Free Republic

I found a definition of Yin and Yang to be, "In Chinese philosophy, yin and yang (also, yin-yang or yin yang) describes how opposite or contrary forces are actually complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another." It appears that our 2016 presidential election cycle is early on being defined by that philosophy. The question is, can this media-driven divide be good for the future of our Constitutional Republic? In 2008 it was all about the "anti-Bush" sentiment in America heavily fueled by a complicit media....

**SNIP** As recently as 2008, the Democratic Party presented 26 debates, which we mainly remember as the venues that presented Barack Obama with the opportunity to promise that he, unlike Hillary Clinton, would never support anything as preposterous as "the individual mandate," a k a fining people who don't have health insurance. Now the Democratic National Committee is led by Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was the chair of Hillary's 2008 campaign. Any doubts about which candidate she wants to win this time? She declared that any candidates that participated in debates outside of the tightly controlled DNC framework would be...

"Like many other political autodidacts, Ben Carson has an odd obsession with Nazi Germany. On several occasions, the pediatric-neurosurgeon-turned-Republican-presidential-candidate has compared the United States to the Third Reich. Mr. Carson has warned that a Hitler-like figure could rise in America. To understand what is happening in the Obama era, he recommended that people read “Mein Kampf.” And he won’t let go of the myth that the Holocaust would have been “greatly diminished” if Jews in Nazi Germany had been allowed to possess guns. To declare the United States to be “very much like Nazi Germany” is a special kind of...

Commemorating the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel ahead of India's 69th Independence Day, US Secretary of State John Kerry has said India has stood as a beacon for the world. - John Kerry AFP photo Washington - Commemorating the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel ahead of India's 69th Independence Day, US Secretary of State John Kerry has said India has stood as a beacon for the world. "Since 1947, India has stood as a beacon for the world, as an economic power that prides innovation, as a resilient...

Media dereliction of duty to the citizenry I recently watched the movie “Kill the Messenger” which was released in the fall of 2014. It’s the story of journalist Gary Webb who in 1996 began looking into links between Nicaragua’s drug-running Contra rebels and the CIA. He published his findings under the title “Dark Alliance” in the San Jose Mercury News in which he submitted that a US-backed rebel army in Latin America was supplying the drugs that made their way into some of Los Angeles’ poorest neighbourhoods. More importantly, he tied the CIA to the drugs. “For the better part...

The liberal left is always quick to call the United States a democracy Recently, in an interview with Thom Hartmann, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said regarding 2010 Citizens United decision and the 2014 McCutcheon decision, “It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president.” Huffington Post goes on to explain that the decisions were rendered by “five Republican judges on the U.S. Supreme Court.” According to liberal left commentators, experts, political...

This past week was Alexis de Tocqueville’s 210th birthday. This brilliant Frenchman’s insight into our national character still rings true nearly two centuries after he wrote his famous book “Democracy in America.” Ever insightful and prophetic, Tocqueville understood the dangers of big government. He feared that over time big government would strangle the free will of citizens, diminishing our capacity to think and act for ourselves and reducing us to “a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.” But he offered solutions! "He hoped that those having read his prescient book would come to...

Big Apple Mayor Bill de Blasio is a busy guy. He’s got more than enough on his plate already, needing to deal with his city’s skyrocketing crime rate, crushing poverty in the areas that the TV cameras don’t cover and a police force which doesn’t much care for him. Still, he took time out of his busy day on Sunday to talk to John Dickerson on Face the Nation. Strangely, he wasn’t there to talk about Gotham, but rather about Hillary Clinton and her recent calls for expanded early voting around the nation. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio...

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) said on Sunday that Americans would benefit from reformed national voting laws. “We have a democracy problem,” de Blasio told host John Dickerson on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “Our elections are governed by state law and for a long time I’ve believed we need to make a fundamental series of reforms,” he said. “Let’s face it, a lot of the people in the political class have tried to discourage voter involvement and a lot of incumbents prefer a very small electorate,” he added. De Blasio said he disagrees with Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.)...

The U.S. constitution has remained in place with occasional substantive amendments over more than 220 years. U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in a foreword to the book Dollarocracy wrote that, “we cannot govern our own affairs when our national, state, and local debates are bought and sold by billionaires, who use thirty-second commercials to shout down anyone who disagrees…The money and media election complex, producing a slurry of negative ads, spin, and obstruction, is not what the founders intended.” [1] Sanders was right to suggest that the United States’ revered “founding fathers” would be scandalized by the plutocratic madness of the...

