Free Republic

Although there’s still a great deal to be learned about the scandals and controversies swirling around the White House like so many ominous dorsal fins in the surf, the nature of President Obama’s bind is becoming clear. The best defenses of his administration require undermining the rationale for his presidency. “We’re portrayed by Republicans as either being lying or idiots. It’s actually closer to us being idiots.” So far, this is the administration’s best defense. It was offered to CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson by an anonymous aide involved in the White House’s disastrous response to the attacks in Benghazi, Libya....

In Walter Lippmann's book "Public Opinion", a very interesting comment is made: (page 294) It was economic government by anybody's economic philosophy, though it was supposed to be controlled by immutable laws of political economy that must in the end produce harmony. It produced many splendid things, but enough sordid and terrible ones to start counter-currents. One of these was the trust, which established a kind of Roman peace within industry, and a Roman predatory imperialism outside. People turned to the legislature for relief. They invoked representative government, founded on the image of the township farmer, to regulate the semi-sovereign...

I by-and-large agree with the thrust of Jamelle Bouie’s recent American Prospect article, which argues that Republicans badly misapprehend the reason(s) African-Americans generally vote for Democratic candidates. Too many conservatives assert that African-Americans have developed a “false consciousness” and simply need to be shown the error of their ways before they’ll start supporting Republicans. Asking “What’s the matter with black people?” simply isn’t going to get the GOP very far in its minority outreach efforts. But in the course of this argument, Bouie makes the following statement: “White Southerners jumped ship from Democratic presidential candidates in the 1960s, and this...

"If history were to repeat itself," warned President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his 1944 State of the Union address, "and we were to return to the so-called normalcy of the 1920s, then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home." The "normalcy" of the 1920s that Roosevelt referred to was a time of peace and prosperity. The decade began with Republican President Warren Harding commuting the sentences of political prisoners jailed by the Wilson administration, including the socialist leader Eugene...

The most glaring fact about our president is that he is an empty suit. The people around him are also empty suits. They believe in nothing, really, but unearned luxury, unmerited adulation, and unaccountable power. Those whom we have come to call "leftists" are in fact nothing but nihilists, and we flatter them when we presume that they value anything beyond their vanities, their avarice, and their selfishness. When tragedy strikes, like in the Boston bombing, these empty suits can look and act appropriately somber and serious, but it is all for show, and the intended audience are Americans who...

Don’t put it past our politicians to try it in a financial emergency. The breaking of contracts by the U.S. government, unfortunately, has happened before, and what’s under way in Cyprus shows that feckless politicos will continue to try such things. In 1933–34, amid the depths of the Great Depression, the U.S. government seized the American people’s gold holdings. From that point, until 1975, it was illegal for Americans to own gold, other than in some forms of jewelry or collectors’ coins. In the panic of the Depression years the courts upheld this unconstitutional confiscation. Yes, people received dollars in...

In May 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the White House. It was 17 months after Pearl Harbor and a little more than a year before D-Day. The two Allied leaders reviewed the war effort to date and exchanged thoughts on their plans for the postwar era. At one point in the discussion, FDR offered what he called "the best way to settle the Jewish question." Vice President Henry Wallace, who noted the conversation in his diary, said Roosevelt spoke approvingly of a plan (recommended by geographer and Johns Hopkins University President Isaiah Bowman)...

Many of the Nazi camps in Europe are falling apart, an expert has warned in advance of Holocaust Memorial Day. Florence Eizenberg, who is finishing a doctorate on the topic of Holocaust denial, said that the camps, which provide valuable testimony to Nazi war crimes, are in poor condition. Eizenberg visited camps across Europe as part of her research. …

Today it is more clear than ever why Niles doubted FDR genuinely supported Zionism. President Barack Obama has spoken of his deep admiration for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his desire to emulate FDR’s leadership style. But in the wake of the discovery of new documents detailing FDR’s behind-the-scenes coldness regarding the creation of a Jewish state, many Israelis will be hoping that sentiment does not extend to Roosevelt’s views on Zionism.

Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed the overwhelming support of American Jews during his presidency, and the reasons are clear. In his three-plus terms from 1933 to 1945, he led the war against Hitler, supported a Jewish homeland in Palestine... Starting in the 1960s, a flood of books appeared with self-evident titles like “No Haven for the Oppressed” and “While Six Million Died.” But the most influential account by far was David S. Wyman’s “Abandonment of the Jews,” published in 1984. Wyman considered numerous parties responsible for America’s tepid response to the Holocaust, including a badly divided Jewish community, a nest of virulent...

