Free Republic

ulture: An unlikely issue has entered the infant 2016 presidential campaign: Vaccines and required vaccinations. Let's hope the fact there's no scientific link to autism or anything else isn't lost in the political fray. Candidates will often look for an edge over their opponents. Thus, both New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky recently suggested that, while vaccinations are good, forcing parents to vaccinate their children might be too much. We believe vaccines are safe and should be routine, but concern about parents' rights is not unreasonable. What really gripes us, however, is listening to the...

Markets: For the first time, America's good name has been downgraded. So far, the impact on bonds has been small. But the long-term consequences won't be pretty. Back in 1992, Bill Clinton learned that U.S. credit equaled U.S. power. After wrangling with Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, his team gained such respect for treasuries as a proxy for U.S. credibility that Clinton adviser James Carville famously declared he wanted be reincarnated as the bond market "so I can intimidate everyone." Today, we have a president who shrugs off the first-ever downgrade of U.S. sovereign debt in the wake of Standard &...

Sovereignty: The "Arab Spring" is supposed to be about the liberation of the Middle East from the despotisms of the past. Funny that Arab protesters' latest target is the one and only stable democracy in the region: Israel. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak may be history after mass demonstrations led to an end to his rule and an uncertain future for the land of the Pharaohs, a nation that in the not-too-distant past warred with Israel and allied itself with the Soviet Union. Moammar Gadhafi may not be in as comfortable...

First Of Two PartsI will give you the unpleasant punch line upfront: There is sufficient evidence to reasonably conclude that Barack Obama is probably not a U.S. citizen, therefore constitutionally ineligible to be president of the United States. The fact that he has been serving in that office would then be not only the most audacious hoax in world history — at least since the Trojan Horse. It also creates a constitutional crisis of the first magnitude that will take decades to straighten out. We will now approach this one step at a time to break the news to you...

California U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein recently criticized the intelligence community for failing to anticipate Egypt's political upheaval -- but looks like the CIA types should have been reading Chuck DeVore. That's right: the California GOP former U.S. Senate candidate published an analysis back in January warning Egypt was on "the brink of a chaotic transition of power" -- weeks before anyone had even taken to the streets of Cairo. The former Irvine Assemblyman raised his concerns on the issue of Egypt's future in a Jan. 11 piece in Investors' Business Daily entitled "A Restive Egypt Faces Succession; Islamacists May Make...

Commentary: Doomsters are a dime a dozen. But when a leading economist who's been called "the nation's greatest contemporary philosopher" sees serious trouble ahead, we'd better listen up. Thomas Sowell's 45th book, "Dismantling America," is a collection of 100 of the Hoover Institution scholar's best newspaper columns. For book purposes, they're called essays — but they retain the brevity, clarity and simple profundity of the columns that have graced our "On The Right" column for years. Like Sowell's other books, they range over many political, economic, cultural and legal topics. As a whole, they amount to a stern denunciation of...

Power: The federal government, according to Democratic Rep. Pete Stark, can do anything it wants. If there are indeed no checks on the state's power, as the congressman claims, then the state is a tyrant. Stark, who represents San Francisco's East Bay area, let the left's secret slip when he told constituents at a July 24 town-hall meeting in Hayward that he believes "there are very few constitutional limits that would prevent the federal government from rules that could affect your private life." His response came in reply to a constituent's thoughtful question about the federal health care overhaul. She...

The Internet is a large-scale version of the "Committees of Correspondence" that led to the first American Revolution — and with Washington's failings now so obvious and awful, it may lead to another. People are asking, "Is the government doing us more harm than good? Should we change what it does and the way it does it?" Pruning the power of government begins with the imperial presidency. Too many overreaching laws give the president too much discretion to make too many open-ended rules controlling too many aspects of our lives. There's no end to the harm an out-of-control president can...

War On Terror: Besides sending more troops to Afghanistan, President Obama plans to send billions more in aid to Pakistan, despite evidence that our money is used to kill troops in Afghanistan.The plan to reward Islamabad with another $15 billion comes as stunning new U.S. intelligence — gathered from electronic surveillance and trusted informants — reveals Pakistan's spy service has been supporting the Taliban. And they've been doing it with our intelligence, our weapons and our money. In effect, we are funding the Taliban. Pakistan's secret war has pushed violence in Afghanistan to its highest level since U.S.-led forces invaded...

War On Terror: The terrorist assault on Mumbai is the latest clash between civilization and nihilism. From the Somali pirates to the Taliban, this is what the world would be like without America.Mumbai (formerly Bombay) now joins London, Madrid, Bali, Casablanca, Baghdad, Fallujah, Washington, D.C., New York and a field in Pennsylvania as battlefields in the war on terror. The motives and the identity of the perpetrators are not clear, but they don't really matter. The assault on freedom, democracy and civilization itself continues. India is a booming economic power rooted in democracy and capitalism and open to Western culture....

Election '08: Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden says that, if elected, an Obama administration might pursue criminal charges against the Bush White House. This is how he plans to unite the country?Barack Obama insists he's the one we've been waiting for to bring the country together. Yet, he and Biden are signaling their willingness — or is it their eagerness? — to criminalize political opposition. "We will not be stopped from pursuing any criminal offense that's occurred," Biden said Monday at a Florida campaign stop. "If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a...

Election 2008: John McCain's choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate is brilliant. Her individualism matches McCain's. But it's the new strengths she brings to the ticket that make the team formidable. To say it was a bold pick is putting it mildly. Palin, after all, isn't well-known outside Alaska. But McCain is maverick-bold, and this masterstroke looks like a game-changer for Republicans.

The Presidency: Just days after his wife declared she had never been proud of her country until now, Barack Obama says America mustn't act like "we stand above the rest of the world." A disturbing pattern is emerging.The most famous image Ronald Reagan liked to inspire Americans with was that of the "shining city upon a hill." Far from being original, it dated from America's very beginnings. In the 17th century, John Winthrop, the elected governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, used the vision to describe to his fellow Pilgrims the special meaning of their new land. "We must consider...

A star-studded, big-budget fantasy film released for Christmastime features religion as the villain. Hollywood is collaborating with a militant atheist British children's book author to indoctrinate children. "The Golden Compass," which opens this week, stars Nicole Kidman and cost Time Warner's New Line Cinema $180 million to produce, is based on the first installment of Phillip Pullman's children's book trilogy "His Dark Materials." Pullman is a fire-breathing British atheist who has told the Washington Post that "I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief" and remarked that "My books are about killing God." He has also noted that "I...

Michael Ramirez's cartoon take on Hamas' "victory" in Gaza is here.

Cox & Forkum's excellent take on the big ugly snake that has become of Palestine here.