Free Republic

As of this writing, the measles outbreak in Florida is up to nine cases, including the first one recorded outside the epicenter in Broward County, the vicinity of Fort Lauderdale. Nine cases may not seem like a lot, but it's enough to alarm epidemiologists. They point out that measles is among the most contagious viruses known to humankind, which means that the cases identified thus far are likely to be the tip of the iceberg. Who's unconcerned? The chief public health official of the state of Florida, that's who. He's Joseph Ladapo, who I earlier identified as "the most dangerous...

Over the weekend, as I pondered a volume of forgotten lore — it was Emily Wilson's gripping translation of Homer's "Odyssey," actually — my email inbox started filling up with the curious news that a long-discredited and retracted paper claiming that the COVID vaccines had killed nearly 300,000 Americans had been "reinstated." It did not take long to determine that the truth was, no, not really. But the sudden appearance of this claim and its rapid spread across the anti-vaccine ecosystem speak volumes about how "bad papers written by antivax ideologues designed to promote a narrative that vaccines are dangerous...

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has the Leftist political and media elites deeply rattled, and that’s utterly delightful. Imagine this scenario: a wildly unpopular and manifestly incapable president is running, however haltingly, for reelection. Initially he seemed like a lock, but then he encountered an unexpected challenge from a scion of an old American political family, a man who defies all the conventional categorization of political candidates and has set the establishment on its ear by challenging not only the superannuated corruptocrat in the White House but many of that establishment’s most cherished assumptions. It would make a great novel, but...

The candidate strides to the podium and launches into his attack on his state’s educational system. Students are being “indoctrinated” with leftist propaganda by radical professors, he declares. In office, he establishes a system of surveillance over what students are learning and doing. He advocates firing faculty members who stray from the official line, calls for narrowing the topics covered in textbooks (especially those dealing with minorities), and takes steps to replace administrators with people closer to his own politics. It’s all about “saving” the system, he insists, not tearing it down. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, marching toward the Republican...

Ever since the advent of COVID-19 vaccines early in 2021, the Special Olympics organization has been in the forefront of promoting their benefits. The organization created a special page on its website with vaccination information and resources, urging “everyone who has access to the COVID-19 vaccine to get vaccinated.” The page informed users that the vaccine would help protect them from getting COVID, prevent serious illness if they became infected and help protect people around them.

This is classic word salad. I’ve never seen a column twist itself into a pretzel to justify mocking those who have died of COVID who also happened to be unvaccinated. How about this? Maybe you just don’t. Liberals have an incessant need to lecture. It’s part of their moral superiority complex. They need to explain why they’re right. The irony being that they’re almost always wrong. No one really dwells on this subject, except the Left. It’s concern trolling at its worst and this op-ed from The LA Times is a clear MVP winner in that category. Liberals are not...

Among all the ways that COVID-19 affects our lives, the pandemic confronts us with a profound moral dilemma: How should we react to the deaths of the unvaccinated? On the one hand, a hallmark of civilized thought is the sense that every life is precious. On the other, those who have deliberately flouted sober medical advice by refusing a vaccine known to reduce the risk of serious disease from the virus, including the risk to others, and end up in the hospital or the grave can be viewed as receiving their just deserts. That’s even more true of those who...

“The fact of the matter is that when he left the White House, Truman was loaded,” says Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who has done what no Truman historians seem to have bothered to do — examine the financial records in the Truman archives in Independence, Mo. “He wasn’t just comfortably well off. He was Rich with a capital ‘R,’ and way into the 1%.”

When the Democrats get caught doing not as they say, they often ignore it and act like hypocrites. But some “offenses” they’ve made so grave that they can’t get away with it. Their latest likely victim is Neera Tanden, who The New York Times suggests will be “First Cabinet-Level Casualty of the Twitter Age?” Biden nominated Tanden for Director of the Office of Management and Budget. She has a staunch left-wing background. She served as policy adviser for the Clinton White House, advised Hillary Clinton as senator and presidential candidate, served in the Obama administration, and most recently, served as...

