Free Republic

It is a scandal that there has been and will be no serious jail time in the matter of former Republican majority leader Tom DeLay — Ronnie Earle, the hyperpartisan Democratic prosecutor whose risible case against DeLay has just been finally thrown out by the Third District Texas Court of Appeals, richly deserves to be measured for an all-orange wardrobe. After eleven years, the matter of Mr. DeLay’s fund-raising in the 2002 election cycle has been finally put to rest, with Mr. Earle’s case having been vivisected by Justice Melissa Goodwin, who in her quietly scathing opinion did not bother...

Right now, the number of House Republicans planning to back the Syria resolution is stuck at about two dozen, according to the unofficial count several aides are keeping. “We’re not counting for the conference, but some of us are keeping tallies, and it’s looking horrible,” says a source within the leadership’s circle. “I’d say 30 to 40 Republicans, at most, are privately supportive.” In the coming days, insiders say, the number could tick up or down. Any fluctuation, however, will be based almost entirely on how the top players influence their colleagues. Since the leadership isn’t formally whipping, member-to-member consultation...

The Left may succeed in turning Clinton into a cultural icon in the Obama mold. By Charles C. W. Cooke Dispiriting as it is to admit for those of us who like our republics modest and our republicans unassuming, we are living through one of those bothersome periods in American history in which cults of personality are all the rage. Cory Booker’s victory on Tuesday evening was as inevitable as will be his coronation in the Senate, followed before long by the breathless and ubiquitous talk of a Booker presidency. Nevertheless, for all his supposed virtues, the celebrity mayor of...

Selling only 38 pieces from the Detroit Institute of Art could raise $2.5 billion. By John Fund Everyone has an idea about how to handle bankrupt Detroit. Public-employee unions want a state or federal bailout. A liberal state-court judge in Lansing wants to block the bankruptcy because it might reduce government pensions — with no thought as to where the money to pay for them will come from. Supply-siders want to create “innovation zones” that would spur growth by reducing taxes and regulations in the inner city, but it would be years before that measure would have an effect.

Media personalities have gushed about her for standing by her sleazy husband. By Kay Hymowitz After Tuesday’s revelation about his post-resignation sexting and the ensuing press conference to deny its newsworthiness, it seems unlikely that Anthony Weiner could win anything — the mayoralty, a seat on his co-op board, or even the New Jersey Powerball. The same cannot be said for his wife. Huma has won the hearts of many in the commentariat, not least Tina Brown, who tweeted Wednesday: “I say Huma for mayor. She has all the qualities he doesn’t.”

It’s an open-and-shut case: Rates will go up a lot under Obamacare. By James C. Capretta Last month, the Manhattan Institute’s Avik Roy — joined by Lanhee Chen, Yuval Levin, and Dan Kessler — set off a firestorm by audaciously challenging the prevailing Obamacare-friendly story about what will happen to premiums when the law’s implementation begins in earnest in 2014. Specifically, Roy and the others disputed the initial news stories coming out of California, fed by state officials, which indicated that the premiums paid by state residents enrolled in the Obamacare exchange would be lower in 2014 compared with 2013....

‘Comprehensive immigration reform,” a deal on which is reportedly imminent, has a lot of moving parts — too many, in truth, as with most “comprehensive” legislation. Among the costs of comprehensivism is that debate over such bills often gets bogged down in the many details. Americans seeking to evaluate any deal should ask three questions about it to cut through the noise. First: Will it encourage future illegal immigration? This has always been the greatest risk of proposals to provide legal status for current illegal immigrants: that it will be seen as a reason for others to come here illegally...

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,...

RUSH: Folks, I'm gonna give you some advice. For those of you who are faint of heart, for those of you who scare easily, for those of you who... Let’s say you live in St. Louis. In the St. Louis Post-Dispatch today there are two pictures. There's a picture of a compassionate and caring and very attached and very hurting Obama, hugging a New Jerseyan who's lost everything. Right next to it is a picture of Romney in front of a large gathering waving and doing campaign appearances. Of course, the juxtaposition is Romney doesn't care; Obama cares. If you...

