Free Republic

The first urban political machine was named after a fictional Indian saint unrecognized by any church and whose name, when pronounced with a Y at the end, began to strike many as Irish which only further confused the issue. The godfather of that machine was another fictional saint who became Thomas Jefferson's vice president after successfully rigging an election using a phony water company that eventually became Chase Bank, was tried for murder after killing the first Secretary of the Treasury, was tried for treason after a conspiracy to make himself King of Mexico and plotted to convince New England...

The urban political machine was born in New York but died in Chicago. It’s no longer a separate entity from the rest of the country; one of the inconveniences of urban life along with smog, muggings and excessive regulation. The urban political machine has gone national. It’s here. It’s there. It’s everywhere. You may disapprove of New York’s soda ban or Chicago’s love affair with gun control or Los Angeles’ pandering to illegal aliens; but what happens in the country’s blighted metropolises no longer stays there. You can live surrounded by ten thousand acres of wilderness on one side and...

Apparently America has too many jobs so Obama will be spending taxpayer money to support Russia’s defense industry on behalf of Afghanistan. And he’s doing so over the bipartisan objections of Congress from both the right and left and a ban on buying them written into the NDAA. The US Department of Defense said Thursday it plans to sidestep a Congressional ban to purchase 30 helicopters from Russian state-owned defense firm Rosoboronexport, despite objections from US lawmakers who allege that the firm has equipped the Syrian government to commit brutal crimes against civilians.

The first rule of Jihad Club is that there's no talking about it. For the second rule, see the first rule. The culture of silence and terrorism denial is sometimes well meaning. Since the Bush days, experts on Islam have warned that the best way to defeat Islamic terrorists is to undermine their claim to fighting on behalf of Islam by refusing to call them Islamic. The sheer brilliance of this strategy was only partly undermined by its origins in Saudi Arabia, the country sponsoring Islamic terrorists, and by the fact that recruiting primarily takes place in media and channels...

THAT IS NOT THE ROOSEVELT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR Bull Moose Sportsmen is a front for some figures in the Colorado Democratic Party. Its name and use of T.R. is yet another tiresome effort to co-opt Teddy Roosevelt for the left’s causes. What would Teddy Roosevelt have thought of being exploited by the gun control crowd? “The great body of our citizens shoot less as times goes on. We should encourage rifle practice among schoolboys, and indeed among all classes, as well as in the military services by every means in our power," Roosevelt said. "The first step – in...

In the rapist’s defense, his lawyer argued that he wasn’t at all clear about this whole “Women are human beings” thing. Mr Regan said Esmatullah Sharifi was uneducated, illiterate, inexperienced in forming relationships with women, and was confused about the nature of consent. He is in Australia on a permanent protected visa. The judge didn’t buy it then, but the usual lefty approach is to just keep appealing until you find a bleeding heart judge who accepts the horrible notion being put forward. And that didn’t take very long.

All politics are the politics of the future. The one cause that we all champion, regardless of our political orientation, is the cause of the future. All that we fight for is the ability to shape the future. The fundamental political question is, "Do you believe things are getting better or worse?" Ruling parties tend to answer, "Better", opposition parties tend to answer, "Worse". The deeper answer to that question though lies in our perceptions of the past and the future. The left tends to view the past negatively and future shock positively. It wants change to disrupt the old...

State Department “Ramping Up” Program to Bring Muslim Students to the USPosted By Daniel Greenfield On April 1, 2013 @ 7:00 pm In The Point | 16 Comments Apparently the United States is suffering from a surplus of skyscrapers and passenger jet planes. The State Department is hoping that their program can stimulate the economy through some creative destruction. The idea of “education diplomacy” has “really arrived” at the highest levels of American foreign policy, a US State Department official has told an international higher education conference.Meghann Curtis, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Academic Programs at the US Department of State’s...

The only question worth asking about gay marriage is whether anyone on the left would care about this crusade if it didn't come with the privilege of bulldozing another civilizational institution. Gay marriage is not about men marrying men or women marrying women, it is about the deconstruction of marriage between men and women. That is a thing that many men and women of one generation understand but have trouble conveying to another generation for whom marriage has already largely been deconstructed. The statistics about the falling marriage rate tell the tale well enough. Marriage is a fading institution. Family...

As another Passover begins, the echoes of "Once we were slaves and now we are free" and "Next year in Jerusalem" resound briefly and then fade into the background noise of everyday life. We can board a plane tomorrow and fly off to Jerusalem. Some of us are already there now. But will that make us free? Since Egypt we have become slaves again, lived under the rule of iron-fisted tyrants and forgotten what the very idea of freedom means. And that will likely happen again and again until the age ends. What is this freedom that we gained with...

