Free Republic

Washington is up to its old political shell game again, this time in an unprecedented way. While Americans are focused upon the Christmas season and the mainstream media on health care and President Barack Obama’s two trips to Europe – last week to Oslo and this week to Copenhagen – the Democratic Congress have slipped major pro-abortion legislation under the radar. First, last Monday the Senate rejected the health-care reform bill amendment introduced by Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, that would have banned federal funds from providing for abortion. Then, on Thursday, the House of Representatives...

Recently, I sat down with a friend who has spent almost three decades working as an intelligence operative in the defense of our nation. During the course of our conversation, I asked him what -- based on his vast experience -- was the number one threat facing our nation? Without even pausing to think about it, he forcefully answered, “Our mainstream media.” More than Al Qaeda, more than homegrown terrorists, more than heavily armed Mexican drug cartels, more than non-existent borders, more than out-of-control and extremely violent domestic gangs, and even more than biological and nuclear terrorism, this dedicated intelligence...

'Tis the season . . . to pick the winners and losers in state politics during a very turbulent 2009 -- and what a banner year for losers it has been. The people of New York are, again, the biggest losers -- burdened as they are with "leaders" who raised taxes and fees $8 billion during one of the worst recessions ever, a dysfunctional Legislature, and an unelected governor who plumbed record-low approval ratings in the polls. The annual list was put together with the help of public officials, government bureaucrats, lobbyists, union leaders and journalists, all of whom talked...

If you are under 30, you really need to read this column and pass it on to your friends. Your elected officials are dooming you to a new sort of bondage, a form of 21st Century slavery, if you will. First, some background. On October 16, 1854, Abraham Lincoln, then a former one-term Congressman, gave a three hour speech in Peoria, Illinois in which he decried the extension of slavery into the territories. The Republican Party was barely three months old. Lincoln warned that slavery was a “monstrous injustice” based on the raw principle of “self-interest” at odds with the...

Politics: Sen. Mary Landrieu was the new "Louisiana Purchase." Sen. Ben Nelson got the federal government to pick up his state's future Medicaid tab. Maybe we should just put Senate votes up on eBay. Nelson, the 60th vote in the middle-of-the-night Senate party line vote on health care reform, will go down in American political history as the inventor of the permanent earmark. His seemingly principled stand against including federal funding for abortion evaporated like the morning dew as he decided to take what was behind door No. 1. The deal for Nelson includes special Medicaid funding for Nebraska, along...

Avatarocious Another spectacle hits an iceberg and sinks. by John Podhoretz 12/28/2009, Volume 015, Issue 15 AvatarDirected by James Cameron Avatar, we are told, does things with cameras and computers and actors that have never been done before. Its painstaking combination of real-life action and animation has, we are told, taken cinema to a new level. It cost anywhere from $328 million to $500 million, we are told, and took four years to make. It is a breakthrough, we are told, the boldest step into the future of filmmaking, an unparalleled achievement. What they didn't tell us is that Avatar...

  'Twill be the night before Christmas when the Senate delivers the top item on White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's wish list: a health-care bill. But like the beautifully wrapped gift that looks so wonderful under the tree, this health-care legislation might start to look more like the ghastly sweater from your Aunt Tilly once it comes out of the box. Give Majority Leader Harry Reid his due. Notwithstanding the grumblings about the way he did it, getting the 60 senators he needed to avoid a Republican filibuster was an achievement. Assuming the House and Senate work...

The enormous and helter-skelter expansions of the federal government seem to be sinking the president's approval ratings. President Obama's approval rating has sunk below 50% for the first time, but for our money the bigger polling news is the way his agenda is turning the public against activist government. Last week's NBC/Wall Street Journal survey asked whether voters thought that "government should do more to solve problems and help meet the needs of people" or if "government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals." This is a familiar polling question to gauge the credibility of government,...