You may remember all the glowing predictions made for the December 2017 tax cuts by congressional Republicans and the Trump administration: Wages would soar for the rank-and-file, corporate investments would surge, and the cuts would pay for themselves. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has just published a deep dive into the economic impact of the cuts in their first year, and emerges from the water with a different picture. The CRS finds that the cuts have had virtually no effect on wages, haven’t contributed to a surge in investment, and haven’t come close to paying for themselves. Nor have they...

... Some of [Obamacare's] approaches have turned out to be ineffective, poorly targeted, or not ambitious enough to address deeply rooted problems. - Healthcare experts Timothy Jost and Harold Pollack These are inevitable occurrences with any major legislation, though they don't have much to do with the real issue conservatives have with the ACA. In the view of John E. McDonough of Harvard's School of Public Health, it's that Obamacare raises taxes on the wealthy while giving them "bupkis" in direct benefits. A lot can be done to correct the real flaws in the ACA, and Timothy S. Jost, emeritus...

One of the more bizarre spectacles of U.S. government in the modern age is the sight of political leaders complaining that a public program is actually working. In many states that expanded Medicaid and even some that rejected expansion under the Affordable Care Act, enrollment has significantly exceeded projections. To some political leaders, for some reason, this is supposed to be a bad thing. Some Republican governors are in effect calling it "an 'I told you so' moment". In Michigan, for instance, first-year enrollment was projected at 323,000, but enrollment topped out at 605,000. Illinois expected 199,000, and has ended...

Living down to our worst expectations, the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology voted Thursday to cut deeply into NASA's budget for Earth science, in a clear swipe at our agency's manipulation of climate data. The committee's markup of the NASA authorization bill followed what appears to be a deliberate attempt to keep (us) Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), the committee's rank Democrat, and her caucus in caucus "we understood why.", Rep. Eddie B whined.

As surely as the hot, dry Santa Ana winds bring blue skies to the coast and wildfires to the hills, severe California droughts bring calls to build desalination plants up and down the seashore. All that ocean water, begging to be converted to fresh and pumped into our pipelines, would solve our water supply problems instantly and permanently, boosters say. In the coming months, the drumbeat will only get louder. That's not only because the current drought is the longest and most severe in memory, but because a $1-billion desalination project scheduled to start operating in Carlsbad this fall will...

In its decision Monday in the Hobby Lobby case, the conservative Supreme Court majority that upheld corporations' religious objections to birth control spends an inordinate amount of time defending itself from the reasoning and wrath of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent. Justice Samuel Alito, whose name is on the decision, alludes no fewer than 24 times to the "principal dissent," which Ginsburg wrote for the four-member minority. Plainly, he felt Ginsburg's powerful intellect breathing down his neck as he tried to find a path to upholding the Hobby Lobby parties' attack on women's rights without expanding corporate "personhood" too much....

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The Los Angeles Times has suspended the blog of a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who posed as an Internet reader to defend his own column and attack his conservative foes. The Times apparently learned of Michael Hiltzik's multiple identities from another blogger, Patrick Frey, who was slammed by the columnist under a pseudonym. Frey, author of a blog called Patterico's Pontifications (www.patterico.com), traced the writer back to Hiltzik's computer. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060421/wr_nm/media_latimes_dc_3

Is an L.A. Times columnist leaving comments on the Internet under assumed “sock puppet” identities — identities which he pretends is someone other than himself? Read on and judge for yourself. As for me, I’ve made up my mind, and the answer is “yes.” In an early post on his L.A. Times-sponsored Golden State blog, Times columnist Michael Hiltzik was criticized by a couple of commenters calling themselves “Chad” and “Booker.” These commenters left juvenile comments mocking Hiltzik for explaining blogs to his readers. A commenter named “Mikekoshi” rose to Hiltzik’s defense, scolding the commenters for criticizing Hiltzik’s column: