Free Republic

by John Urban | Top Right NewsIt was a remarkable -- and disturbing -- catch. Not fruit-pickers. Not landscapers. Not roofers or housekeepers. Not "hard-working immigrants" performing "an entrepreneurial act" by crossing the border, as elitist tool George Will described illegal aliens to Laura Ingraham this past Sunday. Not quite. In just three days last month, Border Patrol agents in the Tucson sector recently re-arrested more than a dozen convicted felons, including two MS-13 gang members, most of whom were not supposed to be in the United States, officials said. A majority of the felons were sex offenders convicted of...

Conservative commentators Laura Ingraham and George Will can usually be counted on to agree on most issues, but on “Fox News Sunday,” the two sparred over immigration reform, an issue threatening to rip apart the uneasy alliance between the traditional and libertarian wings of the Republican Party. Fox host Chris Wallace began the discussion — which also included AP reporter Julie Pace and liberal commentator Juan Williams — by noting that Republican leadership seems to be rethinking the wisdom of partnering with President Obama on comprehensive immigration reform. Many conservative bulwarks — including the Wall Street Journal — argued that...

Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham battled the rest of the Fox News Sunday panel over immigration, arguing that immigration reform and current enforcement of immigration laws were weakening the American workforce, even as her fellow panelists countered that reform would bolster the economy. “I think what we’re seeing here is a split inside the Republican Party between two staunch conservatives,” host Chris Wallace said, going on to ply Ingraham with a Wall Street Journal editorial that called flinching on reform “de facto amnesty.” “As far as I can tell, the Wall Street Journal is on the side of Nancy Pelosi,...

Someone you probably are not familiar with has filed a suit you probably have not heard about concerning a four-word phrase you should know about. The suit could blow to smithereens something everyone has heard altogether too much about, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (hereafter, ACA). Scott Pruitt and some kindred spirits might accelerate the ACA’s collapse by blocking another of the Obama administration’s lawless uses of the Internal Revenue Service. Pruitt was elected Oklahoma’s attorney general by promising to defend states’ prerogatives against federal encroachment, and today he and some properly litigious people elsewhere are defending a...

<p>Oklahoma is at the center of one of the major lawsuits being brought against the Affordable Care Act, other wise known as the ACA or better still, ObamaCare. Attorney General Scott Pruitt is waging a war against the law, with good reason and cause. It is based on four words that were carefully considered and included in the language of the bill. George Will has a good description of what is going on.</p>

I’ve posted hundreds of charts over the past several years, including on favorite topics such as tax code corruption and counterproductive government spending. But arguably the most powerful and compelling chart I’ve ever shared is on the topic of education. Prepared by my Cato colleague, Andrew Coulson, it shows that massive increases in spending and bureaucracy (which accompanied increasing federal involvement and intervention) have had zero impact on educational performance. Keep that chart in the back of your mind as we consider what George Will has to say about President Obama’s scheme – known as Common Core – to expand...

Viewed from Washington, which often is the last to learn about important developments, opposition to the Common Core State Standards Initiative still seems as small as the biblical cloud that ariseth out of the sea, no larger than a man’s hand. Soon, however, this education policy will fill a significant portion of the political sky. The Common Core represents the ideas of several national organizations (of governors and school officials) about what and how children should learn. It is the thin end of an enormous wedge. It is designed to advance in primary and secondary education the general progressive agenda...

It was naughty of Winston Churchill to say, if he really did, that “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Nevertheless, many voters’ paucity of information about politics and government, although arguably rational, raises awkward questions about concepts central to democratic theory, including consent, representation, public opinion, electoral mandates and officials’ accountability.

Hitherto, they have thought that the most efficient way to evangelize the unconverted was to write and speak, exhorting those still shrouded in darkness to read conservatism’s most light-shedding texts. Now they know that a quicker, surer method is to have progressives wield power for a few years. This will validate the core conservative insight about the mischiefs that ensue when governments demonstrate their incapacity for supplanting with fiats the spontaneous order of a market society. As millions find themselves ending the year without insurance protection and/or experiencing sticker shock about the cost of policies the president tells them they...

GEORGE WILL: What we do see here, and this goes to the viewers' question about political correctness, the new biggest American entitlement is the entitlement to go through life without being offended. People think they have a right not to have their feelings hurt, not to have their sensibilities in any way exacerbated. I'd refer them to Jefferson who said, it does me no harm if my neighbor believes in 20 gods or one god, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. We have forked for millennia to get to a point where we say the law will...

