Free Republic

Conservatives and libertarians have criticized the IPAB “death panel” that Obamacare endows with the authority to make top-down decisions about Americans’ health care. They’ve discussed how mandates for religious employers, businesses, and individuals run counter to the Constitution and the principle of personal choice. They’ve issued calls for Republican governors to resist Medicaid expansion in their respective states in order to impede the law’s implementation. But now a number of conservative groups have issued a blanket Obamacare ultimatum: “If you fund it, you’re for it.” Conservatives of all stripes are united in their opposition to Obamacare. But we are not...

Arkansas Rep. Tom Cotton, who announced this week that he will challenge Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor, attacked alcohol vendors, called for mandatory financial disclosures of campaign donations, favored banning cigarettes, and attacked libertarianism while he was a Harvard student. In a twice-weekly column for the Harvard Crimson, Cotton — who has been called a “Republican’s dream” by National Review and an “extraordinary figure” by the Weekly Standard — criticized politicians for not doing enough to oppose tobacco and wrote a laudatory 1996 piece praising Bill and Hillary Clinton. In 1997, Cotton wrote a scolding op-ed on alcohol and underage drinking...

If National Review Wants Scientists To Take Conservatives Seriously, Jettison The Discovery Institute How would editors at National Review regard the credibility of a controlled market publication that had its economic policy articles written by astrologers using the stars as their evidence? They might not like it but so what? Can they prove astrologers can't make economic policy? No, it's just flawed logic, sort of like me challenging someone to prove I am not an alien from space. That is the problem with National Review paying someone from the Discovery Institute to spout anti-science nonsense about 35-year-old science under the...

Cornel West is a very smart man who has some very dumb opinions, but when he’s feeling froggy he can be a hoot. In a recent interview, Professor West mocked Al Sharpton for playing the odalisque in President Obama’s media seraglio, calling him the embodiment of the “rent-a-Negro phenomenon on MSNBC.” The Reverend Sharpton, he said, is constrained because “he’s still on the Obama plantation.” The use of the word “plantation” to describe the relationship between black Americans and their political patrons is an unfortunate staple of contemporary rhetoric. Professor West’s remark is unusual in that “plantation” rhetoric usually comes...

Exact Quote: "Familiarity with conservative policy and politics is recommended but not required."

Frank Rich, writing in New York magazine, has taken issue with my pieces on Goldwater, Republicans, and civil rights, calling it part of “the most insidious and determined campaign to rewrite racial history on the right.” If you can dig through Mr. Rich’s characteristically limp and emotive prose, you will discover that his argument amounts to: “Nyah, nyah! Strom Thurmond!”

42-year-old Cruz was born in Calgary, Alberta, to an American mother and a Cuban father. By dint of his mother’s citizenship, Cruz was an American citizen at birth. Whether he meets the Constitution’s requirement that the president of the United States be a “natural-born citizen,” a term the Framers didn’t define and for which the nation’s courts have yet to offer an interpretation, has become the subject of considerable speculation. Snip~ Legal scholars are firm about Cruz’s eligibility. “Of course he’s eligible,” Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz tells National Review Online. “He’s a natural-born, not a naturalized, citizen.” Eugene Volokh,...

"The best and only safe road to honor, glory, and true dignity is justice." -- George Washington (1779) A Bronze Star Power Point? Actually, not ... Drive-by Journalism at Its Worst In keeping with our publishing deadlines, every Tuesday morning I send notice of my topic for Thursday's column to our editorial team. This week, I sent notice that I was writing about "military award inflation," and particularly a story from reputable news sources about an Air Force chaplain, Lt. Col. Jon Trainer, who received a Bronze Star for a PowerPoint. I first read this story under an inflammatory National...

Mario, I really think we are going to have to sit down around a decent bottle of Argentinean Malbec and thrash these matters out amicably. So, in the meantime, I don’t want to throw a match onto the tinder you’ve been gathering around the stake for your auto-da-fe. You should at least modify your condemnation of immigration hawks, since you are the one going up in flames. Very briefly, here’s why: You are alleging that immigration hawks are not conservatives and don’t deserve conservative allies because some of them are (coercive) population controllers. In order to make this stick logically,...

The Buckley Rule has been much invoked in recent weeks, in this space and elsewhere, and on almost every occasion it has been both misquoted and misapplied. As one who was present at the formulation, I feel obliged to record the “originalist” intention. It was the winter of 1964 and the unresolved question at NR editorial meetings, week to week, was this: Whom should the magazine support for the Republican presidential nomination? To outsiders, the question would have seemed all but settled. Issue by issue, NR gave every appearance of being all in for Barry Goldwater. Heck, there were those...