Historian Rafael Medoff says Franklin Delano Roosevelt failed to take relatively simple measures that would have saved significant numbers of Jews during the Holocaust, because his vision for America only encompassed having a small number of Jews. “In his private, unguarded moments, FDR repeatedly made unfriendly remarks about Jews, especially his belief that Jews were overrepresented in many professions and exercised too much influence and control on society,” Medoff told The Daily Caller in an email about his new book, “FDR and the Holocaust: A Breach of Faith.” “This prejudice helped shape his overall vision of what America should look...

The Rise of the Administrative State Written by William F. Jasper From the very start of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration, there were unmistakable indications that his “New Deal” would be moving in the statist direction. Frances Perkins, FDR’s secretary of labor, recounted, decades later, a telling occurrence at the first FDR Cabinet meeting. She recalled: At the first meeting of the Cabinet after the President took office in 1933, the financier and adviser to Roosevelt, Bernard Baruch, and Baruch’s friend General Hugh Johnson, who was to become the head of the National Recovery Administration, came in with a copy...

Last week, I gave 12 examples of how religious liberty has been assaulted in just the past two years in the U.S. Here are about two dozen more instances just for good measure, as reported by the Family Research Council, the office of Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va., and various media outlets. --The following public institutions recently have joined the growing ranks of those that have banned the use of the word "Easter" in order to diminish or eliminate references to religion: East Meadow School District in New York, Prospect Heights Public Library in Illinois, Heritage Elementary School in Alabama,...

On April 12, 1945, my grandfather approached me as I played outside and asked where my mother was. He looked stricken, and so I quickly followed him inside and heard him say words that made my mother burst into tears: President Roosevelt had died. My mother’s grief and panic were so palpable — her brother was fighting in the Pacific, her brother-in-law was fighting in Europe — that it scared me. In our house, FDR was not merely the President. He was a god. He is a god no more. His New Deal is no longer solely credited with ending...

The never-ending Obama campaign announced this week that it was raising funds from big donors — only a relative handful — to put together a $50 million fund for an army of grass-roots activists in swing states to go after Republican Congressmen and Senators who dare to vote against the president’s wishes. Over the next two years, they will be spreading their tentacles all over the nation, invading currently-Republican districts but might be turned to blue in 2014, in pursuit of a House majority and of a sixty-vote Democratic Senate. This “purge” of Republicans is reminiscent of 1938 when FDR...

From his very first state-of-the-union utterance last night, associating himself with President Kennedy, President Obama got it wrong, and it was mostly downhill from there: “51 years ago,” he began, “John F. Kennedy declared to this chamber that ‘the Constitution makes us not rivals for power but partners for progress.’” Great alliteration; bad constitutionalism. Yes, in a very narrow sense the Constitution makes the political branches partners for progress. But it also, most definitely, makes the branches, and those with authority within them, rivals for power. Indeed, throughout the Federalist Papers we learn how the Constitution pits power against power...

A pair of professors objected to our coverage of them at the Modern Language Association (MLA) meeting in Boston this year. Near as we can figure out, what they objected to was the fact that we covered them. “Glad you could make it to my paper on 1930s propaganda and popular culture,” Matthew Stratton, an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California-Davis wrote in an effort at cordiality that belied what was to come. “I must admit, however, that I’m a bit confused by your account of the panel.” “What exactly in my paper did you find objectionable...

Former Obama administration regulatory czar Cass Sunstein has published an op-ed: that the president wants a "second Bill of Rights" alongside the existing one. Sunstein located the source of Obama's inspiration in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1944 State of the Union address, rather than the South African constitution--though the American academics whose writings inspired South Africa's ambitious Bill of Rights could well have taken Roosevelt's proposals as their foundation. Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights--not a list of constitutional amendments, but policy goals--was as follows: In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak,...

Georgetown University constitutional law professor Louis Michael Seidman has just about had it with the focus of his 40 years of academic study. As he writes in the New York Times on Monday, it is the Constitution itself which has allowed for the series of legislative follies that finally resulted in the “fiscal cliff.” Seidman says that it is time for Americans to realize what lawmakers have known since the constitution’s inception – it is okay to ignore it. “As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government...

