Free Republic

As Americans ran from gunfire at the Navy Yard in Washington DC, commentator David Frum took to Twitter to talk gun control and suggest that gun control opponents were to blame for the shooting:

During the pre-Palin days of the Tea Party Movement, the idea of a conservative third party was often discussed. Since the Tampa Purge of 2012, many have revisited this idea, most recently Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation. A third party dedicated only to freedom and limited government has been attempted several times, and we do have the Libertarian Party and the Constitution Party, though like the Green Party, they have been restricted to local politics, and often lack ballot access. This period of American history is marked by a large, oppressive, and violent federal government. We have many factions...

've been having an argument with a friend of mine, a veteran Washington journalist, about whether it can really be true that where I live (an apartment building on the Upper West Side of New York, all of whose residents are Columbia faculty members), people arenÂ’t talking about This Town. My friend thinks IÂ’m playing the country bumpkin, but I swear it! This Town has a powerful infinity-of-mirrors quality: itÂ’s proudly, defiantly obsessed with a particular Washington subculture, which it persuasively portrays as being self-obsessed, and the subculture obsesses over This Town right back, because the book plays into the...

Raising McCain: Episode 1 - YouTube

What are we going to do with John McCain who is helping Obama “save-face” by supporting his phony war on Syria? It is clear Americans do not want to get involved. Like Sarah Palin says, “Mr. President, please give America justification before you spend blood and treasure to intervene.” Sarah Palin and John McCain don’t have much in common, except being on the same ticket in 2008. They don’t agree on much politically, especially Syria. The Governor does what the Senator is supposed to do, but that is as far as it goes. John McCain’s transgressions seem to be getting...

The usual war on women liberals who mocked vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin (R) for not attending a prestigious college were baffled that she made it on her own, not with inherited wealth or her husband's influence. And so they laughed when she predicted death panels under Obamacare; they're not laughing now. And they continued their laughter and their mockery over the past few years including more than two months ago, pre President Barack Hussein Obama's (D) allegedly broken "red line" in Syria, when she bluntly stated, "Militarily, where is our commander in chief? We're talking now more new interventions....

The make-believe crusade by publicity-hound Republicans to somehow stop Obamacare is one of the most cynical political exercises we’ve seen in many years. And that, my friends, is saying something. Charlatans are peddling the fantasy that somehow they can prevent the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act from becoming what it already is: the law of the land. Congress passed it, President Obama signed it, the Supreme Court upheld it, many of its provisions are already in force, and others will soon take effect. The Republican majority in the House, though, is . . . what’s the word? Unpredictable? Uncontrollable? Unhinged? They...

When Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol suggested on Sunday that Sarah Palin restart her political career by running for Senate, people noticed, because more than anyone else —more than John McCain, the candidate who picked her as his running mate, more than Steve Schmidt, the adviser who urged McCain to do it — Kristol is credited with launching Palin's career. On Tuesday, Kristol made it clear he does not want all that credit (or blame). On MSNBC's Morning Joe, Nicolle Wallace, who was Palin's aide during the 2008 campaign, asked Kristol, "How did you feel as sort of being branded...

Over a half-century after Cooke wrote that lighthearted song, such ignorance is now all too real. Even our best and brightest -- or rather our elites especially -- are not too familiar with history or geography. Both disciplines are the building blocks of learning. Without awareness of natural and human geography, we are reduced to a sort of self-contained void without accurate awareness of the space around us. An ignorance of history also creates the same sort of self-imposed exile, leaving us ignorant of both what came before us and what is likely to follow. In the case of geography,...

Congress has won some partial relief for lawmakers and their staffs from the "Obamacare" health reforms that it passed and subjected itself to three years ago. In a ruling issued on Wednesday, U.S. lawmakers and their staffs will continue to receive a federal contribution toward the health insurance that they must purchase through soon-to-open exchanges created by President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law. The decision by the Office of Personnel Management, with Obama's blessing, will prevent the largely unintended loss of healthcare benefits for 535 members of the Senate and House of Representatives and thousands of Capitol Hill staff. When...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: There was something in the New York Times Magazine over the weekend. This has, within its own universe, created a firestorm. It's about hooking up in college. I have the headline right here. Let me see the second page here. "Sex on Campus: She Can Play That Game, Too." This is a long piece. It's like 4,000 words, this New York Times Magazine piece. It's a long piece on how there isn't any dating anymore, as you and I understand it. It's just no-emotion sexual hookups, and they are perfunctory at that. Not any attachment whatsoever. It's...

