Free Republic

The University of Chicago has decided to destroy the boyhood home of Ronald Reagan in Hyde Park. That's the University of Chicago I know and do not love. When I wrote of the violence and corruption my friends and lovers endured in Hyde Park in the late 60s, I was taken to task because the Hyde Park the Obamas inhabited was different from the Hyde Park I described. Fair enough. But some said that it was not only different, but also better, by which they mean, let's tell the truth, richer and whiter. Several commenters got it right, however, so...

RALEIGH, N.C. -- North Carolina's newest Representative Renee Ellmers said the deadly shooting rampage in Arizona has made her concerned for her own safety. Ellmers said she has a concealed carry permit and plans to carry a handgun at public events. However, even in light of the shootings she said she will not support restrictions on certain ammunition. "I think it was an isolated incident and has more to do with the individual who committed the crime than the actual ammo he was using," said Ellmers. North Carolina Congressman Health Shuler has also said in recent weeks he will carry...

"When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When people fear the government, there is tyranny." -Thomas Jefferson It's said the composers of the Constitution intended to constrain the central government by charging it with protecting the rights of the citizen. This was clearly a lapse in judgment, a pratfall actually, the kind requiring many tankards of the previous autumn's cider. Since those wonderful days of yesteryear, generations of our best and brightest have not merely alienated our inalienable rights, they've criminalized most of them. The work has been exacting and exhausting but it's yielded a dark parallel to the...

It just happened again. I spend a fair amount of time at my local coffee shop. I like to do my writing outside and, besides, it gives me an opportunity to try and initiate political conversations with the people who pass by, my hope always being to begin to enlighten them as to what conservative really believe (and not just what the Leftist media tells them.) Today the conversation turned to Sarah Palin and my new acquaintance blurted out “Oh I hate her.” Not yet knowing my politics, I’m sure that, being her in Los Angeles she expected to hear...

It’s healthy, even natural, for Americans to feel populist resentment against elites that base their status through inherited wealth and family connections. But it’s toxic, misguided and profoundly stupid to focus public hostility on leaders who achieved their positions through education, diligence and ability. Recent sniping between Sarah Palin and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Charles Krauthammer highlights the crucial distinction between rebellious attitudes that attack unfairly arrogated power and privilege and a trendy neo-populism that attacks brains. When Krauthammer dared to suggest that the former Alaska governor looked less than “presidential” while shooting caribou with Kate Goselin on her hit TLC...

“She is a gifted politician, just in terms of getting people to connect with her on an emotional level in person,” says Taibbi. “It’s something that if you’re an experienced campaign journalist you can just see.” Question: Will Sarah Palin run for President in 2012? Matt Taibbi: Absolutely she is going to run for president in 2012 and... I don’t think she is going to win, but I think she is a very good bet to win the nomination. I think what we saw in the last election was the Tea Party is now in this kingmaking role and the...

Outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has commuted the prison sentence of the son of a former state Assembly speaker, cutting his sentence from 16 years to 7 years in the 2008 killing of a Concord man. The move came just hours before Schwarzenegger was to leave office. In 2009, Esteban Nuñez, son of Fabian Nuñez, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the fatal stabbing of Luis Dos Santos, 22, during a fight in San Diego. He and co-defendant Ryan Jett were sentenced to 16 years in prison, the maximum sentence. Santos, who was attending San Diego Mesa College, was killed in...

A huge majority of Washington's insiders say Sarah Palin, the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate, isn't qualified to be president, a Politico poll indicates. Eight-six percent of respondents considered members of the political establishment said they don't think Palin is qualified to hold the office, compared to 64 percent of the general public, results of the Politico poll released Wednesday said. Eleven percent of political establishment respondents in Washington said they believe Palin is qualified to be president, compared to 23 percent of the general public, the survey indicated. In addition, 79 percent of those classified as Washington elites said...

Well, the bubble of Obama supremacy has finally exploded in all our faces and is now lying in tatters, with little giblets of its former hot-air glory spread from here to kingdom come. The candidate who played his "Peace is just an Obama speech away" tune to the easily bamboozled left has just been dealt the final blow that crashed the big, fat hot air balloon. The very first test case was just last week: a former Gitmo detainee, brought to NYC to be tried as a civilian with all the rights of a genuine American citizen, was found guilty...

Probably not since the days of the Pharaohs or the more ludicrous Roman Emperors has a head of state travelled in such pomp and expensive grandeur as the President of the United States of America. While lesser mortals – the Pope, Queen Elizabeth and so on – are usually happy to let their hosts handle most of the security and transport arrangements when they venture beyond their home shores, the United States creates a mini-America on the move to ensure that nothing is left to chance. Today, Barack Obama arrives in India at the start of a ten-day tour of...

