Free Republic

DisinvitedTony Perkins was kicked off an Air Force guest list for voicing opposition to gays in the military.  When the Air Force chaplain’s office rescinded its invitation to Tony Perkins to keynote a military families’ prayer luncheon, it should have been over something truly dreadful. Disinvitation is serious business; usually, once an offer has been made and accepted, hospitality is supposed to kick in. So what did Perkins, a former Marine and president of the Family Research Council, do to offend the Air Force chaplaincy? He wrote on his organization’s website that he opposes Pres. Barack Obama’s intention to repeal...

The White House was hoping the health-care summit would create momentum among Democrats to push their bill through Congress. It almost certainly did not work. Both sides repeated points that have been made countless times over the past year. That being the case, it seems likely that the public will react to what they heard from the Blair House meeting much as they have to the months-long debate in Congress: by agreeing in larger numbers with the Republican view that the bill the Democrats are pushing is hopelessly flawed. One reason for the Democrats’ trouble is that their talking points...

The 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review report gives unprecedented attention to the issue of climate change. Previous QDR reports did not identify climate change, global warming, or other environmental issues as major concerns for U.S. security. The 2010 QDR, by contrast, dedicates three of its 105 pages (plus executive summary) to the issue, highlighting it (along with energy) in a section dedicated to its impact on the "future security environment." All in all, the report mentions "climate change" 19 times. China is mentioned only eleven times, Iran five times, Russia four times, and North Korea three times. It seems that the...

McCarthy points out Reid was just one of many attacks we saw. Allowing Richard Reid to remain silent did nothing to prevent Flight 253. Instead of making that same mistake, President Bush had thousands of terrorists interrogated and dozens of attacks were prevented; not affording Constitutional rights to terrorists (besides Reid) prevented those attacks. Initially repeating a past mistake with Abdulmuttalab is not mitigated by the fact President Bush "did it" eight years earlier. McCarthy went on to write: That brings us to a third point Democrats would prefer to forget: “The Wall,” the internal regulations adopted by the Clinton...

This fiasco disgusts Americans. A February 1 Rasmussen survey discovered that only 16 percent of likely voters want terrorists to enjoy the same legal rights as U.S. citizens, while 74 percent disagree. Meanwhile, HumanEvents.com (which often posts my columns) has gathered 126,665 signatures on its online petition demanding KSM and company’s ejection from civilian court. “These proceedings will make the O. J. Simpson trial look like a traffic-court hearing,” says Marc Thiessen, author of Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack , a new bestseller on the Obama administration’s soft-on-terror...

THE EDITORS JANUARY 26, 2010 Freezing Conditions Even before Scott Brown’s remarkable election to the Senate, the Obama administration was making noises about the need to get serious about the deficit. Last year’s shortfall was $1.4 trillion. This year’s is projected to be $1.35 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has projected that cumulative deficits over the next ten years will reach $9.3 trillion, and the amount of federal debt held by the public will reach 82 percent of GDP. Economist John Taylor has noted that without deep spending cuts, taxes would have to go up by 60 percent in...

January 19,2010 Fehrnstrom: 'You have to throw out the rulebook with this election.' Robert Costa BOSTON — Eric Fehrnstrom, Scott Brown’s senior strategist, just sat down in the Park Plaza lobby with National Review Online. He tells us that he expects turnout to be between 30 and 40 percent. If turnout reaches 50 percent, “that’ll be good news for Scott Brown,” he says. Even with today’s snowstorm, Fehrnstrom says the campaign is confident that it has a highly-energetic following of voters who are self-motivated to put on their scarves and get to the polls. “We’re doing phone calls and door...

Congressman Paul Ryan is one of the most knowledgeable and influential Republicans serving in the House or Senate today. He has done the hard work of researching and writing a roadmap to avoid fiscal calamity, which is arguably the most pressing challenge the nation will face this decade. And, last year, he was one of the four original authors of The Patients’ Choice Act, which remains the clearest articulation of the market-based alternative to a government-takeover of American health-care. In short, when Cong. Ryan speaks, people should listen. And many will have a chance to, this Wednesday, at 6 pm...

A weird evening. Within five minutes, two sources call, each one hearing through the grapevine the internals of one of the two major campaigns in Massachusetts. One tells me that the most recent internal poll of the Scott Brown campaign shows the Republican winning by . . . 11 percentage points. I'm getting the sense that the folks hearing this are almost a little incredulous, but it seems every demographic and key group is breaking to Brown in the past day or two. For weeks, Brown and everyone around him has said they will campaign and work as if they're...

Within a year—give or take a few months—the shuttles will no longer be roaring through Florida skies. The program will shut down, the orbiters will go to museums, and pundits and bloggers will jump all over each other to pontificate on the meaning of the shuttle program. Most will declare it a mistake, some will call it a disaster. Eventually the historians will get to it, holding symposia and writing books about the program. Some of them will look at the shuttle’s early origins, when it was slated to be all things to all people: cheap, reliable, responsive. They will...

