Free Republic

Based on hints, feints, public pronouncements, and off the record commentary, the administration's stance toward Iran is coming into focus. Without any question, military action against Iran is off the agenda. The Obama administration will do nothing to prevent the further enrichment of uranium by Iran's mullahs, notwithstanding who is elected in that nation's upcoming vote. The negotiations with Iran are based on the premise that Iran can produce as much enriched uranium as it wants as long as a nuclear bomb isn't manufactured. In other words, Obama seeks a "Japanese solution," the conditions for a bomb without actually making...

Back in the 1970s, William F. Buckley Jr. was invited to debate feminist author Germaine Greer at the Oxford Union, but found that he and Greer were unable to agree on the wording of the resolution to be debated. After a long exchange of trans-Atlantic telegrams, Buckley in exasperation cabled his final proposal: "Resolved: Give 'em an inch, they'll take a mile." In that simple phrase, Buckley summed up a basic truth about the conservative instinct. Over and over, we find ourselves fighting what is essentially a defensive battle against the forces of organized radicalism who insist that "social justice"...

....That noble form of humanism has its roots in the Enlightenment, in Kant's defense of the moral law, and in the progressivism of well-meaning Victorian sages. And the memory of it leads me to take an interest in something that calls itself "humanism," and is now beginning to announce itself in Britain. This humanism is self-consciously "new," like New Labour; it has its own journal, the New Humanist, and its own sages, the most prominent of whom is Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and vice-president of the British Humanist Association. It runs advertising campaigns and letter-writing campaigns and...

Did the fact that Canada has a socialist, government-run healthcare system --similar to the kind that President Obama wants to ram down the throats of Americans-- kill acclaimed actress Natasha Richardson? The short answer is yes, it may very well have done so. Regarding the case of the actress who fell on a ski slope at Mont Tremblant resort in Quebec, AP reports: As a steady stream of celebrities pay their last respects to Natasha Richardson, questions are arising over whether a medical helicopter might have been able to save the ailing actress. The province of Quebec lacks a medical...

WASHINGTON -- Thank God winter is almost over. It has been another cold one. I hope Al Gore wore his hat and brought along his galoshes whenever he made an appearance against global warming. Better yet, I hope he scheduled his jeremiads in warmer climes, say, Miami Beach or Antigua. As I reported a while back, scientists have not been able to measure any increase in global warming since the end of 1998. That, despite their lunkheaded computers forecasting the opposite. During the past two years, temperatures have actually dropped by more than 0.5 degrees Celsius. Button up! I mention...

Newsmax TV’s Ashley Martella noted that in a recent column Tyrrell pointed to Obama’s massive federal spending package and his plans to raise taxes and cut the military, and asked Tyrrell what that tells him about Obama. “It tells me that he is the most ill-prepared man to be president of the United States since Lincoln’s vice president Andrew Johnson abruptly became president,” Tyrrell responded. “And Johnson had the excuse of being an alcoholic. “Obama simply is a man without any executive experience. He has spent his time as a community organizer or agitator. He has spent some time as...

A good indicator of how Palin's buck-the-establishment bent informs her approach to family-oriented policy issues can be found in her recent push to open up Alaska's health care market to greater transparency and competition.

[T]he entire decision to go after Rush Limbaugh was cooked up by supposedly clever White House aides and outside advisors. David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager last year and a member of his inner circle still, will publish an op-ed in Wednesday's Washington Post chiding Republicans for being "paralyzed with fear of crossing their leader.” [But now Rush] has challenged Obama to a one-on-one debate on his radio show, no teleprompters please. With an ineptness that leaves one breathless, the Obama team has now effectively labeled Obama himself as "paralyzed with fear" if in fact the President doesn't have the guts...

http://spectator.org/archives/2009/02/16/in-all-fairness

"Let's hear it for the children. We're here for the children," said Nancy Pelosi moments after becoming America's first female Speaker of the House. The date was January 4, 2007. Two months earlier, the Democrats had swept the mid-term elections and ended the Republicans' 12-year control of Congress. It was a momentous occasion for Democrats, sweetened by Pelosi's ascendancy to the top congressional job. She had "broken the marble ceiling," to quote her own words. She was the uber-feminist, free from the constraints of motherhood and the female proclivity for nurturing children. Or was she? Much to the amusement of...

Two narratives seem to be forming to describe the underlying causes of the financial crisis. One, as outlined in a New York Times front-page story on Sunday, December 21, is that President Bush excessively promoted growth in home ownership without sufficiently regulating the banks and other mortgage lenders that made the bad loans. The result was a banking system suffused with junk mortgages, the continuing losses on which are dragging down the banks and the economy. The other narrative is that government policy over many years--particularly the use of the Community Reinvestment Act and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to...

