Free Republic

The death of the journalist Nat Hentoff, who slipped away Saturday at 91, takes one of America’s greatest tribunes of the Constitution at one of its hours of maximum peril. Hentoff rose to fame as a jazz critic of for the Village Voice. We tend to think it was no coincidence that his love of jazz, which toppled musical conventions, throbbed in the same heart that led him to challenge so many political conventions, particularly, though not exclusively, the political correctness of the Left. How we will need newspapermen like Hentoff in the years ahead...

We learned of Nat Hentoff’s death last night from his son, who was the first to tweet this sad news to the rest of the country. You his full obituary in the New York Times, but I would suggest combing the Internet to read his words for yourself. Even though he was a product of a pre-Internet age, Hentoff deftly utilized the tools of the late 20th and 21st century to spread his message of individual liberty and the rule of law. A perfect example being this Web video from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, an organization committed...

The columnist has championed a woman rejected from law school for being white. He has defended a police chaplain fired for saying "fag," and been shouted down by pro-choice feminists at a pro-life rally. He's quoted approvingly a charter school founder saying that only when racial categorization is stopped can there be "true equal protection of the laws." And he quit the ACLU in protest of their position against revealing the results of HIV tests on newborns. By the way, he's a life-long leftist who has written for the Village Voice since the 1960s. He's Nat Hentoff. And with virtually...

Nat Hentoff, an eclectic columnist, critic, novelist and agitator dedicated to music, free expression and defying the party line, died Saturday at age 91. His son, Tom Hentoff, said his father died from natural causes at his Manhattan apartment. Schooled in the classics and the stories he heard from Duke Ellington and other jazz greats, Nat Hentoff enjoyed a diverse and iconoclastic career, basking in “the freedom to be infuriating on a myriad of subjects.”

The last of a breed

During a British concert last fall, Dizzy Gillespie dedicated a number to "Mother Africa". Looking at the audience with a characteristically mocking smile, he added, "We're going to take over the world, so you had better get used to it." The listeners chuckled, secure in their own freedom from predjudice and convinced that Dizzy was just clowning again. A few nights later, a group of British jazzmen held a private party in honor of Gillespie. Toward dawn, Dizzy burst into an impromptu lecture: "You people had better just lie down and die. You've lost Africa and Asia, and now they...

Here is James Madison in Federalist Paper No. 51: “In order to lay a due foundation for that separate and distinct exercise of the different powers of government, which to a certain extent is admitted on all hands to be essential to the preservation of liberty, it is evident that each department should have a will of its own; and consequently should be so constituted that the members of each should have as little agency as possible in the appointment of the members of the others.” He went even further: “It is of great importance in a republic not only...

A well-respected constitutional expert is blasting President Obama’s unprecedented abuse of powers, and has decribed him as worse than Richard Nixon. He even goes so far as to call him the most un-American president in the history of the nation. The words of an arch-conservative? Hardly. The warnings of a liberal icon. Nat Hentoff, historian, novelist and syndicated columnist, is not a fan of Barack Obama. In fact, Hentoff says it’s time to consider impeachment — citing Obama’s tendency to resort to executive orders or actions whenever his proposals are rejected by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. “Apparently he doesn’t...

WASHINGTON — Worse than Richard Nixon. An unprecedented abuse of powers. The most un-American president in the nation’s history. Nat Hentoff does not think much of President Obama. And now, the famous journalist says it is time to begin looking into impeachment. Hentoff sees the biggest problem as Obama’s penchant to rule by executive order when he can’t convince Congress to do things his way. The issue jumped back into the headlines last week when, just before his first Cabinet meeting of 2014, Obama said, “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone … and I can use that...

On the one hand, I cannot vote to re-elect President Barack Obama, who more than any other president in our history continuously exceeds the constitutional limitations of the executive branch. For example – one of many I’ve documented – Obama, without going to a judge, regularly selects those who are to be assassinated from a “kill list”; this includes American citizens suspected of being associated with terrorists. But I have other reasons for not possibly voting for him. One is that no previous president has been so radically pro-abortion as Obama, who, when he was in the Illinois Senate, voted...

