Free Republic

In a SPIEGEL interview, conservative intellectual leader and Trump confidant Newt Gingrich discusses the president-elect's future political course, how he is "very cautious" when it comes to nuclear weapons and the threat of trade wars. SPIEGEL: Mr. Gingrich, what can we expect during the first 100 days of the Trump presidency? Gingrich: You can expect a great deal of action. Donald Trump is a very action-oriented person. I think in the first few weeks, you're going to see a lot of executive orders repealed, peeling back the Obama legacy. You're going to see steps moving forward across a broad range...

Thursday, I laid out the case for why Obamacare should be repealed, instead of propped up and tinkered on by additional top-down, boardroom thinking. It’s clear that whatever replaces Obamacare must focus on quality and incremental local solutions, not one-size-fits-all government mandates.In this respect, the federal government’s biggest task for replacing Obamacare is to get out of the way and let state policymakers and health care providers innovate.First off, let’s get clear what Americans want: They’d like many choices of affordable health insurance plans that allow them to choose their doctors. They want to buy a plan when they are...

RUSH: Bob Woodward, as you know, is the dean from Woodward and Bernstein — Watergate. He’s still the go-to journalist on investigative journalism that destroys presidents. Woodward and Bernstein showed how it’s done. That act, Watergate, has inspired every journalist — practically everybody in journalism school — to show that they could do it, too: Take down powerful people. Well, this “dossier” last week that McCain was so eager for that he sent somebody on a jet across the Atlantic Ocean to the U.K. to pick up a copy of it and bring it back and give it to James...

Sigmund Freud’s famous quote, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” was to clarify that not everything a patient said or did was somehow symbolic of a deeper psychological issue. That’s almost never the case with politics, when almost every action is really about what’s behind the act itself. That’s why I’m presenting this article a “Guide to the Perplexed Liberal” for all the activities they’ve been buzzing about since Donald Trump won the election. Tweet! Tweet!Liberals are furious with President-Elect Trump’s tweets. They say it is evidence that he is an unhinged narcissist with his finger of the...

“Snake-oil salesman” is the stinging label Princeton’s African-American studies chair, Eddie S. Glaude Jr.—who happens to be black—gives President Obama as he leaves the White House. Because Obama betrayed blacks. Millions of white men and women voted for Barack Obama, a biracial president, in hopes that he would unite our country. Millions of black men and women voted for Obama hoping he would help them forsake disparate levels of poverty; teen pregnancy; single motherhood; absent fatherhood; and violent crime. Whites’ and blacks’ hopes were historic. Turns out Obama’s dual presidency was historic. Historically bad. Only wealthy whites and Asians notably...

To delegitimize Trump’s victory, the Left is setting the parameters of the controversy and the terms by which it will be discussed.

America’s Nobody-in-Chief is finally going away, his last spasm of rhetorical onanism completely overshadowed by Donald Trump neatly turning the tables on the media purveyors of that fake dossier that tried and failed to paint the PEOTUS as the second coming of Bob Crane. Good riddance. And welcome President Trump. I have a simple two-word request for you: Avenge us! The last two months have been hysterically funny as President Faily McWorsethancarter desperately tried to remain relevant. He’s taken leading from behind to a whole new level – he’s actually now behind behind. No one is listening to him. No...

Early last year, I interviewed for a senior editor's position with the Federal Aviation Administration. The supervisor of the group had done some research on my writings and asked if I would be able to maintain the government's narrative. The office did press releases for government officials and the public on the next-generation air traffic control system, as the FAA transitioned from a radar-based ATC to a global positioning system-based program. As senior editor, I would ensure our office's prime directive that the new GPS-based ATC program was vitally necessary to combat global warming. I write conservative novels and I...

Critics often make for strange bedfellows. Louis Farrakhan and Cornell West are examples. Both argue that Barack Obama was not ready for prime time. For Farrakhan, Obama failed on race and social issues. For West, the 44th president was a sell-out to a capitalist establishment. Overall, both say the Obamas didn't do much for blacks in particular and social justice in general. For brothers like Farrakhan and West, the last eight years were a wasted opportunity. Buyer's remorse may be the new "hope and change." There will be a black president one day – maybe not for decades, thanks to...