The progressive era, fueled by the Fabians, worked to take away more of the voice of the States, and move America towards pure democracy James Madison wrote five times in his essays of the Federalist Papers that we are a republic, and then explained what a republic is. He believed this to be necessary not only so that the Constitution may be properly understood, but because in their argument against the Constitution, the statists of the era were trying to convince the people that a republic, and a democracy, are the same thing. Democracy, in reality, is a transitional form...

Last week, the Ohio Constitutional Modernization Commission abruptly canceled its planned public meeting. On the OCMC’s agenda was to have been the proposed weakening of legislative term limits, from the current eight-year maximum to 12 years, which the august Legislative Branch and Executive Branch Committee had advanced, 8-1, to the full commission. Perhaps the cancelation came from concern that supporters of term limits were riding to the capitol for a news conference to coincide with that now-scuttled meeting of the commission, announcing a campaign to confront this latest gambit against citizen-imposed limits. Goodness, a meeting of this elite tribunal and...

Post-Cold War honeymoon is long over. It was a geopolitical honeymoon that the West should have never taken in the first place After the Cold War ended, much promise was held out that the world would rapidly democratize—particularly states with notoriously poor human rights records such as China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba. Alas, these were utopian dreams. We were told that transferring large amounts of wealth and technology to authoritarian regimes would make them richer and free—only the former took place. We educated their leaders, often at our taxpayers’ expense, with the promise that these Western educated leaders would usher...

Post-Cold War honeymoon is long over. It was a geopolitical honeymoon that the West should have never taken in the first place After the Cold War ended, much promise was held out that the world would rapidly democratize—particularly states with notoriously poor human rights records such as China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba. Alas, these were utopian dreams. We were told that transferring large amounts of wealth and technology to authoritarian regimes would make them richer and free—only the former took place. We educated their leaders, often at our taxpayers’ expense, with the promise that these Western educated leaders would usher...

“Power is the great evil with which we are contending. We have divided power between three branches of government and erected checks and balances to prevent abuse of power. However, where is the check on the power of the judiciary? If we fail to check the power of the judiciary, I predict that we will eventually live under judicial tyranny.” — Patrick Henry Americans are now living under judicial tyranny as one of our greatest patriots Patrick Henry predicted. For those who have forgotten Henry, he is the man who said “give me liberty or give me death.”

The United States of America is a republic, of course. Not a democracy. Yet, it is through democracy — that is, via democratic means — that we maintain the Republic and thus, maintain the bulwark protecting our freedom as individuals. Or not. “We the People” elect our representatives at the local, state and federal level, to serve our interests, and in 49 states (Delaware’s the weirdo) a majority of citizens must vote to approve any change to the foundational contract of that government: the state constitution. That’s wonderful, certainly, except that hardly anyone (that is, hardly anyone not on the...

Springfield, Mo.SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — An LGBT-inclusive non-discrimination ordinance passed by the Springfield, Mo., city council last October, was overturned by voters on Tuesday.With more than 97 percent of the votes tallied, 51.4 percent of voters opted to repeal the ordinance, while 48.5 percent voted to retain the measure.The vote comes following months of campaigning by advocates and opponents of the measure, which added sexual orientation and gender identity to the list of protected categories in employment, housing, and public accommodations.The city council approved the ordinance by a 6-3 vote on October 13.But any celebration was short-lived when, in November, an...

It’s not enough to propose liberal ideas. Eventually, you must use force against your fellow citizens if they don’t embrace them. Coercion is at the heart of the liberal enterprise. Hence, President Obama has unveiled his latest plan to fundamentally transform the United States – mandatory voting. It comes on the heels of his unconstitutional order granting legal status to five million illegal immigrants. Coincidence? Ironically, it also landed the very same day that Hillary Clinton floated the idea that summer camps should be created for adults because we have a “fun deficit.” Perhaps they will get together and create...

The Economist magazine recently published "What's gone wrong with Democracy ... and what can be done to revive it?" The suggestion is that democracy is some kind of ideal for organizing human conduct. That's a popular misconception. The ideal way to organize human conduct is to create a system that maximizes personal liberty for all. Liberty and democracy are not synonymous and most often are opposites. In Federalist Paper No. 10, James Madison explained, "Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an...

Refuting the Belief that the Catholic Church ever supported the notion of the Divine Right of KingsI this article I will help to refute the false belief that the Catholic Church ever supported the so called “Divine Right” of kings. I will show that the concept of “Divine Right” is actually not a Catholic and for most part a medieval concept, but rather a concept which derived from the Late medieval ages, and which found its way into complete acceptance in the Protestant Reformation. Similarly I will show that to much extent the Catholic Church actually helped develop much of...