January 13, 2010, 4:00 a.m. American Energy Independence A war-fighting necessity or “‘foreign oil’ alarmism”? By Barbara Lerner Is energy a key element in the war we are fighting against the onslaught of Islamist terror and subversion? Does America need energy independence to really win this war? The American people seem to think so. The last time a Rasmussen poll asked them if the development of new homegrown energy sources was “an urgent national priority,” 81 percent said yes. Only 9 percent disagreed. In NRO last month, I argued that the great American majority is right, on this fundamental...

January 07, 2010, 4:00 a.m. Still the Stupid PartyDo Republicans really deserve to win big in 2010? By Kevin Williamson Guy Benson’s recent report about a lifelong New Jersey Democrat who already is so fed up with Obama-Pelosi-Reid shenanigans that she pulled the lever for Chris Christie is one pebble in the avalanche of opinion holding that Republicans are due for a big year in 2010. Maybe the Republican optimists are right: I’m no good at electoral prognosticating, so I’ll defer here to the psephological gurus. I don’t know whether the Republicans will win big in the next couple...

Prof. Epstein's focus is very different, and a heartening reminder for capitalists in the age of Obama. Drawing on the Bill of Rights protections against takings without just compensation and deprivation of property without due process of law, and on the Supreme Court's rate-regulation jurisprudence, Epstein concludes that the Constitution assures that "any firm in a regulated market be allowed to recover a risk-adjusted competitive rate of return on its accumulated capital investment." (Citing the Supreme Court's decision in Duquesne Light Co. v. Barasch (1988)) Applying these principles, Epstein concludes: The Reid Bill emphatically fails this test by imposing sharp...

Earlier in the week, the American Medical Association (AMA), the nation’s largest physician organization, declared its backing for the most recent version of Obamacare. Doctors are notoriously bad businessman and, judging from the AMA’s haste to support pretty much any bill Congress proposes, it seems that negotiating is not the strong suit of physicians, either. During the prolonged health-care debate, the AMA sought two sensible reforms: an abolishment of the SGR and tort reform. The Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) is a formula utilized by Medicare to determine Medicare physician reimbursement rates for the following year. Every year since 2002, the...

The giant gold and silver satellite glittered against the black sky as space shuttle Atlantis closed in on it from below. Commander Hoot Gibson and pilot Guy Gardner flew the approach, while mission specialist Mike Mullane, at the other end of the flight deck, readied the shuttle’s robot arm for a capture. Downstairs in the airlock, mission specialists Jerry Ross and Bill Shepherd waited in their spacesuits for Gibson’s order to go outside and attempt a rescue. The mission of STS-27 had been to deploy the first in a series of new spy satellites that used radar to observe ground...

To its credit, National Review once attacked those who refused to accept the prima facie evidence of Barack Obama's birth certificate as proof of his eligibility to be president of the United States. The hallmark of a conspiracy theory is that a lack of evidence for the theory is taken as yet more evidence for the theory. Indeed, the maddening thing about dealing with conspiracy hobbyists of this or any sort is the ever-shifting nature of their argument and their alleged evidence: Never mind the birth certificate, his step-grandmother said he was born in Kenya! (No, she didn't.) Now examine...

There is a lesson here. KSM & Co. do not have to be brought to the United States — a move that would make it significantly more likely that other Gitmo detainees, trained terrorists, would be transferred here. Similarly, KSM & Co. do not have to be given a civilian trial — a move that would make it far more difficult to justify military commissions for lesser terrorists. This is not a fait accompli. It is still possible to block these developments and to induce the Obama administration to reverse itself. But doing so will require the same two things...

The murder of four police officers in a suburban Seattle coffee shop on Sunday took a decidedly political turn when it was discovered that the prime suspect in the killings was once granted clemency by Mike Huckabee.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair should sign by Dec. 1 a document laying out new responsibilities for the National Reconnaissance Office, builder and operator of America’s spy satellites. This will set in motion the first substantial changes to the NRO charter since 1965, four years after then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara created the NRO and drafted its charter. The NRO is led by former Air Force Gen. Bruce Carlson, The new document, called a statement of principles, lays out eight core ideas meant to guide the NRO, according to a source familiar with the document....

@JimDeMint Some senators who voted for this healthcare takeover may have made a career-ending decision tonight 11/21 8:42 - http://twitter.com/JimDeMint/status/5934166425 @edhenrycnn Pay attention to Sen liberals: Bernie Sanders warns while he voted to advance debate, "my vote for the final bill is by no means guaranteed" 11/21 8:45 P.M. - http://twitter.com/edhenrycnn/status/5934229760 @PrestonCNN Voinovich didn't vote tonight, but he said in a statement Friday that he would not vote in favor of the motion to proceed. 11/ 21 8:30 P.M. - http://twitter.com/PrestonCNN/status/5933871353 @markknoller WH hails tonight's senate vote. Spokesman Robert Gibbs says Pres. Obama is "gratified." 11/21 8:30 - http://twitter.com/markknoller/status/5933839697 @kathrynlopez...