Health Care: Democrats on the take and in the dead of night pass an execrable piece of legislation that they haven't read, the public doesn't want and only socialists could love. What has happened to this country? If we hadn't stayed up past midnight Sunday, we wouldn't have known what was going on. Here we thought a vote on the proposed health care overhaul wasn't going to take place until Thursday night — Christmas Eve. But there they were, the United States Senate, at 1 a.m. Monday, rushing to vote in the middle of a snowstorm to close debate on...

Science is one of the great achievements of the human mind and the biggest reason why we live not only longer but more vigorously in our old age, in addition to all the ways in which it provides us with things that make life easier and more enjoyable. Like anything valuable, science has been seized upon by politicians and ideologues, and used to forward their own agendas. This started long ago, as far back as the 18th century, when the Marquis de Condorcet coined the term "social science" to describe various theories he favored. In the 19th century, Karl Marx...

DECEMBER 21, 2009 Change Nobody Believes In A bill so reckless that it has to be rammed through on a partisan vote on Christmas eve. And tidings of comfort and joy from Harry Reid too. The Senate Majority Leader has decided that the last few days before Christmas are the opportune moment for a narrow majority of Democrats to stuff ObamaCare through the Senate to meet an arbitrary White House deadline. Barring some extraordinary reversal, it now seems as if they have the 60 votes they need to jump off this cliff, with one-seventh of the economy in tow. Mr....

For eight long years under George W. Bush, conservatives endorsed a don’t ask, don’t tell foreign policy–they did not really ask why their country was at war and Republican leaders did not tell, or bother, Americans with any of the gory details. Missions were accomplished, we fought them over there so we didn’t have to fight them here and troops were supported by simply supporting the wars they fought, with little to no dissent. But why were we fighting? What was “victory?” How many had to die? What was the cost? Conservatives did not ask-Republican politicians did not tell. But...

A few years ago, I accepted global warming theory with few doubts. I wrote several columns for this paper condemning what I thought were unfair attacks by skeptics and defending the climate scientists. Boy, was I naive.Since the Climategate emails and documents revealed active collusion to thwart skeptics and even outright fraud, I’ve been trying to correct the record of my earlier foolishness. In one of those columns, I even wrote: “And see Real Climate (www.realclimate.org) for global warming science without the political spin.” In fact, Real Climate was and is nothing more than the house organ of global warming...

"Last year," Ryan Bingham says, “I spent 322 days on the road, which means that I had to spend 43 miserable days at home.” Home is an Omaha rental unit less furnished than a hotel room. He likes it that way. Today, he is where he feels at home, in an airport — glass walls and glistening steel, synthetic sincerity and antiseptic hospitality. Today, he is showing Natalie, a ferocious young colleague, how an expert road warrior deals with lines at security screening: Avoid, he says, getting behind travelers with infants (“I’ve never seen a stroller collapse in less than...

Yeah, plenty of righties are on the flip side of the coin, but that’s all the more reason to post this. Their logic’s been blessed by a bona fide Nobel prize winner. Any economics Ph.Ds want to try identifying the crucial variable that’s changed in Krugman’s calculus between then and now? 2005: Yesterday The Washington Post reported on the growing number of pharmacists who, on religious grounds, refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control or morning-after pills. These pharmacists talk of personal belief; but the effect is to undermine laws that make these drugs available. And let me make a...

Singing the enemy’s song Rahman, many experts have long suspected, was allowed to enter the United States by the Central Intelligence Agency in an effort to infiltrate Al-Qaeda -- a high-stakes intelligence gamble that backfired spectacularly “We have an expression in Arabic”, the blind Egyptian cleric who ran al-Qaeda’s networks in the United States once told an interviewer, “everybody sings for those he loves”. On February 26, 1993, a fifteen hundred kilogramme improvised explosive device went off in the underground parking garage of the World Trade Centre in New York -- the very building that, eight years later, would be...

