Free Republic

Last week, the Obama administration announced new curbs on racial profiling by federal law enforcement. Before deciding whether this is good or bad policy, we might try to develop a description/definition of racial profiling or any other kind of profiling. A good definition of profiling in general is the use of an easily observed physical characteristic as a guess for some other, difficult-to-observe characteristic. The reason people profile is that information is costly and they seek methods to economize on information costs. One way to do that is through profiling. Imagine a chief of police in a city where there...

I don’t usually get so personal in these columns, but today I want you to know that I feel particularly blessed. I am in the Holy Land with my friends, Dr. Ben and Candy Carson. Israel is one of my favorite travel destinations in the world. This will be my eighth visit. It is the first trip there for the Carsons and it is truly a privilege to escort them through this remarkable country. Dr. and Mrs. Carson are deeply faithful Christians, who I suspect will soon find themselves enveloped by the deep sense of spirituality that is palpable in...

If government anti-poverty programs focused on individual outcomes, the results would be those like Lance from Michigan. His father on death row and his mother a prostitute, Lance wandered into Florida and lived behind a dumpster at a 7-11. Hungry, dirty and homeless, he later found a place to live, became sober, got a job and will go to college on a scholarship. We don’t hear stories like that attributed to government assistance. That is because there are over 90 government welfare programs ranging from cash payments to housing and nutrition that are projected to cost $14 trillion over the...

The city of Scranton hiked property taxes 57% and garbage collection fees 69% to shore up a police and fire pension funds that will run out of money anyway, in 5 years and 2.5 years respectively. Amusingly (to outsiders) but certainly not to Scranton taxpayers, Scranton Pensions Increased as Much as 80 Percent as a result of inane mayoral promises. The 2011 court ruling that awarded huge raises and millions of dollars in back pay to Scranton firefighters and police officers was a windfall for retirees too, with some seeing a more than 80 percent hike in their pensions between...

My recent interview with Bret Baier, and his new book "Special Heart: A Journey of Faith, Hope, Courage and Love"Gayle Trotter: I am speaking with Bret Baier, Fox News Chief Political Anchor, and anchor of the top-ranked evening news program, Special Report. Thank you for joining me, Bret. Bret Baier: Thanks Gayle, good to be here. GT: Bret wrote an awesome book called Special Heart: A Journey of Faith, Hope, Courage and Love, which chronicles his journey in his career and his family life. It is hilarious and vividly written, and it brought me to tears at least twice. Bret,...

The stunning 40% drop in the price of oil over the past few months has scrambled global economic forecasts, changed the geo-political landscape, and has severely pressured many energy sector investments. Economists are scratching their heads to determine if the drop is good or bad for the economy or whether cheap oil will add to or decrease unemployment, or complicate the global effort to "defeat" deflation. While all of these issues merit detailed discussions, the first question to address is if the steep drop is here to stay and whether energy prices will stay low enough, for long enough, to...

Among the journalistic takeaways from the late Congress' death frenzies is the equivocal plight of the two parties -- the grown-up deal makers in both cases squeezed by hardcore, do-it-our-way extremists. On the Republican side John Boehner beset by Ted Cruz, in the Democratic camp the pragmatic Hillary Clinton wing forced to contend with the true-believing fans of Elizabeth Warren. It is the strategy some of our friends in the liberal media may have seized on to take away the bitter taste of defeat at the polls. In this telling, the left-left MoveOn.org/Daily Kos faction, anti-military and pro-big government, has...

Unlike the American Political System, third parties have more influence in the British System. Currently, the Conservatives, by David Cameron, have the majority because of their fraught combination with the Liberal Democrats, with Lib-Dem deputy prime minister Nick Clegg. While their union makes strange bed-fellows on paper, the coalition permitted massive spending cuts in the first few years of the Cameron Government. Concerns about immigration, government spending, Big Business and Big Government getting bigger have pushed Britons to the brink, and empowered an anti-establishment, pro-free market backlash from a formerly marginal third party, the United Kingdom Independence Party, otherwise known...

The Republican establishment has become infected with a new epidemic of “Ted Cruz derangement syndrome” apparently brought on by being forced to actually work at the job of being a United States Senator. “Patient Zero” in this epidemic may be New Hampshire Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte who complained bitterly before last weekend’s rare Saturday session to debate the constitutional point of order on the “CRomnibus” that it interfered with her plans to go home and watch a performance of the holiday classic the Nutcracker. Ayotte, by the way, has an F score of 44% on Conservative Review’s Liberty Score, compared...

The Obama administration is now trying to outlaw single-sex classrooms, a practice that has been growing as parents and teachers see its good results. The Obama administration is discouraging that option in conformity with demands by the feminists who believe in the interchangeability of the genders and insist that schools forbid any deviation from their peculiar belief that there is no difference between male and female. The Minnesota State High School League, which controls policy for all extracurricular activities in all schools, public and private, voted 18 to 1 to outlaw recognition of all sex differences in high-school sports. The...

