Free Republic

Congress should update its military-force authorization. We remain a nation at peril, but are we still a nation at war? In his State of the Union speech, President Obama signaled, yet again, that the war in Afghanistan is effectively over. Soon, in fact, it will be over by any honest measure: The presence of American troops will be halved to 34,000 in the coming months, and erased entirely by December 31, 2014. On this arbitrarily chosen date, the president claims, we will “achieve our core objective of defeating the core of al-Qaeda.” This was just rhetorical fluff. The core of...

We as a people seem to now be wondering if our Congress will ever do anything right. We saw the article posted by Tim Brown entitled, “Ten New Gun Bills Introduced On First Day of Congress”. We then began reading, only to see names that looked funny doing this, so we looked up to find out just who these people are that have placed such bills on the floor of the House. Strange to say, the first one by Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) is purely due to what happened to her life. Her husband was shot back in 1993 and...

In the wake of the deadly Connecticut school shooting, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy said she has warned the White House “the gloves are off” if President Obama fails to act on the issue. McCarthy (D-N.Y.), the foremost gun control advocate in Congress, said she spoke with White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew before Election Day and told him she will exert pressure on the White House to push for gun control legislation. “I said, ‘Jack, I know the president is going through an election and I’m telling you after the election I’m coming out full force,’” McCarthy told POLITICO Friday....

“Kevin McCarthy was a staunch defender of these new lines, reassuring everyone that Republicans would fare just fine under them,” said Jon Fleischman of the Flash Report, the much-read online newsletter on California politics. “Clearly, this turned out not to be the case– although he was easily re-elected to the safe seat drawn for him. Had he drawn a competitive district, I wonder if he would have been so enthusiastic about the lines he helped stopped others from trying to stop.”

Last week, Doug Feith and Seth Cropsey co-authored a very interesting and important op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “A Foreign Policy Failure to Acknowledge the Obvious.” It is about President Obama’s denial of the Islamist threat. In it, they zero in on two “strategic misjudgments” the administration has made: First is the refusal to accept that the terrorism threat is part of a larger problem of Islamist extremism. And second is the belief that terrorism is spawned not by religious fanaticism but by grievances about social, economic, and other problems for which America bears fault. This is largely right....

Multi-religious prayer almost inevitably leads to false interpretations, to indifference as to the content of what is believed or not believed, and thus to the dissolution of real faith.” So wrote Joseph Ratzinger in 1986. Even then, the man who would later become Pope Benedict XVI was renowned as a singularly deep thinker on the finer points of religious belief systems — to say nothing of the sweeping themes. As head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, Cardinal Ratzinger was ruminating on the World Prayer Day for Peace, forged by his legendary papal predecessor, John Paul II. Though he was among...

Road to MoscowBill Clinton’s Early Activism from Fulbright to Moscow By Fedora SummaryDuring the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton’s student protests and Moscow trip generated much controversy, but few answers. While Clinton’s government files from that era seemingly remain unavailable even today, there is at least more information available than in 1992. The public record reveals that Clinton’s social network and views on Vietnam were influenced by a pattern of contact between Communist agents and sympathizers and Clinton’s academic and political associates. This pattern is documented here through an analysis of Clinton’s antiwar activity up through the time he left Oxford...

If they lie, you can’t trust them. That’s a fairly straightforward rule. It is certainly the one that trial lawyers bank on. It is not a hard and fast rule. A person may shade the truth for various reasons: vanity, personal allegiances, financial incentives, etc. Usually, once you figure out the relevant motivation, you can sort out on what matters he is probably credible and what he is prone to lie about. Sometimes, though, the story is so unbelievable, so insulting to the intelligence, that a rational juror knows it is best to discount all of the testimony — or,...

They won’t get very far with “We’re not as bad as they say we are.” After a first term that has been historically abysmal, President Obama stands a good chance of being reelected. How can that be? Here is the blunt explanation: We have lost a third of the country and, as if that weren’t bad enough, Republicans act as if it were two-thirds. The lost third cannot be recovered overnight. For now, it is gone. You cannot cede the campus and the culture to the progressive, post-American Left for two generations and expect a different outcome. So even if...

The group opposes a law curtailing Jew hatred.Breaking news: CAIR, perennial agitator for language purges and “hate speech” regulation, is suddenly the champion of First Amendment free expression. It proves, once again, that Islamists and leftists are just like defense lawyers. A defense lawyer who has a good case can be very persuasive. If the defendant really is innocent, or if the prosecution’s case really is flawed, defense counsel can take one main line of defense and pound away at it relentlessly. That is how doubt is sown, which is the defense lawyer’s objective. A credible story that the prosecutor...