<p>At 7 AM in California’s rural Central Valley, not long before the recent presidential election, I stopped to talk with an elderly irrigator on the shared border alleyway of my farm. His face was a wrinkled latticework, his false teeth yellow. His truck smelled of cigarettes, its cab overflowing with flotsam and jetsam: butts, scribbled notes, drip-irrigation parts, and empty soda cans. He rolled down the window and muttered something about the plunging water-table level and whether a weak front would bring any rain. And then, this dinosaur put one finger up on the wheel as a salutation and drove off in a dust cloud.</p>

In politics, as in sports, there is an offense and defense. In some sports the same players assume both roles, as in basketball and hockey, where a team may shift roles back and forth quickly as the game proceeds. In other sports, such as football, there are separate teams for offense and defense, specialists in their specific roles. Political games often have separate teams for offense and defense; sometimes the political leaders, often their surrogates. In the case of Democrats, the media takes a prominent team role playing both ends of the field. The media can ignore unfavorable stories. A...

The 7th of this month marked two years to the day since two gunmen walked into the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris and murdered twelve people. This period also therefore marks the second anniversary of the period of about an hour during which much of the free world proclaimed itself to be "Charlie" and attempted, by walking through the street, standing for moments of silence or re-tweeting the hashtag "Je Suis Charlie" to show the whole world that freedom cannot be suppressed and that the pen is mightier than the Kalashnikov. So two years on is...

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is simply incompatible with the Trump era. President-elect Trump won as an entrepreneurial change agent who would “drain the swamp”, get Washington under control, take charge of the bureaucracies, and get things done in an entrepreneurial, common sense way. The Congressional Budget Office is the opposite of these commitments. It is a left-wing, corrupt, bureaucratic defender of big government and liberalism. Its scoring of ObamaCare was not just wrong, it was clearly corrupt. CBO literally brought in the architect of ObamaCare to be the adviser on scoring the very Obamacare legislation that he helped write....

By the time students enter college, they want to focus on their specific area of study or proposed career. Educators should dictate what’s best for the curriculum, not legislators.

Eric Holder and Loretta E. Lynch have been perhaps the most flagrant partisans ever to hold the office of attorney general. Year after year, they rubber stamped whatever the Obama administration wanted to do, legally or otherwise. ... The attorney general, who heads the Justice Department, takes an oath to enforce federal laws and uphold the Constitution. We’re at the tail end of an administration in which the highest legal office in the land was weaponized along racial lines and openly attacked laws that the progressive left disliked, such as the federal Defense of Marriage Act and state voter ID...

The closing arguments for the Obama years are arriving, and they aren’t helping the outgoing president. A case in point is a new book published this week, one that acknowledges “Obama’s supporters have experienced [his presidency] as a continuous disappointment.” Those supporters, and others, must have noticed that “for most of Obama’s term, wage gains were largely confined to the rich.” Or that “The administration’s planning in Libya clearly failed” or “It is certain that the actual outcome [of Obama’s Syria policy] was disastrous.” Even many of President Obama’s proudest achievements look about as enduring as April snow: “If there...

The people who want to destroy the Trump presidency demand that John Lewis, be awarded absolute moral authority (shades of Cindy Sheehan) for his public denial of the legitimacy of the next commander-in-chief. At least that is the conclusion one must draw from the torrent of abuse Donald Trump has received for his tweets suggesting that Lewis should better spend his time helping his constituents. Lewis is invariably described as a “civil rights icon,” but the man is an utter fraud. He has been coasting on his 50-year-old reputation for decades. Andrew Breitbart exposed Lewis as a liar when he...

Repealing Obamacare is all but a certainty. It’s the "replace" part that has everyone hung up. Democrats hilariously claim if Republicans “break it, they’ve bought it.” That’s like accusing someone of breaking the picture on a jigsaw puzzle. Still, the matter of replacing this abomination presents Republicans with serious problems, not the least of which is the concept of government interference in health insurance has long been ceded. Were this a pre-Obamacare world, implementation would be easy to stop – people can’t miss what they never had. But it was implemented, and millions of people are used to what Obamacare...

Senate Democrats are trying to assume the high ground against President Trump by rubbishing his nominees. Consider the nomination of Senator Jeff Sessions to be attorney general. The sum total of arguments against Senator Sessions are that at one time, many decades ago, he may have made a flippant offhand comment about the Ku Klux Klan and that he has suggested that the radically leftist NAACP and ACLU may be radically leftist. His record of prosecuting Klansmen, desegregating Alabama schools, and generally upholding the law is, of course, totally ignored. So are Senate Democrats concerned about placing the former Klansmen...

Mr. Garfinkle of Garfinkle’s New Method Hebrew School in Milwaukee used to frequently echo King Solomon’s admonition; “There’s nothing new under the sun.” I was reminded of that this week when the rapidly unfolding “scandal” of Trump’s purported dealings with Russia hit the news. It has more than a few similarities with the Dan Rather faked-up story of GW Bush’s National Guard service where an anonymous, never-found source supposedly gave Bill Burkett a demonstrably fake report and Dan Rather ran with it. This time a Bush (Jeb) is involved but as an instigator of the story, not a victim. John...