The elite mostly lead a reactionary existence of talking one way and living another. One of the strangest things about the modern progression in liberal thought is its increasing comfort with elitism and high style. Over the last 30 years, the enjoyment of refined tastes, both material and psychological, has become a hallmark of liberalism — hand in glove with the art of professional altruism, so necessary to the guilt-free enjoyment of the good life. Take most any contemporary issue, and the theme of elite progressivism predominates. Higher education? A visitor from Mars would note that the current system of...

Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington and a group of other CEOs and former world leaders have formed a group whose goal is to end capitalism as we know it. The nonprofit, known as “The B Team,” was created to help promote a “better version of capitalism, one that prioritizes people and planet over profit.” This ignores the fact that capitalism is, by definition, motivated by profit. The team, led by Branson and German businessman Jochen Zeitz, calls for drastic changes in how the economy works. These include “new rules and models for the future of business – not incremental ‘change as...

First Lady Michelle Obama spoke at a DNC Fundraiser at the Manhattan home of fashion designer Tory Burch Wednesday evening. TPM was in attendance to provide press pool coverage. Our unedited pool report is below: "Your pooler is currently composing this report in a Starbucks a few blocks from Manhattan's Hotel Pierre where First Lady Michelle Obama just gave a speech at a DNC fundraiser in the home of fashion designer Tory Burch. In her speech, Obama encouraged the crowd to remain politically engaged and active though "the excitement that comes with the presidential campaign has faded." Pool was led...

For centuries, Christians thought culture would change if we just had a majority of Christians in the culture. That has proven to be a false assumption. Culture is defined by a relatively small number of change agents who operate at the top of cultural spheres or societal mountains. It takes less than 3-5 percent of those operating at the top of a cultural mountain to actually shift the values represented on that mountain.For example, this is exactly what advocates in the gay rights movement has done through the "mountains" of media and arts and entertainment. They have strategically used these...

Given the battering President Obama took this past week on a trio of political scandals, any public opinion survey results that aren’t dreadful probably are viewed with some relief at the White House. That may be the clearest message from a CNN/ORC poll released Sunday morning. According to the survey, which was conducted Friday and Saturday, 53 percent of Americans say they approve of the job the president is doing, with 45 percent saying they disapprove, CNN reports. That’s actually a tick better than the 51 percent approval rating Obama had in early April – but not enough to break...

Sarah Palin reared her head in American airspace this weekend. As the country’s media, entertainment and political elite gathered in Washington, D.C., for the annual roast that is the White House Correspondents Dinner, Palin could not resist lobbing darts from afar. “Yuk it up media and pols,” she tweeted. “While America is buried in taxes and a fight for our rights, the permanent political class in DC dresses up and has a prom to make fun of themselves. No need for that, we get the real joke.” She panned the event again in a second tweet: “That #WHCD was pathetic....

Former Alaska governor and vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, who has fiercely fought crony capitalism and the permanent political class, absolutely blistered the White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday, tweeting that the dinner was "pathetic" and that "DC assclowns" were throwing "themselves a #nerdprom" while "the rest of America is out there working our assess off." @SarahPalinUSA: That #WHCD was pathetic. The rest of America is out there working our asses off while these DC assclowns throw themselves a #nerdprom In recent years, Washington veterans have expressed similar concerns. Tom Brokaw has compared Washington to "Versailles," Ron Fournier has said...

Here is Yale alum Leah Libresco responding with vigor to Keli Goff’s recent article entitled “Female Ivy League graduates have a duty to stay in the workforce”: Goff assumes that women who leave the workforce will cease to use the education that they paid for, but there’s nowhere you can go that learning about beauty and citizenship and character and tradition aren’t relevant. The liberal arts are supposed to have taken up philosophy’s mantle as preparation for death — the study of how we should live.[...] The college grad starting out as a junior staffer or an administrative assistant may...

The uncomfortable effects of government actions are being felt everywhere. Obamacare concerns are, anecdotally, delaying hiring, causing firms to change benefits for the people, and increasing taxes on the great majority. On the other hand, in the context of the "sequester", which is merely a slowdown in the breakneck rate of government spending, anyone who has traveled by plane in the last month knows the full court press efforts under way to ensure the American public knows just how 'devastating' the sequester cuts are - with delays rising exponentially with every dollar removed from the FAA budget. But there...