Free Republic

Noting with sorrow Justice Scalia’s death, Sowell begs his readers to sober up: The vacancy created on the Supreme Court makes painfully clear the huge stakes involved when we choose a President of the United States, just one of whose many powers is the power to nominate justices of the Supreme Court. After enumerating these, and indirectly reminding readers that the next president is apt to be a wartime president, he makes his views about Trump perfectly clear: Against this background, the frivolous rhetoric and childish antics in the televised political “debates” are painful to watch. If ever there was...

mid the petty bickering, loud rhetoric, and sordid attack ads in this year’s primary election campaigns, the death of a giant — Justice Antonin Scalia — suddenly overshadows all of that. The vacancy created on the Supreme Court makes painfully clear the huge stakes involved when we choose a president of the United States, just one of whose many powers is the power to nominate justices of the Supreme Court. Justice Scalia’s passing would be a great loss at any time. But at this crucial juncture in the history of the nation — with 5–4 Supreme Court decisions determining what...

Amid the petty bickering, loud rhetoric and sordid attack ads in this year's primary election campaigns, the death of a giant -- Justice Antonin Scalia -- suddenly overshadows all of that. The vacancy created on the Supreme Court makes painfully clear the huge stakes involved when we choose a President of the United States, just one of whose many powers is the power to nominate justices of the Supreme Court. Justice Scalia's passing would be a great loss at any time. But at this crucial juncture in the history of the nation -- with 5-to-4 Supreme Court decisions determining what...

During this election year, we are destined to hear many words that are toxic in the way they misrepresent reality and substitute fantasies that can win votes. One of these words is "entitlement." To hear some politicians tell it, we are all entitled to all sorts of things, ranging from "affordable housing" to "a living wage." But the reality is that the human race is not entitled to anything, not even the food we need to stay alive. If we don't produce food, we are just going to starve. If we don't build housing, then we are not going to...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: Will this November's presidential election come down to a choice between a felon and a pied piper? People who call Barack Obama a lame duck president seem not to have noticed that he is exercising more power than ever, and has turned the Republican Congress into a lame duck branch of government. The best New Year's Resolution I ever made was to stop trying to reason with unreasonable people. That may be especially valuable during an election year. With 4 of the 9 Supreme Court justices being more than 75 years old, the next...

Of all the many things said about Donald Trump, what was said by Roger Ailes, head of the Fox News Channel, said it all in just two words: “Grow up!” It is amazing how many people have been oblivious to this middle-aged man’s spoiled brat behavior, his childish boastfulness about things he says he is going to do, and his petulant response to every criticism with ad hominem replies.

The latest tempest in a teapot controversy is over a lack of black nominees for this year's Academy Awards in Hollywood. The assumption seems to be that different groups would be proportionally represented if somebody were not doing somebody else wrong. That assumption carries great weight in far more important things than Academy Awards and in places more important than Hollywood, including the Supreme Court of the United States. In an earlier era, the groupthink assumption was that groups that did not succeed as often, or as well, were genetically inferior. But is our current groupthink assumption based on any...

"Socrates, my master, is my friend but a greater friend is truth." - Plato Free Market Economist Thomas Sowell recently joined other National Review contributors in criticizing Donald Trump and his candidacy for President of the United States. Stefan Molyneux responds to the writing of one of his intellectual heroes - and illustrates the flawed reasoning contained within Dr. Sowell's "Do Emotions Trump Facts?" article.

Those of us who like to believe that human beings are rational can sometimes have a hard time trying to explain what is going on in politics. It is still a puzzle to me how millions of patriotic Americans could have voted in 2008 for a man who for 20 years -- TWENTY YEARS -- was a follower of a preacher who poured out his hatred for America in the most gross gutter terms. Today's big puzzle is how so many otherwise rational people have become enamored of Donald Trump, projecting onto him virtues and principles that he clearly does...

In recent years, a small but growing number of people have advocated a convention of states to propose amendments to the Constitution of the United States. The reaction to the proposal has been hostile, out of all proportion to either the originality or the danger of such a convention. The political left has been especially vehement in its denunciations of what they call "messing with the Constitution." A recent proposal by Governor Greg Abbott of Texas to hold a Constitutional convention of states has been denounced by the Texas branch of the American Civil Liberties Union and nationally by an...

