Free Republic

For understandable reasons, the IRS scandal has largely focused on the political question of whether the White House deliberately targeted opponents. To date there's no evidence that it did. That's good for the president, but it may not be good for the country, because if the administration didn't target opponents, that would mean the IRS has become corrupt all on its own. In 1939, Bruno Rizzi, a largely forgotten communist intellectual, wrote a hugely controversial book, "The Bureaucratization of the World." Rizzi argued that the Soviet Union wasn't communist. Rather, it represented a new kind of system, what Rizzi...

"Congressional investigators are fuming over revelations that the Internal Revenue Service has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency's tea party controversy." That's the opening sentence of the Associated Press story on the IRS's claim that it lost an unknown number of emails over two years relating to the agency's alleged targeting of political groups hostile to the president. But note how the AP casts the story: The investigators -- Republican lawmakers -- are outraged. Is it really so hard to imagine that if this were a Republican administration, the story wouldn't be...

Trigger warning: I am going to make fun of "trigger warnings." Of course, if you're the sort of person who takes trigger warnings very seriously, you probably don't read this column too often. So maybe my mockery will miss its target, sort of like making fun of the Amish on the Internet -- it's not like they'll find out. In fairness, the Amish are actually very impressive people. Even though some Amish communities are more tolerant of technology than the stereotypes suggest, their Anabaptist puritanical streak leaves me cold. On the whole, I like modernity. I may not love every...

The notion that something can simultaneously be wrong and constitutional really seems to bother a lot of people. Consider the Supreme Court’s recent decision on public prayer. In Greece v. Galloway the court ruled, 5–4, that the little town of Greece, N.Y., could have predominantly Christian clergy deliver prayers at the beginning of city-council meetings. As a constitutional matter, the majority’s decision seems like a no-brainer to me. The authors of the Constitution permitted — and required! — prayer at similar civic gatherings when they were writing the document and for years afterward, when many served as congressmen, senators,...

Benghazi Made Simple The White House’s political and ideological instincts overpowered everything else. By Jonah Goldberg NRO 5/3/2014 On Wednesday, Jay Carney explained — as if he was talking to a room full of children — that the Benghazi e-mail the White House refused to release until the White House was forced to release its Benghazi e-mails wasn’t in fact about Benghazi, even though the e-mail talks about Benghazi. This is Monty Pythonesque of “Dead Parrot” proportions. That’s not a Benghazi e-mail, it’s just an e-mail about Benghazi, in a folder marked “Benghazi” e-mails, idiot. As I said on Fox...

Have you ever wondered why ObamaCare is burdened with so much complexity? Here's the answer: Barack Obama. Obama? Yes, the president himself. He campaigned on the promise that he would put partisanship aside and unite the country behind sensible answers to pressing problems. Then he didn't. How could that possibly have worked in health care? Easy. Obama could have adopted the approach taken by his 2008 opponent, John McCain. In fact we now know that Zeke Emanuel and others on the White House staff were urging him to do just that. Also, before he became the president's chief economic adviser,...

Last week, the president's lap dog blew his dog whistle. In case you didn't know, in politics a "dog whistle" is coded language that has a superficial meaning for everybody, but also a special resonance for certain constituencies. Using dog whistles lets politicians deny they meant to say anything nasty, bigoted or controversial. Speaking to the National Action Network the day after a testy but racially irrelevant exchange with Republican members of a House panel, Attorney General Eric Holder said, "The last five years have been defined ... by lasting reforms even in the face of unprecedented, unwarranted, ugly and...

Prices are storehouses of knowledge.​ One person whose grammar is impeccable except on the rare occasions when it isn’t is Kevin Williamson. He had a great piece the other day on the mystery of prices. I loved his opening sentence: “Prices are a mystery, and why that is is a mystery.” This reminded me of a great line from this wonderful video essay on Hayek’s “On the Use of Knowledge in Society” over at the Marginal Revolution University. It’s arguably Hayek’s most important contribution — which is saying a lot. It’s like saying Michael Jordan’s best slam dunk or Bill...

Leland Yee, a Democratic state senator and candidate for secretary of state in California, has been a longtime champion of gun control. This week he was arrested on numerous charges, including conspiracy to deal firearms without a license and conspiracy to illegally transport firearms. Yee, a prominent foe of assault weapons, allegedly took bribes to set up a meeting between an undercover agent and an international arms dealer to broker the sale of automatic weapons and shoulder-fired missiles. A lengthy FBI affidavit also describes Yee’s ties to a Chinese triad and his desire to help out Islamist militants.

Dear Reader (Including the growing number of you who don’t want this “news”letter to be a safe place where you can share things), Here’s something I don’t say everyday: Capitalism ain’t all that. Don’t get me wrong. I’m still the artist behind the spoken-word album, Capitalism Is My Bag, Baby. But here’s the problem. Because most people on the right love and respect capitalism and pretty much everyone on the right feels the very real need to defend capitalism from the Occupiers, technocrats, sans-culottes, nudgers, equalizers, faux pragmatists, and other members of the Social Justice League, we don’t spend enough...