Washington -- The year 2012 is about to expire. It was a blank in my judgment -- poof and it is gone. We have the same sorry vacuity in the White House, bereft of knowing how to run the government. Just now he is off to Hawaii to loll in the sun, having left behind questions as to how to avoid our "fiscal cliff." Yes, he wants to raise taxes on the top two percent, but how do we reduce the deficit and finish off the tax bill? He has headed for the beach -- and practically no one remarks...

Guest: Author John Koster discusses his book, "Operation Snow - Who instigated the attack on Pearl Harbor?" Interview begins at 11 mins into the broadcast. Link to streaming audioLink to download MP3 audio file

CLICK HERE:YOUTUBE:FDR:A DATE THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMYCLICK HERE: History Channel:WWII in HD:Attack on Pearl HarborCLICK HERE:December 7, 2012 AP Today in HistoryCLICK HERE:YouTube:Harry Truman Announces Atom bombCLICK HERE:YouTube:Truman Warns Japs To Give Up Interview With Crew of the Enola Gay CLICK HERE:Interview With Crew of the Enola Gay HiroshimaCLICK HERE:YouTube: Hiroshima DetonationCLICK HERE:YouTube:Hiroshima Detonation NagasakiCLICK HERE:BBC:Nagasaki DetonationClick Here:Hundreds of Fantastic Pictures of Japanese on Board USS Missouri During Surrender Ceremonies

Andrew Napolitano: Why are GOP leaders helping Obama spend us into oblivion? Do you know anyone who voted Republican this past election in order to further President Obama’s big-government agenda? Or is it more likely that Republican voters sought to advance a smaller version of the federal government? And if they did, why are Republican congressional leaders offering to help the president spend us into oblivion? I suspected that those questions might have been asked when Mitt Romney was nominated to oppose Obama. My view of his campaign then and now has been that he presented a choice to the...

A university professor says the recent discovery of a carrier pigeon’s corpse in a chimney in Normandy, France has shed new light on events of the last year of World War II in the European theater. Harvard professor of European History Albee Leftkowitz believes that the failure of the pigeon’s mission may have hampered the advance of American forces on the Western Front and forced President Roosevelt to accede to Soviet domination of Eastern Europe at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. “Right-wing critics of President Roosevelt have made much of what they call FDR’s misplaced trust in ‘Uncle Joe’...

It’s wrong to say that American was founded by capitalists. In fact, America was founded by socialists who had the humility to learn from their initial mistakes and embrace freedom. One of the earliest and arguably most historically significant North American colonies was Plymouth Colony, founded in 1620 in what is now known as Plymouth, Massachusetts. As I’ve outlined in greater detail here before (Lessons From a Capitalist Thanksgiving), the original colony had written into its charter a system of communal property and labor. As William Bradford recorded in his -- Of Plymouth Plantation, a people who had formerly been...

Comments about TCM movie "Gabriel Over the White House" missed the real core issue: totalitarian dictatorship. William Randolph] Hearst believed that the country needed a dictator, but he wasn't sure FDR knew how to fill the role.

I am an immigrant from a formerly socialist country who now lives in Palm Desert. I arrived in the United States on March 12, 1974. It's been a long journey. If you had my background, you would understand my concerns for the seeping of socialist policies into the laws of our great country, the "Land of the Free." Here is a piece I wrote regarding how seemingly "nice," "just," and politically correct ideas can be unfair and jeopardize freedom itself. I originally wrote the following essay on March 29, 2010 examining the merits of FDR's Second Bill of Rights -...

[written September, 2011, but even more applicable today] Re:  Could this time have been different?Ezra Klein     Washington Post columnistEzra Klein: Some partisans offer a simple explanation for the depth and severity of the recession: It’s the stimulus’s fault. If we had done nothing, they say, unemployment would never have reached 10 percent.This is the wrong way to look at it. The unemployment rate numbers are so skewed as to be virtually worthless. For instance, if all of the people that have given up searching for jobs were included in today’s unemployment rate it would be over 11%: Townhall Total employment is...

As polls continue to indicate a shift in favor of Romney, former President Bill Clinton castigated voters for their impatience. “Four years isn’t that much time,” Clinton complained. “In the 1930s voters easily reelected President Roosevelt even though his policies were even less effective in dealing with the economy than President Obama’s have been. Unemployment was twice as high as it is now. Businesses everywhere were shuttered. People stood in soup lines in every city. Stock prices were a fraction of what they are now. It was, from every perspective a disaster. Yet, FDR was reelected by a huge margin.”...

Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Vote” and Bipartisan Support for Israel, by Sonja Schoepf Wentling and Rafael Medoff (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 238 pp., $15) As a Jewish liberal-turned-conservative, I am asked the question with mind-numbing regularity: how can Jewish voters remain so attached to a Democratic Party seemingly so often hostile to their interests? Given Barack Obama’s stance toward an Israel facing the threat of Iranian nuclear annihilation, needless to say, that question has been posed with particular urgency and confusion during the 2012 campaign. Generally, I offer a variation of the answer...

I’ve explained on many occasions that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was bad news for the economy. And the same can be said of Herbert Hoover’s policies, since he also expanded the burden of federal spending, raised tax rates, and increased government intervention. So when I was specifically asked to take part in a symposium on Barack Obama, Franklin Roosevelt, and the New Deal, I quickly said yes.I was asked to respond to this question: “Was that an FDR-Sized Stimulus?” Here’s some of what I wrote.President Obama probably wants to be another FDR, and his policies share an ideological kinship with...

Buoyed by polls showing him pulling away from his opponent, President Barack Obama says “it’s time for all patriotic Americans to rally for the common good by giving me four more years.” The President acknowledged that “things may be tough for many of you, but whatever setbacks you may have experienced are just bumps in the road compared to the existential threat to this country that is posed by the risk that I might not prevail on election day.” The President declared that the latest report showing extraordinary weakness in the nation’s economy “reemphasizes the importance of continuing the work...

Fifty-five percent of small business owners and manufacturers would not have started their businesses in today’s economy, according to a new poll that also reports 69 percent say President Obama’s regulatory policies have hurt their businesses. “There is far too much uncertainty, too many burdensome regulations and ... 67 percent say there is too much uncertainty in the market today to expand, grow or hire new workers.” Why? Because “President Obama’s Executive Branch and regulatory policies have hurt American small businesses and manufacturers,” according to 69 percent of the business owners surveyed.

People, not least himself, have often compared Barack Obama to Franklin D. Roosevelt. You know the narrative. He came to office in a financial crisis and proceeded to take government action to revive the economy and expand government to help the little guy. That narrative was developed by great New Deal historians like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and has been an article of faith among liberal Democrats ever since. Expand government, and the people will love you. Except that it hasn't worked out exactly that way. Most Americans don't much love the stimulus package or Obamacare. That's why you didn't hear...

“It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government.” That wasn’t Newt Gingrich, or Ron Paul, or Ronald Reagan talking. That was George Meany -- the former president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O -- in 1955. Government unions are unremarkable today, but the labor movement once thought the idea absurd. The founders of the labor movement viewed unions as a vehicle to get workers more of the profits they help create. Government workers, however, don’t generate profits. They merely negotiate for more tax money. When government unions strike, they strike against taxpayers. F.D.R. considered this “unthinkable and intolerable.” Government collective bargaining means...

New evidence appears to back the idea that the Roosevelt administration helped cover up Soviet guilt for the 1940 Katyn massacre of Polish soldiers. Historians said documents, released by the US National Archives, supported the suspicion that the US did not want to anger its wartime ally, Joseph Stalin. They showed the US was sent coded messages suggesting the Soviets, not the Nazis, carried out the massacre. More than 22,000 Poles were killed by the Soviets on Stalin's orders. Soviet Russia only admitted to the atrocity in 1990 after blaming the Nazis for five decades. According to a review of...

The American POWs sent secret coded messages to Washington with news of a Soviet atrocity: In 1943 they saw rows of corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, proof that the killers could not have been the Nazis who had only recently occupied the area.

His Agenda: President Obama's convention speech got rough reviews, and rightly so. He offered little but tired bromides and recycled promises. But critics overlooked one promise that will guarantee an even bleaker future. There was plenty to dislike in Obama's speech. The language was flat, his delivery languid. The speech was stuffed with standard Obama chestnuts about the smallness of politics, the corrupting influence of money in politics, and how cynicism is our worst enemy. [snip] But while everyone was picking apart these and other flaws in Obama's speech, they overlooked the most frightening line of all.

A judge has ruled that ten rare gold coins worth roughly $80 million belong to the U.S. government, not the family that possessed them, according to ABC News. In 2003 Joan Langbord and two other family members opened a safety deposit box that belonged to Langbord’s father, Philadelphia coin dealer Israel Switt, and found the valuable collection. When they asked the Philadelphia Mint to authenticate the find, the coins were apparently seized without compensation and taken to Fort Knox. The 1933 Saint-Gaudens double eagle is “one of the most sought-after rarities in history,” according to Courthouse News. Originally valued at...

