supply chain disruptions, a tight labor market and a Pentagon procurement process that can take years, arms makers have been struggling to respond to the soaring demand. . .When the Pentagon ordered new Stinger antiaircraft missiles—widely used...

... Washington’s formulation calls for balancing interest and justice. While in terms of justice, we should offer Ukraine as much support as we can afford, that support is necessarily limited by our own interests. One such interest is to avoid being drawn into an unnecessary war. Another is to be able to fight a war if it should come. Regarding the first, as I recently wrote in GoLocalProv, “The desire to aid Ukraine in repelling Russian aggression is understandable, but our policymakers have to ask themselves if we, like the European leaders of 1914, are sleepwalking into a war, the...

Donald Trump said Tuesday that federal regulators should increase the amount of ethanol blended into the nation’s gasoline supply. Speaking at an event hosted by the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association, Trump, a real estate mogul and the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, said the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ought to follow the ethanol volumes Congress set in 2007. “The EPA should ensure that biofuel ... blend levels match the statutory level set by Congress under the [renewable fuel standard],” Trump said. The mandate is popular in Iowa, which hosts the nation's first caucuses.

The way D.C. political operatives are reacting to the news that Liz Cheney is challenging Sen. Mike Enzi in the Wyoming GOP primary, you’d think the Republican Party had another Sharron Angle on their hands — someone so much more conservative and rhetorically unrestrained than the incumbent or establishment candidate that she wins the primary only to lose a winnable general election race by a wide margin.Well, Cheney is famously unrestrained. But that’s about where the similarities end. Wyoming is so deep red that the winner of the GOP primary will sail through the general, no matter who it is....

Yesterday, I posted about the NEA conference call’s clear and obvious violations of the Anti-Lobbying Act (19 U.S. Code §1913), which explicitly provides: “No part of the money appropriated by any enactment of Congress shall, in the absence of express authorization by Congress, be used directly or indirectly to pay for any personal service, advertisement, telegram, telephone, letter, printed or written matter, or other device, intended or designed to influence in any manner a Member of Congress, a jurisdiction, or an official of any government, to favor, adopt, or oppose by vote or otherwise, any legislation, law, ratification, policy, or...

Policy-makers not only misunderstand the economic crisis, they continue to underestimate it. Consequently, solutions to date have not only failed to “fix” anything, they have made the problem worse. The problem isn’t falling asset prices, it’s not rising foreclosures, it’s too much debt. With an assist from mark-to-market accounting,* too much debt inflated the asset bubble in the first place. Yves Smith has it exactly right that the only “solution” to this crisis is price discovery, to allow asset prices to fall to whatever level they need to in order for markets to clear. This is bad news for over-levered...

... The IRA: But doesn't the reaction to this crisis by a nominally Republican administration suggest that America is not the democratic, free market society we all pretend? The Paulson plan would leave the US government as the largest owner of banks and illiquid assets in the country. Does no one in the Bush administration and the Congress care about what happens beyond the next five minutes? Caps on executive compensation will be only the beginning of a process that will lead to wage and price controls as inflation rises. If this idiocy by the Democrats in Congress continues, we're...

...But Obama did not decide only that "community organizing" was not for him. Judis reports the future senator took part in a September 1989 symposium in which he "rejected the guiding principles of community organizing: the elevation of self-interest over moral vision; the disdain for charismatic leaders and their movements; and the suspicion of politics itself." Later, Obama "would begin to construct a political identity for himself that was not simply different from his identity as a community organizer--but was, in fact, its very opposite."...

A controversial new Hillary Clinton attack ad is causing an Internet stir among critics who claim it deliberately darkens Barack Obama’s skin color. A posting on the liberal site Dailykos.com shows side-by-side screen grabs of Barack Obama taken during a debate with Clinton in Cleveland last week. The screen grab used in the Clinton ad shows a clearly darker-skinned Obama, prompting some to wonder if it was done to highlight his race. One posting on the site charged that while darkening footage may be considered standard practice for political ads trying to “cast the target as sinister,” it is “not...

... Couching his policy positions in the language of faith and morality, Mr. Huckabee portrays himself as the dream candidate of the religious right... ...But one wonders whether his newfound supporters would really say that if they took a close look at his policies. With increasing frequency, Mr. Huckabee invokes his faith when advocating greater government involvement in just about every aspect of American life. In doing so, Mr. Huckabee has actually answered the prayers of the religious left...

In explaining our aversion to Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign, so far we've covered his views on health and taxes. Whatever a candidate's shortcomings on domestic subjects, though, sound ideas and instincts on foreign policy can go a long way to compensate. (Conversely, however fun-crazy Ron Paul's domestic views may be, his scary-crazy foreign-policy notions disqualify him even as a protest vote.)

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser and Chicago Fed President Charles Evans both strongly suggested that they are not in favor of an additional rate cut at the next policy meeting on Dec. 11. Fed watchers were watching the two regional bank president's remarks closely for any sign that they was softening their tone on further rate cuts given the renewed strains in credit markets over the past two weeks. But there were no such signs. In a speech at the University of Rochester, Plosser said the Fed cannot resolve the cause of the tension in financial markets,...