A day after President Obama got what he called a "shellacking" in the midterm elections, he took full responsibility for the outcome that turned over the House to the Republicans. Pundits will spend the next few days poring over the numbers. But judging from the questions reporters asked at the news conference, the defeat is being cast as a clear message from voters that Obama is going in the wrong direction.(snip)For the last two years, the electorate has been subjected to lies about Obama's religion, his heritage and his agenda. These deliberate falsehoods were designed to scare the bejeezus out...

In the Boston-area home of a wealthy hospital executive one Saturday evening this month, President Obama departed from his usual campaign stump speech and offered an explanation as to why Democrats were seemingly doing so poorly this election season. Voters, he said, just aren’t thinking straight. “Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared,” he told a roomful of doctors who chipped in at least $15,200 each...

If Democrats want a single illustration in this election cycle of the hopeless disconnect between the coastal liberal elites and ordinary Americans, it might just be this: Failing news anchoress Katie Couric has recently deigned to leave her Upper West Side studio to mingle with the common folk in the "middle of the country."

You really have to feel sorry for our liberal friends. With each passing day, they are coming to resemble the old WASP elite they sneered at for a century. Good liberal journalists should visit only those inscribed in the Liberal Social Register. And the Netroots seem more and more like southern rednecks, the folks who howled their approval when George Wallace vowed, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" in 1963 in the last moments before the Civil Rights Acts and the end of Jim Crow. In the Juan Williams affair, they are telling us that liberal journalists have to take...

It’s a very subtle ploy, that statement, ”already making more money than most will earn in a lifetime.” Does it make you feel good? Glad for those billionaires, and proud of their enterprenurial spirit? Or does it make you feel slightly envious that these young kids will make more than you’ll ever see in your life? Yeah, me too. The ongoing repetition (only slightly unpalatable in single instances) permeates society these days. It’s in the press, on television, online… all the time. Captialism is evil; tax the rich; make the rich pay their fair share; they’ll make more than you’ll...

The elites are on a roll these days. In just the last week, their Toronto chapter foiled the Canadian government's plan to kill the long-gun registry, even as one of their number — a Harvard educated Bay Street executive — was named the Prime Minister's chief of staff. In Britain, the race to lead the Labour Party boiled down to a nail-biter between two Oxford-educated brothers, David and Ed Miliband. And in Washington, the Republican Party revealed "elites" as the true puppet-masters of politics, in a "Pledge To America" that states: "An arrogant and out-of-touch government of self-appointed elites makes...

A look inside a teacher's mind could help you understand lesson plans and maybe even guide your child to perform better. 1. If we teach small children, don’t tell us that our jobs are “so cute” and that you wish you could glue and color all day long. 2. I’m not a marriage counselor. At parent-teacher conferences, let’s stick to Dakota’s progress, not how your husband won’t help you around the house.

Our Quick-Fix Electorate By Eugene Robinson WASHINGTON -- According to polls, Americans are in a mood to hold their breath until they turn blue. Voters appear to be so fed up with the Democrats that they're ready to toss them out in favor of the Republicans -- for whom, according to those same polls, the nation has even greater contempt. This isn't an "electoral wave," it's a temper tantrum. It's bad enough that the Democratic Party's "favorable" rating has fallen to an abysmal 33 percent, according to a recent NBC-Wall Street Journal poll. It's worse that the Republican Party's favorability...

Unemployment is hovering around 9.6%, our national debt is over $13 trillion, one-in-six Americans are receiving some type of government help, and Barack Obama just wrapped his sixth vacation in less than two years as President. It was a waterfront vacation in Martha’s Vineyard that cost around $50,000 for the rental property alone. (This doesn’t count the cost of staff, of Secret Service protection, or the transport and fuel for the 20-vehicle caravan that traveled with the President all over the island.) If a sixth vacation of this magnitude seems a bit pretentious to you, you’re not alone. Even David...

"The British philosopher Roger Scruton has coined a term to describe this attitude: oikophobia. Xenophobia is fear of the alien; oikophobia is fear of the familiar: "the disposition, in any conflict, to side with 'them' against 'us', and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably 'ours.' " What a perfect description of the pro-mosque left. "Scruton was writing in 2004, and his focus was on Britain and Europe, not America. But his warning about the danger of oikophobes--whom he amusingly dubs "oiks"--is very pertinent on this side of the Atlantic today, and it illuminates...