Forget the World's Fair, we now have a new way to celebrate human accomplishment. Instead of seeing a vision of the future, we turn off the lights and sit in the dark for an hour. Earth Hour shows how far we have come from celebrating human accomplishment to celebrating the lack of accomplishment as an accomplishment. For all the pretense of activism, environmentalism celebrates inaction. Don't build, don't create and don't do-- are its mandates. Turn off the lights and feel good about how much you aren't doing right now. Environmentalism has degenerated into a conviction that all human activity...

I’m still waiting for the Hitler quote. Or is there a minimum number of people that a dictator has to murder before he gets placement on a part of the Department of Education website devoted to kids. This isn’t a generic quote about education being a good thing. It’s actually a quote about the need for Communist indoctrination among Communist Party members. The full quote that the Department of Education cut down comes at the end of an essay on “The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War” “Whoever refuses to study these problems seriously and carefully...

"War is peace," entered our cultural vocabulary some sixty-four years ago. Around the same time that Orwell's masterpiece was being printed up, an armistice was being negotiated between Israel and the Arab invading armies. That armistice began the long peaceful war or the warring peace. The entire charade did not properly enter the realm of the Orwellian until the peace process began. The peace process between Israel and the terrorist militias funded by the countries of those invading armies has gone on for longer than most actual wars. It has also taken more lives than most actual wars. War has...

The one question I invariably encounter in a conservative movement that tends toward the gray side is how to engage the youth. And the answer is usually nothing that the questioners want to hear. Now the Republican Party has laid the corpse of the last election on the slab and come up with the expected answers. Some of them are correct, albeit belated. Many others are the sorts of things that the squishy side of the party has been recommending for a while. The Republican Party has gone from denying that there is a culture war to conceding defeat in...

Time and time again, the liberal defenders of government power have attacked any call for reform as a plot by the wealthy. Even now New York Times editorialists pound their keys about the "Concentration of Wealth", invoking presidents from Andrew Jackson to Theodore Roosevelt. But in our America, the "Concentration of Wealth" is not found in the hands of a few billionaires. It is found in the hands of the government. The editorialists talk about the income gap and how much wealth is held by the top 1 percent of the country, but they are leaving something out. Their statistics...

To understand how we got to the point that spending hundreds of millions of dollars to support a government run by people who have been at war with us for almost a century is a policy that most foreign policy experts endorse, it helps to take a brief trip back in time. In the last century, our big three wars, the two we fought and the one we didn’t, were against enemies who were seen as being distinguished by a lack of democracy, with the Kaiser, the Fuhrer and the Commissar embodying the antithesis of the American system.The Democratic Party,...

If you heard one theme that Obama has been on about at the beginning of both of his terms, it’s infrastructure. During his last campaign, Obama even described it as “Nation Building at Home”, implicitly admitting that he beat down America to the level of Iraq or post-war Japan. All the bridges, we were told, were seconds away from falling down. The highways were full of potholes. The schools were leaning farther than a Pisan tower and if we didn’t build light rail across California, all the illegal aliens would have no choice but to run down pedestrians without a...

Regardless of how many wars on poverty are declared and how often calls are issued to make the rich pay their fair share, neither the rich nor the poor will be going anywhere anytime soon. The question is what forces will keep the poor impoverished and where the rich will derive their wealth from. The founder of Subway recently said that he could not have started up his company today. Similar messages have come from the founders and heads of other major companies. That isn't to say that companies will cease to exist. What we think of as business has...

The left has never adapted to the transition from nationalistic wars to ideological wars. It took the left a while to grasp that the Nazis were a fundamentally different foe than the Kaiser and that pretending that World War 2 was another war for the benefit of colonialists and arms dealers was the behavior of deluded lunatics. And yet much of the left insisted on approaching the war in just that fashion, and had Hitler not attacked Stalin, it might have remained stuck there. The Cold War was even worse. The moderate left never came to terms with Communism. From...

I recall Obama talking a lot about “Nation-Building at Home” instead of abroad, but like every other word that comes out of his mouth, that was another lie. While Barack Hussein Obama is firing 20,000 Marines as part of his massive purge of the United States military to “save money”, he’s also fighting to send $700 million to the terrorists of the Palestinian Authority. On Feb 8th, Obama issued yet another waiver for Palestinian Authority aid, claiming that sending money to the corrupt undemocratic terrorist kleptocracy that refuses to negotiate a peaceful solution was “important to the national security interests...