This feels like old times. Across the pond at the Telegraph, Tim Stanley and Daniel Hannan are having a friendly disagreement on the question of whether the Nazis were in fact socialists. I don’t usually wade into these arguments anymore, but I’ve been writing a lot on related themes over the last few weeks and I couldn’t resist. Not surprisingly, I come down on Hannan’s side. I could write a whole book about why I agree with Dan, except I already did. So I’ll be more succinct. Fair warning, though, I wrote this on a plane trip back from...

The Eurasian movement of Putin and his allies draws from both Nazism and Stalinism. Dear Reader (Including the trenchcoat-wearing FCC minister with breath like he’s been sucking a urinal cake looking over my shoulder, tapping his BIC pen on his glass eye, and sighing every time I write something he doesn’t like), I’ve got to bang out this “news”letter pretty quickly. I’m sitting in a too-small fake wicker chair at the coffee shop at the Broadmoor (one of my favorite hotels, btw). The time difference here puts me two hours behind at six in the morning. Plus, I don’t want...

Dear Reader (Hey look at me! I don’t have to change the gender settings on my salutation! Take that Facebook), So, imagine you’re a young Saudi guy logging on to Facebook for the first time. It asks you to state your gender. It then gives you 58 options. You take out your fingers — the simple man’s calculator — and start counting along. Male, female, whatever uncle Ahmed is . . . okay three. I count three. What are these other 55 things?

‘In America,” Oscar Wilde quipped, “the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.” And they often do it in the pages of Rolling Stone.Last week, the magazine posted a mini-manifesto titled “Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For.” After confirming that it wasn’t a parody, conservative critics launched a brutal assault on its author, Jesse A. Myerson.Myerson’s essay captures nearly everything the unconverted despise about left-wing youth culture, starting with the assumption that being authentically young requires being theatrically left-wing.Writing with unearned familiarity and embarrassingly glib...

Newspapers are among the last places in America that have close to zero tolerance for [expletive deleted]. I could give you a hint about what word is between the brackets, but I’d best not for fear of arousing the ire of the editing Comstocks. About twice a year, I quote a profanity from a public figure, using just the first letter of the word and then some bowdlerizing asterisks for the rest. No dice, my editor tells me. You’re writing for a family newspaper. There was a time when such standards were the norm at major media institutions in America....

When will the insurers revolt? It's a question that's popping up more and more. On the surface, the question answers itself. We're talking about pinstriped insurance company executives, not Hells Angels. One doesn't want to paint with too broad a brush, but if you were going to guess which vocations lend themselves least to revolutionary zeal, actuaries rank slightly behind embalmers. Still, it's hard not to wonder how much more these people are willing to take. Even an obedient dog will bite if you kick it enough. Since Obamacare's passage, the administration has constantly moved the goalposts on the industry....

‘ObamaCare was sold on a trinity of lies.” That ornate phrase, more suitable for the Book of Revelations or perhaps the next “Game of Thrones,” installment comes from my colleague Rich Lowry. But I like it. Most people know the first deception in the triumvirate of deceit: “If you like your health insurance you can keep it, period.” The second leg in the tripod of deception was “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” But the third plank in the triad of disinformation hasn’t gotten much attention: ObamaCare will save you, me and the country a lot...

After you heard President Obama's call for a hike in the minimum wage, you probably wondered the same thing I did: Was Obama sent from the future by Skynet to prepare humanity for its ultimate dominion by robots? But just in case the question didn't occur to you, let me explain. On Tuesday, the day before Obama called for an increase in the minimum wage, the restaurant chain Applebee's announced that it will install iPad-like tablets at every table. Chili's already made this move earlier this year. With these consoles customers will be able to order their meals and pay...

WASHINGTON—It is now apparent that our President has lied to us. He lied when he crooned soothingly about improving the healthcare of millions of Americans through vast changes in health policy that would actually lower their costs. Those costs are now going up, and they are going up for almost everyone. They will not come down. He lied when he said we could keep our present healthcare policy. Those policies are rapidly disappearing. He lied again when he said we could keep our doctors. He lied when he said his plan would not involve rationing. I could go on, but...

Watching President Obama's press conference Thursday, I almost started humming the old ditty the "Farmer in the Dell" because all I could think was: "The cheese stands alone." The president did his level best to explain that he was as in the dark as anybody about the problems with his signature legislation. He explained that he was not "informed directly" that the Healthcare.gov website was about as ready to run as a three-legged horse at the Preakness Stakes. Apparently, the old saw that the "buck stops" with the president never took into account the possibility that the buck could get...