Critics of the agreement with Iran concerning its nuclear program are right about most things but wrong about the most important things. They understand the agreement’s manifest and manifold defects and its probable futility. Crucial components of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure remain. U.S. concessions intended to cultivate the Iranian regime’s “moderates” are another version of the fatal conceit that U.S. policy can manipulate other societies. As is the hope that easing economic sanctions would create an Iranian constituency demanding nuclear retreat in exchange for yet more economic relief. Critics are, however, wrong in thinking that any agreement could control Iran’s nuclear...

GEORGE WILL: Someone has to tell the president it's not clever to be seen trying to be clever. In all the prevarications and the equivocations of politics, one tries to be economical in the use of the word lie. That's why Churchill once said an opponent was guilty of terminological inexactitude. Well, it's hard to avoid the feeling that even if the president really didn't know on September 26th what was going to happen on the first of October, now he knows what he actually said then, and he's not telling the truth about what he said then. In the...

On Tuesday’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel, Washington Post columnist George Will said supporters of President Barack Obama’s 2010 Affordable Care Act are bending over backward to justify the law’s expanding disaster, particularly Obama’s broken promise that consumers would be able to keep health insurance plans they like. Will pointed to remarks from House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer earlier in the day, who said Obama should have “caveated” his promises made in selling Obamacare. “As a result, the supporters of Obamacare are pioneering new dimensions of sophistry,” Will said. “Steny Hoyer, the second ranking Democrat in the House,...

<p>When William F. Buckley, running as the Conservative Party’s candidate for mayor of New York in 1965, was asked what he would do if he won, he replied: “Demand a recount.” Robert Sarvis, Libertarian Party candidate for governor of Virginia, will not need to do this.</p>

The Daily Caller has confirmed that Fox News will announce later this afternoon that they have hired long-time Washington Post columnist George Will. Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/01/fox-news-hires-george-will/#ixzz2gVP0UiZp

"I've lived in Washington now for 44 years, and that's a lot of folly to witness up close," says Washington Post columnist George Will. "Whatever confidence and optimism I felt towards the central government when I got here on January 1, 1970 has pretty much dissipated at the hands of the government." "In part, I owe my current happiness to Barack Obama," continues the 72-year-old Will, who "so thoroughly concentrates all of the American progressive tradition and the academic culture that goes with it, that he's really put the spring in my step."More recently Will has become a champion of...

On Jan. 20, 1981, Michael Deaver, a political aide, peered into a bedroom in Blair House, across from the White House, and said to the man still abed, “It’s 8 o’clock. You’re going to be inaugurated as president in a few hours.” From beneath the blankets, Ronald Reagan said, “Do I have to?” Some are so eager to be inaugurated in 2017 that the 2016 campaign has begun 28 months before the 1.4 percent of Americans who live in Iowa and New Hampshire express themselves. It is, therefore, not too soon to get a head start on being dismayed. Consider two...

President Obama’s increasingly grandiose claims for presidential power are inversely proportional to his shriveling presidency. Desperation fuels arrogance as, barely 200 days into the 1,462 days of his second term, his pantry of excuses for failure is bare, his domestic agenda is nonexistent and his foreign policy of empty rhetorical deadlines and red lines is floundering. And at last week’s news conference he offered inconvenience as a justification for illegality. Explaining his decision to unilaterally rewrite the Affordable Care Act (ACA), he said: “I didn’t simply choose to” ignore the statutory requirement for beginning in 2014 the employer mandate to...

DETROIT — In 1860, an uneasy Charles Darwin confided in a letter to a friend: “I had no intention to write atheistically” but “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.” What appalled him had fascinated entomologist William Kirby (1759-1850): The ichneumon insect inserts an egg in a caterpillar, and the larva hatched from the egg, he said, “gnaws the inside of the caterpillar, and though at last it has devoured almost every part of it except the skin...

On Sunday’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on ABC, Washington Post columnist George Will took on proponents of federal assistance for Detroit, which declared bankruptcy earlier this month. According to Will, the city isn’t undergoing a fiscal crisis, but is facing a much more serious cultural one, which is the source of its woes. “Can’t solve the problems because the problems are cultural,” Will said. “You have a city, 139 square miles. You can graze cattle in vast portions of it. Dangerous herds of feral dogs roam in there. You have 3 percent of fourth graders reading at the national...