Kathryn, re your Facebook friend who asks, "Can we officially retire the phrases 'blue dog' democrats and 'pro life' democrats? Because there is no such thing:" As I wrote back in the summer, "Put not your trust in Blue Dog Democrats." It was folly to bet the Republic on the likes of Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln and other "moderates" who are, by definition, trimmers and accommodationists. By contrast, Barney Frank and the more ambitious Dems are thinking long-term. And, if it's a choice between getting government health care or keeping Ben Nelson, it's no contest. Not to keep quoting...

Without a scintilla of evidence that rising temperatures threaten the extinction of life on the planet, anyone who expresses common sense doubts about the Doomsday prophecies of climate alarmists is dismissed as a "skeptic," an "extremist," or a heretic in the religion of environmentalism. No one needs to apologize for being a scientific ignoramus on climate change when the world's leading publicist for global warming, Al Gore, is not a scientist either. Yet some blindly accept Gore's claim in An Inconvenient Truth that melting ice caps and rising sea levels will drown New York City and Shanghai under 15 feet...

The Democrats have consistently cultivated a public image as the party of the little guy, the party that stands up against big interests and protects the rights of minorities. You would think that a program that helps minority students, lowers costs, and increases funds for public schools would be right up their alley. You would be wrong. The Democrats in Congress have essentially killed Washington D.C.’s Opportunity Scholarship Program effectively throwing nearly 2000 disadvantaged students back into one of the worst school systems in the country. The very popular program had a long waiting list and has strong support in...

While the environmentalists and climate change cultists were freezing their butts off worrying about saving the planet because of global warming and atmospheric pollution caused by carbon dioxide, the planet itself didn't seem to want to be saved. Or maybe the planet has to destroy itself to save itself. Or something. Anyway, off in the Philippines, Mount Mayon volcano has had a total of 248 volcanic quakes and tremors since Monday. In a statement, Phivolcs director Renato Solidum explained that 50 of these events were explosion-type, wherein minor explosions produced volcanic earthquakes and tremors. "However, only seven were observed during...

Apparently, the debate over the economy is over, and it's settled science that government spending stimulates growth. At least that's what President Obama wants you to believe. On CBS' "60 Minutes" on Dec. 13, he boasted, "What we now know, and every economist who's looked at it will acknowledge this, is that [the stimulus] helped us [stem] the panic and get the economy growing again." Mr. Obama's exaggerations are starting to sound a lot like Al Gore's claimed "consensus" about global warming - a formerly hot topic that has cooled down recently. Also on Dec. 13, Lawrence H. Summers, Mr....

Barack Obama hoped to unify the nation, and he is making impressive progress toward that goal. Last week, he created common ground between Howard Dean and conservatives. They agree on one thing, which is that the health care reform package produced by the Senate and endorsed by the president richly deserves to be voted down. Conservatives have always opposed ObamaCare because it involves too much government. Now liberals are abandoning the administration's plan because it involves too little. Dean and Co. are bitter that the bills in Congress offer neither a "public option"—a government-run insurance program—nor a provision letting those...

Just as the year end onslaught on the dollar was spearheaded to a climax by Blankfein’s minions, so did Europe finally decide to convulse under an unbearable lead of ridiculous mispriced “assets” and vomited up a whole load of troubling financial data, which spread from Greece to Austria to Ireland, setting sovereign CDS to multi month highs. Obviously, this did not help the weak dollar case and cost GS traders a few hundred million. A note to traders indicates that while Goldman has not lost the war of intergalactic domination, it too, can lose the occasional battles: Last Friday we...

A bill so reckless that it has to be rammed through on a partisan vote on Christmas eve. And tidings of comfort and joy from Harry Reid too. The Senate Majority Leader has decided that the last few days before Christmas are the opportune moment for a narrow majority of Democrats to stuff ObamaCare through the Senate to meet an arbitrary White House deadline. Barring some extraordinary reversal, it now seems as if they have the 60 votes they need to jump off this cliff, with one-seventh of the economy in tow. Mr. Obama promised a new era of transparent...