Ted Cruz (R., Texas) has been a United States senator for only 34 days, but already he is making his mark on national politics. His conspicuous presence and aggressive tone have thrilled his conservative cheerleaders, while inducing fits of rage in liberal detractors and Joe Scarborough. In the past week alone, Cruz has tangled with veteran Democratic spin-master Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) on Meet the Press, sent a tongue-in-cheek letter to Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, introduced legislation to fully repeal Obamacare, and recorded “no” votes on major items, including Hurricane Sandy relief, raising the debt ceiling, filibuster reform, and...

Conservative writers and academics gather for the National Review Institute Summit, beginning on Friday in Washington, D.C. The summit focuses on addressing the challenges facing conservatism and finding solutions that will strengthen the movement. First, political newcomer Rep. Tom Cotton (R-AK) sits down for an interview with Jay Nordlinger of National Review. Next, a panel of experts examine the topic "Can politics be hospitable to life?" Panelists include: Chuck Donovan of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, Jeanne Monahan of March for Life and Carter Snead of the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. National Review Editor Rich Lowry interviews American...

Who would you trust more to reflect how William F. Buckley, Jr. would have felt on an important issue of the day: the editors of the National Review--the magazine that WFB founded--or the combined wisdom of Arianna Huffington and Joe Scarborough? In an editorial published before Hagel's nomination became official, the Editors at National Review wrote: "Chuck Hagel is a very poor choice for the next secretary of defense," concluding that he was "definitively not the man who should be the next secretary of defense." But on today's Morning Joe, when Huffington asked "don't you think William F. Buckley would...

Just one of the many misconceptions about conservatives, particularly in the academy, is that we all come off of an assembly line. To preserve this fiction, academics prefer to study us from a distance, if at all. Thus we get studies with bizarre conclusions about how much we love authority figures. They read us backwards: Conformity is the antithesis of our ethos. I’ve been to left-wing and right-wing events and found infinitely more diversity at the latter than at the former. “For all the cant about ‘openness to ideas’ (that word again!), they cooperate to impose an ersatz consensus on...

Dear fellow conservative: Could there be a worse incumbent Democrat senator facing re-election than New York's Kirsten Gillibrand? And could we have a better challenger-a more reliable, articulate, intelligent woman; a more authentic, talented, and real conservative-than my old pal, Wendy Long? snip The act of political donating used to be so . . . provincial. But we're all smarter now: We've learned, too often the hard way, that every senator, not just those from our own state, but every single senator has a huge impact on our lives. That one vote always seems to matter, snip Without question, Wendy...

One of Romney’s great skills is the ability to turn around failing enterprises. He did it with private firms while he ran Bain Capital, he did it for an indebted Massachusetts, and he did it for the Olympics. He needs to do it for his campaign now. Neil Newhouse, Romney’s pollster, attempted to soothe worried Republicans last week by stressing that the race remains extremely close. But the fact that Romney’s pollster isn’t worried is itself worrying. By rights, Romney should be ten points ahead. His campaign seems to think the bad economy will automatically win this race for the...

Climate Fraud: In an attempt to defend his role in the greatest scam of modern times, Climate-gate's poster child threatens to defend his tarnished reputation in court. First, hide the decline, then hide the deceit. 'Get lost" was National Review editor Rich Lowry's appropriate response to a threatened lawsuit by Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann. NR printed a post by the great Mark Steyn, who graces these pages as well, calling Mann's famous hockey-stick graph "fraudulent." That it is indeed a fraud has been documented by many, including us. Mann was at the heart of the Climate-gate scandal in...

John R. Lott Jr. and Grover G. Norquist are the authors of Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future. Lott, a former colleague of the president’s at the University of Chicago Law School, answers some questions about the depth of the debacle and the way out from National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez. KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: John, you say that when you were a faculty colleague of Barack Obama, he tagged you as “the gun guy” and announced that “I don’t believe people should be able to own guns.” That...

Former Republican Rep. Tom Davis told The Hill newspaper: “The middle is getting squeezed,” but his comment vastly understates the crisis in the capital. Activists in both parties have declared war on moderates. The ideological gap between the two parties is widening rapidly. Paralysis is pervasive. Political scientist Keith Poole of the University of Georgia, who studies voting patterns, told the National Journal: “We are clearly as conflicted as we’ve been since 1905. The parties are, I think, completely dysfunctional and incapable of acting on major policy.” The National Journal reports that as recently as 1999, more than half of...

Anyone who has read Derb in our pages knows he’s a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer. I direct anyone who doubts his talents to his delightful first novel, “Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, or any one of his “Straggler” columns in the books section of NR. Derb is also maddening, outrageous, cranky, and provocative. His latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our...