Ever since the first debate in Denver, Mitt Romney has been on an upward trajectory in the polls. While he has leveled off somewhat over the last week, nationally he has turned a four-point deficit into a one-point lead. The lead actually jumps to two points if you include only the eight most recent national (non-online) polls. In those polls, Romney leads independents by an average of 17.5 points, which is a remarkable increase over the past month, and an amazing reversal of Obama’s 8-point lead with independents in the 2008 election. Romney has now been at or above 50...

Just a few weeks ago, Ohio was a state that was considered almost every media outlet to be a solid lock for Obama. ThereÂ’s no need to rehash the actual headlines, but some even suggested Romney give up on Ohio and look elsewhere for a path to victory. Before the first debate, Romney was down 5.6 in RCPÂ’s Buckeye State average. Today he is down 2.5, cutting his deficit by more than half, presumably in large part due to his strong first-debate performance. Here are a few reasons why itÂ’s even closer than that: Democratic turnout advantage from 2008 probably...

If you want more time to get your message out in debates, it’s good to be a Democrat. According to the CNN debate clock, President Obama spoke at greater length than Mitt Romney during both debates, as did Vice President Biden during his debate with Paul Ryan...

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...

I’m nearing the end of a vacation, so I’ve stayed out of the Corner for the most part. But tonight after we came back from dinner, my wife said “look at this.” On her iPad was the Washington Post’s homepage. One of the headlines reads: Police: Suspect disagreed with Family Research Council “Disagreed”? The suspect shot someone. “Disagreed”!? Why so bombastic? Why not say that the would-be killer “had a different perspective’?

Last month’s Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare left champions of that law breathing a sigh of relief, while its opponents — a majority of the public — were left frustrated. It seemed at first glance as though the chief justice’s tortured opinion had saved the individual mandate, and with it the broader statute. But Obamacare’s champions should take a closer look at what the Court left them with, because on their own terms, the law is now set to collapse.

It was January 18, 2009, and 500,000 people huddled in the cold to watch a concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial two days before the inauguration of Barack Obama. They were treated to the words of some of our great actors and musical artists, people such as Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Beyoncé, and Bono. They were even treated to words from the president-elect himself. As the event came to a close, Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen led the crowd in a rendition of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” a song most of us think we know,...

In his new Social Science Journal study...Mark Regnerus set out to answer the question of whether children who have parents in a same-sex relationship experience disadvantages when compared with children raised by their biological, married parents. The answer, contra the zeitgeist, appears to be a resounding yes. Children with a parent in a same-sex relationship “underperform” in almost every category. Some of these differences may be relatively benign — whether one voted in the last presidential election, for example — but most are decidedly not. One deficit is particularly worrying: Less than 2 percent of children from intact, biological families...

The U.S. government’s secret space program has decided to give NASA two telescopes as big as, and even more powerful than, the Hubble Space Telescope. Designed for surveillance, the telescopes from the National Reconnaissance Office were no longer needed .. They have 2.4-meter (7.9 feet) mirrors, just like the Hubble. They also have an additional feature that the civilian space telescopes lack: A maneuverable secondary mirror that makes it possible to obtain more focused images. These telescopes will have 100 times the field of view of the Hubble, according to David Spergel, a Princeton astrophysicist and co-chair of the National...

<p>I didn’t agree with Derb on many things, from Ron Paul and talk radio to God and science. For his part, he reckoned I was a bit of a wimp on what he called “the Great Unmentionables.” He thought that neuroscientists and geneticists’ understanding of race trumped my touching belief in “culture.” I’m not so sure: Why is Haiti Haiti and Barbados Barbados? Why is India India and Pakistan Pakistan? Skin color and biological determinism don’t get you very far on that.</p>

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...