In the panic following the insolvencies of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the American taxpayer was stampeded into bailing out Wall Street by acquiescing to Washington's $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in order to prevent the collapse of our financial system. American International Group Inc. was at the center of the storm with its $1.5 trillion book of credit default swaps (CDS). Inexplicably, after passage, TARP was directed at banks rather than troubled assets - almost like a bait-and-switch plan. Now, a little more than a year later, TARP inspector Neil M. Barofsky...

<p>The popular narrative about the dollar — that it is on a greased banana peel skidding downhill — has been pretty well verified by price action of the dollar versus the euro and other major foreign currencies this year. The more extreme adherents of this view suggest that the dollar is doomed because of U.S. government debt and other indicators of decline and decay. I have never shared the long-term dollar doom and gloom viewpoint, but I do believe that very low short-term interest rates and other government policies have definitely hurt the dollar.</p>

My position on breaking up banks generates questions from two groups. Libertarians ask, how can I justify breaking up private sector institutions? Naive liberals ask, why is this policy not embraced by our political leaders? My answer to both relates to what I call the Harvard-Goldman filter. The Harvard-Goldman filter works like this. 1. To get into a position of power, you have to pass through a filter. The easiest way to show that you can pass through the filter is to go to Harvard and then work for Goldman. 2. If you do not go to Harvard and work...

The Great Debate Oddly Is Not OverWe are still in a great public debate between capitalism and socialism, and individual freedom versus statism — odd since hundreds of millions worldwide have escaped poverty the last 30 years due to the spread of Western-inspired free markets.Many choose sides in the debate based on their own predicaments. Sometimes the more independent and secure who have thrived under capitalism promote it, the more dependent who have not - detest it.At other times the realist mind is opposed to the idealist.  And we can also envision the split as an age-old dichotomy between the...

President Obama has given a number of major speeches touching on world affairs since he announced his bid for the presidency. All have invoked historical examples — usually for moral purposes, but often at the expense of both literal and figurative truth. THE VICTORY COLUMN SPEECH1) Candidate Barack Obama had supposedly made a presumptuous request to speak at the Berlin Wall and been denied (the Germans might later have regretted that turndown, since a year later Obama, tit-for-tat, declined an invitation to speak there on the 20th anniversary of the wall’s fall), and so he chose the Victory Column as...

Harry Reid got his 60. Ben Nelson resorted to the typical Washington expedient in such situations and bought into a few window-dressing compromises, in exchange for an enormous Medicaid benefit to his state. The Cornhusker Kickback joins the Louisiana Purchase as the latest evidence that there’s nothing like a hundred million or so in federal dollars to alleviate a senator’s deeply held concerns about the substance of Obamacare. Nelson’s sellout is a gigantic step toward the passage of the bill, but it’s not over yet. Here are five obstacles that still stand between Reid-Pelosi and a White House signing ceremony:...

Senate Dems’ Ignored America’s Opposition And All Voted For Government-Run Health Care, But They’ll Finally Hear The People In November ALL SIXTY DEMOCRAT SENATORS JUST VOTED FOR REID’S BILLEvery Democrat Senator, With No Republicans, Voted For Cloture. (Motion To Invoke Cloture On The Reid Amendment #3267, Roll Call Vote #385, Agreed To R: 0-40 R; D: 58-0; I: 2-0, 12/21/09)THEY DIDN’T LISTEN TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLEPolling Confirms The Obama-Reid Bill is “A Piece Of Legislation That Large Swaths Of The American People Neither Want Nor Think Will Work.” “The White House -- as we wrote yesterday (see link in comment...