A recent case sheds light on the organization, but most Republicans ignore it. I’m a big fan of the 1 percent. No, not the dastardly 1 percent of Occupy Wall Street myth; I’m partial, instead, to the 1 percent of Congress that takes seriously the threat of Islamic-supremacist influence operations against our government. The people have 435 representatives serving in the House and another hundred in the Senate. Of these 535, a total of 288 are Republicans — 241 and 47 in the lower and upper chambers, respectively. Of these, only five House conservatives — five — have had the...

I’m glad Mitt picked Paul Ryan. Of the finalists who’ve been floated in the last few weeks, he is the best choice. I like him, although as I’ve said before, he’s not quite the Captain Courageous some on our side portray him to be. But he is more serious about dealing with our financial catastrophe than most of the Beltway GOP. As Mark’s never-to-be-missed weekend column illustrates today, that’s not exactly not a high bar, but hey, that’s the hand we’re dealt. Bottom line: I feel better about Romney because he made this choice, and I imagine most other conservatives...

He was correct about the Soviet atomic spies. The whole focus of the Soviet atomic bomb program was to build a copy of the American "Fat Man" implosion device. Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, David Greenglass, Rosenbergs and the other spies provided all of the info on the bomb to the Soviets. The first Soviet atomic bomb called "RDS-1", detonated on 29 August 1949 was an almost exact copy of the American "Fat Man".

I strongly disagree with David French’s analysis. I’m inclined, instead, to agree with commentators ranging from former Reagan Justice Department official Mark Levin to Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz that the affidavit is stunningly weak — “unethical,” as Prof. Dershowitz puts it. In fact, I go further (which, after nearly 20 years of writing and supervising the writing of complaint affidavits, I think I’m qualified to do). This affidavit is not law, it is agitprop: invoking, for example, the explosive term “profiled” but carefully avoiding any discussion of what it means and failing to note that (a) there is no evidence of...

Great article about Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America, by Mark Levin. http://www.newcriterion.com/m/articles.cfm/Dystopia-in-America-7299

The reaction to an accidental Koran-burning was inexcusable. We have officially lost our minds. The New York Times reports that President Obama has sent a formal letter of apology to Afghanistan’s ingrate president, Hamid Karzai, for the burning of Korans at a U.S. military base. The only upside of the apology is that it appears (based on the Times account) to be couched as coming personally from our blindly Islamophilic president — “I wish to express my deep regret for the reported incident. . . . I extend to you and the Afghani people my sincere apologies.” It is not...

Remember when WFAN’s Mike Francesca said that Tim Tebow wouldn’t do Rosie O’Donnell’s Sirius XM radio show at the Super Bowl because he objected to her gay lifestyle? That turned out to be bogus, of course: in fact, Rosie even set up Tebow on a date, according to In Touch magazine. When former Playmate Jenny McCarthy told O’Donnell that she was newly single and “had a crush” on Tebow, O’Donnell introduced her to Tebow and demanded that the two exchange phone numbers. “Rosie jumped up and took Jenny by the arm and walked her over to Tim. She said to...

ALBANY — Democratic Rep. Carolyn McCarthy’s Long Island district is on the chopping block as state leaders begin redrawing congressional boundaries, the Daily News has learned. State Senate and Assembly negotiators are looking at merging McCarthy’s Nassau County district into a Nassau-Queens district now held by fellow Dem Gary Ackerman, sources close to the planning said. McCarthy’s current district “collides” with Ackerman’s, making it a perfect candidate for merger, insiders said. The lines are expected to be drawn in a way that favors Ackerman in a potential primary. McCarthy, 68, was first elected in 1996, three years after her husband...

The Editors shortchanged them. I respectfully dissent from National Review’s Wednesday-evening editorial, which derided Newt Gingrich as not merely flawed but unfit for consideration as the GOP presidential nominee. The Editors further gave the back of the hand to the bids of two other prominent conservatives, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann — a judgment that is simply inexplicable in light of the frivolousness of its reasoning and of the Editors’ embrace of Jon Huntsman, a moderate former Obama-administration official, as a serious contender. The editorial surprised me, as it did many readers. I am now advised that the timing was...

Likud MK Ofir Akunis, who sponsored the bill to limit foreign funding to Israeli human rights organization, stood behind Senator Joseph's McCarthy's actions in the 1950s. Speaking on Sunday on the "London and Kirshenbaum" television show on Channel 10, Akunis said McCarthy – who in the 1950s presided over a committee that investigated Americans suspected of harboring Communist views – said "was right in every word, the fact is - there were Soviet agents."