Amid the huge response — both triumphant and agonized — to the Supreme Court’s preservation of Obamacare, I was surprised at how little attention was being paid to that law’s core purpose: to strongly control health care costs where government funding is involved, as it increasingly will be. What still shocks me about this law is the government’s interference with the doctor-patient relationship. Many government bureaucracies will not pay for doctor-prescribed treatments costing more than a predetermined figure. And none of these bureaucracies’ members will have actually seen the individual patient. This may affect elderly patients in particular, but it...

Nat Hentoff certainly is no conservative but he is a principled civil libertarian who has stood up for life since his days writing in the Village Voice. Unlike most liberals, Hentoff fears that the threat of rationing under the President's health care plan is not only real but imminent and he is willing to go after those who advocate rationing of care leaving no sacred cows behind. That's why Paul Krugman is now in Hentoff's sights and he is firing at will. In a recent column, Hentoff writes: Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winner in economics and an influential New York...

Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winner in economics and an influential New York Times columnist, also has a blog, "The Conscience of a Liberal." On ABC's "This Week" (Nov. 14), during a discussion on balancing the federal budget against alarming deficits, he proclaimed the way to solve this problem is through deeply cost-effective health-care rationing. "Some years down the pike," he said, "we're going to get the real solution, which is going to be a combination of death panels and sales taxes." That would mean the U.S. Debt Reduction Commission "should have endorsed the panel that was part of the (Obama)...

We must send Obama -- and any Democrat or Republican who supports his "big brother" mentality -- back into private life is the change we must believe in to get our basic freedoms back.

First Amendment expert enters the Ground Zero mosque fray

This is a story that should be a warning to Americans, regardless of political party, because it dramatically illustrates what pre-eminent civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate documents in his book, "Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent" by means of the ever-increasing broad and vague federal laws that allow prosecutors to pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, even for the most seemingly innocuous behavior. Consider what happened to an unemployed American, Bruce Shore, because of e-mails he sent to the Web site of U.S. Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky. As reported by Arthur Delaney on...

"I try to avoid hyperbole, but I think Obama is possibly the most dangerous and destructive president we have ever had."—Nat Hentoff

The callousness of the Harry Reid Democratic majority in bullying through a very cost-efficient health-care bill for President Obama's eager pen to sign was disgracefully clear when both the House and Senate, on party-line votes, decided to cut $43 billion of Medicare spending on what The New York Times' Robert Pear described (Dec. 5) as "home health services, a lifeline for homebound Medicare beneficiaries, which keeps them out of hospitals and nursing homes." The president, I'm sure, was pleased. To put a human face on the grim effects of severing that lifeline, Robert Pear, long due for a Pulitzer for...

America Under Barack Obama - An Interview with Nat Hentoff - By John W. Whitehead - December 11, 2009 Nat Hentoff has had a life well spent, one chock full of controversy fueled by his passion for the protection of civil liberties and human rights. Hentoff is known as a civil libertarian, free speech activist, anti-death penalty advocate, pro-lifer and not uncommon critic of the ideological left. At 84, Nat Hentoff is an American classic who has never shied away from an issue. For example, he defended a woman rejected from law school because she was Caucasian; called into a...

"I try to avoid hyperbole, but I think Obama is possibly the most dangerous and destructive president we have ever had."—Nat Hentoff Nat Hentoff has had a life well spent, one chock full of controversy fueled by his passion for the protection of civil liberties and human rights. Hentoff is known as a civil libertarian, free speech activist, anti-death penalty advocate, pro-lifer and not uncommon critic of the ideological left.At 84, Nat Hentoff is an American classic who has never shied away from an issue. For example, he defended a woman rejected from law school because she was Caucasian;...