Those who have been marveling at Donald Trump's political showmanship were given a reminder of who is the top showman of them all, when President Barack Obama went on television to make a pitch for his unilateral actions to restrict gun sales and make a more general case for tighter gun control laws. It was beautifully choreographed, like a great ballet, and performed with consummate skill and understated eloquence. First of all, the scene was set with a room full of people who had lost loved ones to gun violence. A father whose son had been gunned down made...

Engineers who design computerized products and services seem to have an almost fanatical determination to avoid using plain English. It is understandable when complicated processes require complicated operations. But when the very simplest things are designed with needless complications or murky instructions, that is something else. For example, like all sorts of other devices, computers and computerized products and services have to be turned on and off. And everybody knows what the words "on" and "off" mean. But how often have you seen a computer or a computerized product or service that used the words "on" or "off"? These simple...

How shall we remember 2015? Or shall we try to forget it? It is always hard to know when a turning point has been reached, and usually it is long afterwards before we recognize it. However, if 2015 has been a turning point, it may well have marked a turn in a downward direction for America and Western civilization. This was the year when we essentially let the world know that we were giving up any effort to try to stop Iran -- the world's leading sponsor of international terrorism -- from getting a nuclear bomb. Surely it does not...

The political left has been trying to run other people's lives for centuries. So we should not be surprised to see the Obama administration now trying to force neighborhoods across America to have the mix of people the government wants them to have. There are not enough poor people living in middle class neighborhoods to suit the political left. Not enough blacks in white neighborhoods. Not enough Hispanics here, not enough Asians there. Nowhere in the Constitution does it grant the federal government the power to dictate such things. But places that do not mix and match people the way...

Defenders of racial preferences are good at two things: ignoring the real-world consequences of their policies, and attacking anyone who notices the consequences. At the recent argument in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, Justice Scalia asked a question that illustrated that the victims of racial preferences in college admissions include not only the people denied admission because they are not the preferred race, but also the people preferences are designed to help. At oral argument, Justice Scalia said: There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas...

Among the many sad signs of our time are the current political and media attacks on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, for speaking the plain truth on a subject where lies have been the norm for years. The case before the High Court is whether the use of race as a basis for admitting students to the University of Texas at Austin is a violation of the 14th Amendment's requirement for government institutions to provide "equal protection of the laws" to all. Affirmative action is supposed to be a benefit to black and other minority students admitted with lower academic...

The case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court, involving racial double standards in admissions to the University of Texas at Austin, has an Alice-in-Wonderland quality that has been all too common in other Supreme Court cases involving affirmative action in academia, going all the way back to 1978. Plain hard facts dissolve into rhetorical mysticism in these cases, where evasions of reality have been the norm. One inconvenient reality is that racial double standards by government institutions are contrary to the "equal protection of the laws" prescribed by the 14th Amendment to the constitution. Therefore racial double standards must be...

When the President of the United States asks the television networks to set aside time for him to broadcast a speech from the Oval Office, we can usually expect that he has something new to say. But President Obama's speech Sunday night was just a rehash of what he has been saying all along, trying to justify policies that have repeatedly turned out disastrously for America and our allies. This was not a speech about how the Obama administration is going to do anything differently in the future. It was a speech about how Obama's policies were right all along....

People who want to buy Christmas gifts, without having to confront the crowds at the local shopping mall (or shopping maul) can take a load off their feet by buying books or movies on the Internet, while sitting in the comfort of their own homes. In addition to old standbys like gorgeous coffee table books of Ansel Adams' scenic photographs or the collected works of Shakespeare -- or of "Calvin and Hobbes" comics -- there are also many thought-provoking books on current events or on history. People who already seem to have everything may not have DVDs of the latest...

Storm trooper tactics by bands of college students making ideological demands across the country, and immediate preemptive surrender by college administrators -- such as at the University of Missouri recently -- bring back memories of the 1960s, for those of us old enough to remember what it was like being there, and seeing first-hand how painful events unfolded. At Harvard, back in 1969, students seized control of the administration building and began releasing to the media information from confidential personnel files of professors. But, when university president Nathan Pusey called in the police to evict the students, the faculty turned...