The global climate negotiations in Copenhagen produced neither a grand success nor the complete meltdown that seemed almost certain as late as Friday afternoon. Despite two years of advance work, the meeting failed to convert a rare gathering of world leaders into an ambitious, legally binding action plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It produced instead a softer interim accord that, at least in principle, would curb greenhouses gases, provide ways to verify countries’ emissions, save rain forests, shield vulnerable nations from the impacts of climate change, and share the costs. The hard work has only begun, in Washington and...

Does Ed Schultz read my blog? I have long held MSNBC host Ed Schultz's erratic behavior stems from his political and professional status, envy at those whose careers surpass his. As David Swindle noted in the roll-out of this series, "Ben’s posts on Schultz are collected and all future articles will be collected here under the series name 'Genius Envy' a play on a well-known Freudian term." I came up with the name "Genius Envy" to highlight the way much of Ed's incendiary rhetoric seems to be rooted in his offended masculinity. I was gratified to see my thesis...

Unless some legislator pulls off a last-minute double-cross, health care reform will pass the Senate this week. Count me among those who consider this an awesome achievement. It’s a seriously flawed bill, we’ll spend years if not decades fixing it, but it’s nonetheless a huge step forward. It was, however, a close-run thing. And the fact that it was such a close thing shows that the Senate — and, therefore, the U.S. government as a whole — has become ominously dysfunctional. After all, Democrats won big last year, running on a platform that put health reform front and center. In...

This series of posts is dedicated to the proposition that 90 percent of everything Ed Schultz, the host of MSNBC's The Ed Show, does is motivated by envy (and the same could be said of the Left). Schultz has raged against his more successful colleagues Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and Glenn Beck. The folks at Politico give an indication of who Schultz's next target may be: Bret Baier of Fox News' "Special Report." A side-by-side comparison with Ed's direct competitor is damning:

On the eve of the notorious and deadly Senate healthcare vote of December 2009, Facebook and Twitter statuses everywhere are mourning the passing of America. My friend Frank’s [Freeper Cacique] says it best: “The republic is dying, long live the republic.” For no particular reason, I decided tonight to download the Electric Light Orchestra’s 1981 album, “Time.” Quite a bit of nostalgia in the sounds and ideas of these songs; they are hopeful, haunting, majestic and mournful. And suddenly, as I listen to the lyrics of “21st Century Man,” my insides are knocked out. The words seem to speak to...

A quick search of the Interwebs for the term “political suicide” will return a significant number of stories on the pending Democrat-pushed healthcare “reform” legislation and their seemingly inexplicable political death spiral. Virtually every poll says that the public rejects the bills in the Senate and House, Barack Obama’s popularity is tanking, and virtually no one on the Right OR the Left is happy with them. So the natural question is: Why are the Democrats pushing this? The characterization of the Democrats’ actions as “political suicide” is somewhat inaccurate. It would be more apt to call it “political hari-kari”, as...

Barack Obama's quest for historic health-care legislation has turned into a parody of leadership. We usually associate presidential leadership with the pursuit of goals that, though initially unpopular, serve America's long-term interests. Obama has reversed this. He's championing increasingly unpopular legislation that threatens the country's long-term interests. "This isn't about me," he likes to say, "I have great health insurance." But of course, it is about him: about the legacy he covets as the president who achieved "universal" health insurance. He'll be disappointed. Even if Congress passes legislation -- a good bet -- the finished product will fall far short...

Back in the days when war was a form of romance, there was a tactic called the "forlorn hope". When an army reached the end of its string while laying siege to a fortress or walled city, a single unit of several hundred men would be selected for a final attempt at overcoming the walls. Artillery would fire one last series of rounds to make a breach, and the forlorn hope would make its mad dash toward the walls, to try to overcome through muscle and will what months of patient strategy had failed to do. As for the level...

For expanding government, increasing debt, diminishing America's role in international affairs and promoting state involvement in every facet of American life, Mr. Obama can give himself high marks. From our perspective, however, his report card is nothing to brag about. In economics, civics and foreign affairs, Mr. Obama has flunked every test.

