Free Republic

Barack Obama owes his position to his membership in a class that is destroying America: the intellectualoids--shallow people able to fool others into believing they possess superior intellects.[SNIP]Intellectualoids are fairly easy to recognize. They are the “best and the brightest” in our society,people with top degrees and social connections who have positioned themselves(or been positioned)to have a great impact on our culture of politics,race,education,and economics. But at the same time, intellectualoids have severe knowledge deficits when it comes to understanding the great religious and intellectual traditions(Judeo-Christianity and the seven traditional liberal arts)that have built their civilization. They have a knack...

No TV nor radio news will cover this. CNN Reports Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) Extremely Secretive Two copies of the biggest free trade deal in history are sitting in reading rooms -- one at each end of the Capitol. The document is classified. Only members of Congress and staffers with security clearance can access it. And they can't make copies or even carry their own handwritten notes out the door. This is how trade negotiations work. Fearful that they'll undercut their own negotiators, leaders of the countries involved don't want the details of what they're hashing out revealed until the...

A new report commissioned by concerned alumni of Horace Mann School, an elite private school in New York City, tells an extraordinary story of the sexual abuse of scores of students over decades by teachers, coaches, department heads, a headmaster, a school chaplain and a dean of guidance. The findings build on revelations made public in recent years about sex abuse at Horace Mann, which was founded by Columbia University on its campus in 1887 but has long been an independent school in the Bronx, now with 1,782 students from nursery school through 12th grade. It costs $41,900 a year...

I spent a long time on the phone last night with a law professor at one of the country’s elite law schools. This professor is a practicing Christian, deeply closeted in the workplace; he is convinced that if his colleagues in academia knew of his faith, they would make it very hard for him. We made contact initially by e-mail — he is a reader of this blog — and last night, by phone. He agreed to speak with me about the Indiana situation on condition that I not identify him by name or by institution. I do know his...

Ted Cruz received almost 4.5 million votes in the 2012 Texas Senate election, which he won in a landslide. Millions more Americans, outside Texas, agree with his aggressive brand of conservatism. He has been one of the most influential figures in Congress lately, and this week he became the first major candidate to announce an official 2016 presidential campaign. He also has virtually no chance of winning the Republican nomination, let alone of becoming president. So what are we in the media supposed to do about Mr. Cruz’s candidacy? He is, on the one hand, a major figure in American...

Michael Van Der Galien has tried to understand why the Ted Cruz presidential candidacy announcement has set social media on its ear and advances a tentative theory. “But why are leftists’ heads exploding as well? I’ve got no doubt I know the answer: they fear him. Tremendously even. He is everything they oppose: a true, small-government conservative.” If that were all Cruz were guilty of it wouldn’t be half bad. It’s far worse. His “Imagine” speech seemed calculated to ridicule every Leftist shibboleth with predictable effect. The Left lost no time characterizing him as a Christian bigot, a patriarchal supremacist,...

As I write this, the No. 1 “most read” story on the Washington Post’s website is its investigation into the college years of Scott Walker, headlined: “As Scott Walker mulls White House bid, questions linger over college exit.” Most of the time, you don’t need to read such a story to know what it’s about: for Republicans, every silly comment or stunt in their teenage years is in the public interest, and for Democrats the same investigative practice is racist, racist, racist. (Though in 2016 it will be sexist, sexist, sexist.) But there is one aspect of this story that...

Shedding a new skin is Bush's euphemism for national transformation: purge public institutions of what doesn't work and ingest the fruits of radical connectivity to inspire and support innovators.

A small, but elite group of Americans demonstrate signs of anti-Christian hostility, sociologists David Williamson and George Yancey claim in their new book, So Many Christians, So Few Lions: Is There Christianophobia in the United States? In an email interview with The Christian Post, Yancey, professor of sociology at the University of North Texas, explained that Christians are fortunate in one sense, because those with anti-Christian hostility are small in number; but in another sense, they should be concerned, because those with "Christianophobia" tend to be powerful elites with influence in certain important areas, such as higher education. The data...

A gentrified cocoon of progressive privilege has cost Democrats the middle class. Democrats for over a century were associated with the American middle class. Working-class voters once believed that Democratic-inspired intervention into the economy — minimum-wage laws, overtime pay, Social Security, Medicare, workers’ compensation — protected their interests better than unfettered free-market capitalism. Republicans often had trouble selling the argument that an unleashed economy and new technology would relegate poverty to a relative, not absolute, condition — something like suffering with a cheap, outdated iPhone 4 while the better-off could afford an iPhone 6. Why, then, have Democrats lost the...