INDIANAPOLIS -- If success at the state level were enough to recommend someone for president of the United States, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana would be among the frontrunners for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination. According to the governor's office, Pence has "signed into law $643 million in annual tax relief: That includes: $313 million for hardworking Hoosiers, thanks to last year's 5 percent income tax reduction, the largest state tax cut in Indiana history." In addition, the state corporate tax rate was reduced from 6.5 percent to 4.9 percent, making it the third lowest in the country and contributing...

Anyone skeptical about entrusting ambitious tasks to the government was not stunned by the dismal rollout of the Affordable Care Act. It featured technical snafus, cost overruns and false advertising ("If you like your plan, you'll be able to keep it."). Things got so bad that President Barack Obama apologized and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius resigned. This epic fail occurred even though the administration had more than three years to prepare for the launch and $840 million to spend developing the website. It was a textbook case of government bungling. Truth be told, a rocky start should...

America's Christophobes have been plenty busy lately. Maybe the Christmas season makes them especially nervous. A few weeks ago, Atlanta Fire Rescue Department Chief Kelvin Cochran was suspended for a month without pay for the unforgivable sin of self-publishing a Christian book in which he expressed his disapproving views about homosexual behavior, among other things. City spokeswoman Anne Torres said: "We understand that (Cochran) was distributing the book to other employees. We are still not sure yet what the circumstances surrounding that are. ... The bottom line is that the (Mayor Kasim) Reed administration does not tolerate discrimination of any...

In an earlier column, I looked at the role the abortion issue would play in the 2016 election -- not very much, I concluded -- and promised another column on other cultural issues. Here goes. On anyone's list of cultural issues that have been debated over the last decade, same-sex marriage ranks just behind abortion. And unlike abortion, opinion on same-sex marriage has changed dramatically in recent years. Not long ago, it wasn't a political issue at all. The gifted writers Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch were making an intellectually serious, and interestingly conservative, case for same-sex marriage. But the...

Liberalism is… 1) ….idiots who think the police can keep us safe from criminals without ever accidentally hurting thugs who are resisting them and think the CIA can get information out of terrorists by giving them lattes, fluffing their pillows, and hugging them until they give in. 2) ….encouraging sexually deviant behavior at every turn, teaching young children about fisting and graphic gay sex, laughing at people who encourage modesty, and then demanding that college kids give formal consent before they kiss each other. 3) …a bunch of morons "occupying" a public park for months or blocking traffic who can't...

Most everyone in the United States has at some point encountered Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. One short story, “Silver Blaze,” involves a dog that didn’t bark. Spoiler alert: Detective Sherlock Holmes solves the case by realizing a dog didn’t bark because the dog recognized the murderer.Holmes’s legwork is profoundly applicable to disgraced journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s whopper of a Rolling Stone story claiming at least five members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity chapter at the University of Virginia gang-raped — and punched in celebration — a freshman named Jackie at a party at their frat house on Sept. 28,...

Democrats are the masters of deceptive persuasion, meaning they will take our attention off something they have really screwed up and put it on something that's not quite so bad. And chief among those masters is he who resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, D.C. For example, let's look at the bumbling idiot Jonathan Gruber, who has repeatedly said that the key for passing Obamacare was the stupidity of the American people. When Gruber was called before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to explain himself, he ducked and weaved questions, to the point that even Rep. Elijah...

The usual suspects are attacking Ted Cruz for doing his job.Republicans and a chorus of conservative commentators are dumping on the sole conservative Republican senator from Texas because–the horror!–he dared to force his Senate colleagues to publicly take sides on President Obama's shameful extralegal unilateral immigration amnesty.Apologists for Republican cowardice claim to be upset with Cruz because, as they claim, his parliamentary maneuvers to stymie the amnesty somehow allowed some objectionable Obama nominees to move forward in the confirmation process.Of course, they're lying. All Obama nominees are objectionable–remember, our president is a red diaper baby–yet the Senate eventually caves to...

Karl Eikenberry couldn't understand why the staff sergeant insisted that he take a loaded pistol to patrol the barracks. The West Point cadet was in Hawaii for the summer, serving as a staff duty officer with the 25th Infantry Division, which had recently returned from Vietnam. It was his job on weekend nights to ensure good order. "Why would I take a sidearm?" Eikenberry asked. "In case you need it, that's why," replied the sergeant. As soon as he entered a darkened barracks building, Eikenberry says, he understood why his staff sergeant was so nervous. Soldiers were gathered in small...

“Think of how stupid the average person is — and realize half of them are stupider than that.” — George Carlin Congress has gone full stupid. Late Tuesday night, lawmakers released a 1,603-page bill that would dole out more than $1 trillion in taxpayer money (the federal government, by the way, has collected a record amount in taxes this year, but still can’t stop overspending). Rollcall.com calculated that the massive omnibus bill came in at 289,861 words. Then the reporter dove into the math: “If members averaged 200 words per minute to read the dense legislative text, they would need...