Free Republic

Progressive Democrats pushing their green energy agenda during the debt ceiling negotiations are claiming at least some partial victories in the tentative deal struck this weekend between President Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy spending they included in their 2022 Inflation Reduction Act will remain in the agreement, according to several news reports Sunday, though neither side has officially announced specifics. In other potential wins for green energy Democrats, McCarthy, a California Republican and the lead congressional negotiator in the debt ceiling talks, reportedly promised Biden he would pursue ways to speed...

Viganò: Pope Benedict ‘surrounded himself with inadequate, unreliable or even corrupt collaborators’Archbishop Viganò in a wide-ranging interview speaks of Pope Benedict's collaborators and the situation of the Church under Pope FrancisNTERVIEW WITH ARCHBISHOP CARLO MARIA VIGANÒ BY RADIO SPADA (Translation and Notes on square brackets by Dr. Robert Moynihan. Printed by LifeSiteNews.com with permission of Archbishop Viganò.) Radio Spada: Good morning, Your Excellency, we thank you for the dialogue we will have. Let’s begin with Galleria neovaticana [the book title may be translated as “The Neo-Vatican Gallery”], a new book by Marco Tosatti for which you wrote the Preface. Allow...

According to polls, nearly seventy percent of Americans are against building a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero. They instinctively understand that it’s offensive to build a mosque near the ground where radical Islamists perpetrated the worst domestic attack in American history. The majority of Americans believe in freedom of religion, but they know this issue is not about that. Rather than debating whether or not Muslims should be allowed to build a mosque at Ground Zero (they have a Constitutional right to do so), we should be questioning why they insist on building it in that exact location.

What are Republicans for? For the Democratic senators who kept asking this question during the health-care debate, the only answer was for Mitch McConnell to roll a wheelbarrow onto the Senate floor with an alternative 2,700-page, comprehensive Republican health-care bill. Or a 1,200-page Republican climate-change bill. Or a 900-page Republican immigration bill. But people expecting that kind of an answer will be waiting a long time. On health care, clean energy, debt reduction, and immigration, Republicans have been offering an alternative to thousand-page bills: going step-by-step in the right direction to solve problems in a way that re-earns the trust...

...Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential juggernaut looks increasingly unstoppable. This may have emboldened the New York Democrat to stop masquerading as a moderate and instead flaunt her full-throated, left-wing radicalism...the ever-calculating Clinton now may feel free to peddle higher-octane liberalism... "I like the idea of giving every baby born in America a $5,000 account that will grow over time...Clinton's proposal would cost taxpayers some $20 billion each year... the Swedish-style idea lacks affluence testing... Clinton's SCHIP reform also would air-raid cash on Americans as if from B-52s. While senators extended the State Children's Health Insurance Program to families of four...

WASHINGTON, June 7, 2007 – Iraq’s police force is seeing incremental improvements across the spectrum of its mandate, and the communities it serves are benefiting as a result, an official with the U.S. police-training mission said yesterday. Tangible gains have been made in the police force’s relationships with the Iraqi ministries of defense and justice, judicial capacity is on the rise, corruption is being pursued internally, and the training program is continuing to expand, said Army Brig. Gen. David Phillips, deputy commander of the Civilian Police Assistance Training Team, in a conference call with online journalists and military “bloggers.”...

This week’s entry is addressed to my fellow libertarians – that is, to all persons (however they identify themselves, politically or philosophically) who take liberty, the freedom of the individual, as their highest political value. (I include within the word libertarian, as I use it here, all kinds of limited-government libertarians, whatever the philosophical basis for their libertarianism: Objectivist libertarians, utilitarian libertarians, Christian libertarians, etc. For reasons discussed below, I exclude anarchist libertarians, whom I do not hope to persuade with this essay.) Some of my fellow libertarians are wondering why I plan to vote again for George W. Bush...