WASHINGTON — For years, Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But those remedies will now be applied to the Harvard faculty, and the professors are in an uproar....... In addition, some ideas that looked good to academia in theory are now causing consternation. In 2009, while Congress was considering the health care legislation, Dr. Alan M. Garber — then a Stanford professor and now the provost of Harvard — led a group of economists who sent an open letter to Mr....

The Washington political classes do not understand you. If you are a Democrat, they assume you're a pure progressive. They take for granted that you consider climate change a religion, think immigration should be a free pass for everyone, support entry-level people jumping past entry-level pay, think fairness is an entitlement provided by government through executive order, and believe socialized health care is the greatest achievement this country has accomplished. If you are a Republican, they assume that you carry a gun every time you walk out the door, that you hate women, gays, blacks and Hispanics, and that you...

Last week, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Jonathan Gruber, one of prominent architects of Obamacare, was exposed as little more than an elitist fraud. Gruber was caught on videotape expressing the haughty attitude that drove the Affordable Care Act, deriding the "stupidity" of Americans as a way to justify misleading them. Gruber apparently thinks such deception is OK because yokel voters could not handle the truth about the looming chaos he helped to engineer in their health coverage. Unfortunately, Gruber's disdain for the proverbial masses -- he was paid nearly $400,000 in consulting fees -- is thematic of the last...

A snippet of MIT economist Jonathan Gruber speaking candidly has resurfaced, but this time it’s about himself rather than American voters. “I’m an ivory tower guy at heart and do my thing and figure I’m an honest guy and people will trust it,” Gruber told Politico in Jan. 2010. The self-description is likely to resonate with the public after several videotaped recordings surfaced this week of Gruber calling Americans “stupid” and bragging about how “a lack of transparency” was necessary to pass Obamacare. Gruber called himself “an ivory tower guy” after it came to light that he had been paid...

MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, a leading architect of President Obama’s healthcare law, is under fire for recently surfaced comments in which he conceded that to pass Obamacare, supporters relied on “the stupidity of the American voter” to hide its actual effects. My colleague Tim Carney has already written about how the comments are just the latest reminder of how the law was built on a foundation of lies. But there is a broader message in all of this — that Gruber’s comments get to the heart of what’s wrong with liberalism. At the end of the day, liberals not only...

An NBC News crew was ordered under mandatory quarantine for possible Ebola infection after the network’s chief medical correspondent was allegedly spotted on a food run to a New Jersey restaurant, according to a report. Dr. Nancy Snyderman and her crew had agreed to a voluntary quarantine when they returned to the United States from West Africa last week following their exposure to a cameraman who contracted the deadly virus.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Interview - Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Abortion - Elle "It makes no sense as a national policy to promote birth only among poor people."“Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” – United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, quoted in Emily Bazelon, “The Place of Women on the Court”, The New York Times Magazine, July 7, 2009 Elle: Fifty years from now, which decisions in your tenure do you...

President Obama has put America at the center of a widening war by expanding into Syria airstrikes against the Islamic State, the Sunni extremist group known as ISIS and ISIL. He has done this without allowing the public debate that needs to take place before this nation enters another costly and potentially lengthy conflict in the Middle East. He says he has justification for taking military action against the Islamic State and Khorasan, another militant group. There isn’t a full picture — because Mr. Obama has not provided one — of how this bombing campaign will degrade the extremist groups...

California is run from a sort of Pacific Versailles, an isolated coastal compound of elite rulers physically cut off from its interior peasantry. To understand how California works — or rather does not work — drive over the I-5 Grapevine and gaze down at the brilliantly engineered artificial Pyramid Lake. Thanks to California water project deliveries, even in a third year of drought its level still fluctuates between 90 to 100% full — ensuring, along with its companion reservoirs, plentiful water for the Los Angeles-area municipalities for the next two years. The far distant watersheds and reservoirs that feed Pyramid...

Most of us understand that yelling “fire” in a crowded theater is not a valid exercise of free speech. Why, then, do we permit the irresponsible, agenda-driven media, the race-baiters and poverty pimps to do so? Black America has plenty of problems, and not all of them are of their own making. But a significant portion are. In theory, black families should be doing well. We’ve had how many generations of affirmative action? For some families this has worked well. But for a lot of them it hasn’t. Why? We can start with the phrase “black family.” In a lot...