And tidings of comfort and joy from Harry Reid too. The Senate Majority Leader has decided that the last few days before Christmas are the opportune moment for a narrow majority of Democrats to stuff ObamaCare through the Senate to meet an arbitrary White House deadline. Barring some extraordinary reversal, it now seems as if they have the 60 votes they need to jump off this cliff, with one-seventh of the economy in tow. Mr. Obama promised a new era of transparent good government, yet on Saturday morning Mr. Reid threw out the 2,100-page bill that the world's greatest deliberative...

I'm wondering whether there's anyone out there with the guts to pretend that it's insignificant that President Barack Obama keeps appointing radical after radical to his czar positions. Can anyone honestly say Obama's appointments don't tell us a great deal about Obama himself -- as if we needed any further proof he is a left-wing extremist? I don't need to make a list of his radical appointees and detail proof of their extremism. Anyone paying attention knows it's irrefutably true that this has become a deliberate pattern. Statistically, Obama couldn't accidentally appoint this many radicals in two political lifetimes. Is...

The best summation of the UN climate circus in Denmark comes from Andrew Bolt of Australia's Herald Sun: "Nothing is real in Copenhagen – not the temperature record, not the predictions, not the agenda, not the 'solution'." Just so. Reuters, for example, carried a moving account of the speech by Ian Fry, lead negotiator for Tuvalu, the beleaguered Pacific island nation soon to be under water because of a planet-devastating combination of your SUV and unsustainable bovine flatulence from Vermont farms.

When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like "Avatar"? Critics have called alien epic Avatar a version of Dances With Wolves because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy. Spoilers... Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point...

In the city of Chicago "politics" is done very differently than in much of the rest of the nation. Evidently in tiring of hearing from "we the people," the current administration has a political death wish. Many of the prominent capitol hill leaders seem determined to join Obama and company as they plummet fully another sixth of the American economy into the eternal abyss. But we would not be at this point if President Obama had not broken very specific promises. Most specifically he has broken his constant pledges from the campaign trail to be a different kind of leader....

Before Sarah Palin became John McCain's running mate last year, we spent a morning in her Alaska office while she was still governor. We sat down for a one-hour TV interview, and I was most impressed with her insights, traditional values, grasp of issues, and just what a sincere and genuinely warm person she was. The morning in her office made it clear why so many Americans across the board respond to and connect deeply with her brand of politics. However, the former governor has become an icon to many and a disaster waiting to happen for others. Are Americans...

Thousands of mourners are gathering in the Iranian city of Qom following the death of leading reformist cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, offering protesters a fresh rallying point for confrontation with the government. Montazeri, who died early this morning aged 87, is due to be buried at the Ma'asoumeh shrine, one of the holiest in Shia Islam, tomorrow. The event threatened to turn into a security nightmare for the authorities amid reports that thousands were travelling from as far away as Isfahan and Najafabad, Montazeri's birthplace. Reformist websites reported that the road between Tehran and Qom was clogged with...

It has been shown that the so-called "public option" for low-premium health insurance is sure to significantly crowd out, and perhaps even eliminate, the private provision of health insurance. Thanks to Senator Joseph Lieberman's courageous stand, it appears that the public option will not be a part of any bill that passes the Senate. Unfortunately, HR 3962 includes regulations that will destroy the ability of private firms to provide marketable insurance, with or without a public option. To understand the devastation that will be wrought by this bill, one must understand how health insurance functions on a free market to...

The U.S. Navy is looking for a sufficiently impressive foe to help scare more money out of Congress. The Chinese Navy (or, more correctly, the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army Navy) is now the favorites candidate, for navy and defense industry analysts, to become the new Big Bad. Just how dangerous are these Chinese sailors and their ships? It turns out that, on closer inspection, not very. This is the sort of thing that what went on during the Cold War. Russian military prowess was hyped by American the military, and their defense suppliers, to justify further increases in defense spending....