Free Republic

Politics is the art of shifting the playing field. This is an art Republicans simply don't understand. Perhaps it's because they spend so much time attempting to stop the Democratic snowball from running downhill too quickly, but Republicans in power have an unfortunate tendency to conserve their political capital rather than invest it. That's unfortunate because political capital doesn't accrue when you save it; it degrades. Just as sticking your cash in a mattress is a bad strategy when it comes to investment, inaction in power is a bad strategy when it comes to politics. Democrats understand that political capital...

The Democrats' comprehensive meltdown after their fifth straight election loss is a spectacle worth savoring. They're vacillating between denial and self-flagellation, between consuming depression and delusional optimism. Some are even blaming hacking for the loss. Don't let them fool you; they did not expect carpetbagger Jon Ossoff to lose to Karen Handel in the special election for Georgia's 6th Congressional District. If they had, they would not have poured unprecedented millions into the race. No one but gambling addicts intentionally waste that kind of money. For all the talk about President Donald Trump's being in trouble, the Democratic Party is...

Sherlock Holmes famously solved a mystery by noticing the dog that did not bark. In the recent government shutdown/debt ceiling fight, there was a five-letter dog that didn't bark: T-A-X-E-S. Democrats insisted they wouldn't negotiate until they negotiated, and they insisted that a government shutdown was unprecedented although it was the 17th such shutdown since people started counting under the current budget rules in the late 1970s. But if you read their lips, the two words that were never enunciated, even silently, were "new taxes." This is something new. For more than 30 years, income tax rates have been...