With a new president ensconced in the White House, it's time to roll out the goodies for loyal supporters in left-of-center political advocacy groups such as ACORN. The latest economic stimulus bill promises to do just that by providing a huge bailout --up to $5.2 billion in taxpayer funds -- for some of the same liberal groups that helped get Barack Obama elected. The three relevant fiscal provisions are buried deep in the $825 billion monstrosity known as the proposed "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009." Title XII of the spending legislation backed by the Democratic congressional leadership and...

Barack Obama's choice of Leon Panetta, the former congressman who went on to serve as chief of staff for President Clinton, to head the Central Intelligence Agency has members of the intelligence community scratching their heads. To defenders of the choice, Panetta's reputation as a competent manager and loyalty to Obama may help to shake up the agency and keep it from undermining the White House. But several ex-CIA officials contacted by TAS greeted the pick with trepidation.

As we close out a disastrous 2008, a year in which Western Civilization essentially suffered a nervous breakdown, conservatives now must turn to two fundamental goals. First, we must stop the destructive policy initiatives of the Obama Administration and the liberal left now ruling in Washington (first prediction for 2009: the loony, far left Congress will consistently make the ultraliberal Obama Administration look moderate by comparison). Secondly, we must lay the foundation for our political comeback. Here is what we must do to achieve these goals: Return to the Grassroots First and most important is to build up mighty, grassroots...

A policy report published last month on the Office of the President-Elect's website puts a hole right through the fanciful notion, believed by some evangelicals, that Barack Obama will save a place at the table for pro-lifers. Titled "Advancing Reproductive Rights and Health in a New Administration," the report suggests a radical abortion agenda for the first 100 days of Obama's term. The recommendations carry quite a price tag. In an era of ballooning national debt and unprecedented government expansion, the abortion industry (and it is an industry -- Planned Parenthood made $115 million in profits for the 2006-2007 fiscal...

How long will the media continue its gushing adoration of Barack Obama? This is the question raised by the adulatory prose of The Washington Post's Eli Saslow: Between workouts during his Hawaii vacation this week, he was photographed looking like the paradigm of a new kind of presidential fitness, one geared less toward preventing heart attacks than winning swimsuit competitions. The sun glinted off chiseled pectorals sculpted during four weightlifting sessions each week, and a body toned by regular treadmill runs and basketball games. Such "reporting" ought to make Saslow a laughingstock among the hard-bitten cynics of the Washington press...

So John McCain again says he intends to run for re-election in two years. Is there anybody else out there who wishes he would just go away? He ran a campaign that was both utterly inept and in many ways dishonorable, and he's been in Congress since 1982, and he'll be 74 years old in 2010, and he holds bizarre grudges and is temperamentally difficult, to say the least. I know he was a Navy guy, not a soldier, but methinks he should take McArthur's advice for old soldiers and just.....fade....awa...... PLEASE!

To listen to some Republicans, not to mention, the braying of media outlets such as MSNBC, and even, here and there, a few economic libertarians, you would think that traditional conservatives, the defenders of the unborn and the integrity of marriage as a venerable and ancient institution, were responsible for two wars gone sour, over-spending at a level to embarrass Lyndon Johnson, the largest expansion of entitlement spending since the Great Society, numerous cases of GOP corruption and betrayal of the public trust centering around earmarks and political favors and the miserable results in the presidential and congressional elections just...

I don't think anyone who looks at the platforms of Republicans running in the Northeast or even the Pacific West can say that the GOP generally refuses to run candidates who deviate from the party line on certain issues. In some respects, Rahm Emanuel is doing for Democrats what his party used to do and the Republicans have done for years in recognizing geographical and ideological diversity. Throughout the 1990s, Republicans like Rudy Giuliani and Bill Weld won in Democratic areas taking center-right positions on taxes, spending, welfare, and crime but reflecting the region's liberalism on abortion, gay rights, and...

I subscribe to an Internet newsletter called Energy Central and the news is getting more depressing every week. Every time I scan the headlines I realize I'm looking at another piece of a gathering energy debacle. Take last Thursday's edition. Right at the top of the page was the story, "Xcel Energy, eXco Join in Major Wind Farm Developments in Minnesota, North Dakota." It's like this every day. Wind farms of sprouting up all over the country like 65-story mushrooms. The North American Reliability Council estimates we will have 175,000 megawatts of new capacity by 2017 (that's the equivalent of...