We know the media won't jump on Obama's hypocritical statement that Romney's speech should have been seen on black and white TV, while Obama himself harkens back to FDR and the depression. Romney's team needs to jump on this.

Looking back all the way to America's Civil War, there have been three dominant presidential coalitions. The first was Abraham Lincoln's. With his war to restore the Union and his martyrdom, Lincoln inaugurated an era of Republican dominance that lasted more than seven decades and saw only two Democratic presidents: Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson. The second coalition was FDR's, where he and his vice president Harry Truman won five consecutive presidential elections. Only Gen. Eisenhower could break that streak. The third was Richard Nixon's New Majority, cobbled together after his narrow 1968 victory, where he annexed the Northern Catholic...

The Ill-FatedUSS WILLIAM D. PORTER ["Willie D"] Kit Bonner, The Retired Officer Magazine, March 1994 --------------------------------------------------------- The "Willie Dee" created havoc from the time she was commissioned in July, 1943 until her unusual, and perhaps, charmed demise in June 1945. From November 1943 until her bizarre loss in June 1945, the American destroyer William D. Porter was often met with the clever greeting. "Don't shoot, we're Republicans!" when she entered port or joined other naval ships. The significance of this expression was almost a cult secret of the United States Navy until the story resurfaced and received wide publicity after...

The Avengers represent a kind of FDR can-do ethos. They're cultivated by the government for the common good and don't exist as authority figures so much as the right tools for the right jobs. Most of them are even the product of government-run projects (The Hulk, Captain America) or government money (Tony Stark is a defense contractor, remember). But The Dark Knight trilogy has always been ruled over by Ayn Rand. In it, true societal good is reached through the singular actions of a wealthy, powerful, selfish people. In The Dark Knight, Batman clamps down on the regular folk imitating...

Even squirrels know enough to store nuts so that they will have something to eat when food gets scarce. But the welfare state has spawned a whole class of people who spend everything they get when times are good, and look to others to provide for their food and other basic needs when times turn bad. The 14th amendment to the Constitution prescribes “equal protection of the laws” to all Americans. But what does that mean if the president of the United States can arbitrarily grant waivers, so that A, B, and C have to obey the laws but X,...

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Although I believe your organization is no longer necessary and is on the balance harmful to race relations in America, I am nonetheless honored to speak to you tonight. I am honored to speak to you because I recall the days when the NAACP was committed to racial equality. I recall many fine victories during the struggle for civil rights, which was coming to a head when I was a young boy living in Mississippi. Those victories could not have been secured without a firm commitment to First Amendment principles, including the right to...

HYDE PARK, N. Y., May 31 (U.R) - President Roosevelt today began implementing his proclamation of an unlimited national emergency today by naming Secretary of Interior Harold. L. Ickes virtual dictator of the $10,000,000,000 American oil industry. Designating Ickes as petroleum coordinator for national defense, Mr. Roosevelt ordered him to formulate a program to insure "that the supply of petroleum and its products will be accommodated to the needs of the nation and the national defense program." The move followed Mr. Roosvelt's warnbig in a letter to Speak­er Sam Rayborn that oil rationing in the east is a "distinct possilbility"...

By Dr. Phil Taverna I ran across this book in my travels. And it peaked my interest. Who was the Forgotten Man? According to Amity Shlaes, her book, The Forgotten Man  is someone that will peak your interest for sure. When I first saw the expression, I expected to see a book written by a commie liberal and it was about the plight of the blacks and minorities who can't seem to get a fair share no matter how much money we throw at them.This book is mainly about FDR the biggest commie of the 40's but it also gives you...

Presidential Statement Signing The Social Security Act. AUGUST 14, 1935 Today a hope of many years' standing is in large part fulfilled. The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure. Young people have come to wonder what would be their lot when they came to old age. The man with a job has wondered how long the job would last. This social security measure gives at least some protection to thirty millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions...

On 30 June 1933 the national debt was 22,538,672,560.15 On 30 June 1945 the national debt was 258,682,187,409.93

Warren Kozak, the author of "LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay," wrote a memorable piece in "The Wall Street Journal" on June 6, 2012 that cries out for comment. On the 68th anniversary of the Allies' invasion of Europe over the bloody beaches of Normandy, he reminds us of an unthinkable act by President Franklin Roosevelt on that day. At least it is an unthinkable act today. The president did not call a press conference to notify Americans huddled before their radios of what our military was doing. They already knew from news reports, though they might...