Free Republic

I voted for Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican primary election, left my ballot blank in the 2016 general election, and now must decide whom to vote for this year. In several ways, I find Donald Trump over the top and offensive. I have said this on air and on Twitter. He can be too hot to handle, insulting people and often making himself the issue, diverting attention from more important policy matters. Many of my Republican friends, notably women, will not vote for him, not because they are “Republicans in name only” but because the president has given them...

The president-elect's former agent is said to be hoping to discuss some of Trump's initial appointments. Is the president-elect soliciting help from his former Hollywood agent in selecting a cabinet? Ari Emanuel, the co-CEO of entertainment and sports powerhouse WME-IMG, was spotted at the Trump National Golf Course in New Jersey on Sunday, and a WME-IMG source confirms to The Hollywood Reporter that a meeting is set for this afternoon. The exact nature of the sit-down is unclear, but the Democratic stalwart Emanuel is said to be uninterested in a job in the Trump administration and instead hopes to discuss...

Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel has offered to take charge of a film celebrating Donald Trump's presidential campaign that would air next month at the Republican National Convention, Trump said in a new interview. "He's a very good friend of mine," Trump said about Emanuel in a story posted online Wednesday by The Hollywood Reporter. "He calls me a lot. I call him a lot and we talk. He's very political. Even though he's not political, he's political. He gets it." . . .

Vid at link

Ari Ephraim Rubin, vice chairman of the Jewish Defense League long led by his father, Irving (Irv) Rubin, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on July 20. He was 30. Ari Rubin had been active since his youth in the militant JDL, which has long been rejected by mainstream Jewish organizations for its violent tactics, and he became vice chairman in 2006. His death was ruled a suicide by the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, whose spokesman, Craig Harvey, said that a neighbor found Rubin in his car with the self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head. The report was confirmed...

As their first Iran vs. Israel video passes the 1 million view mark, Jeremy Gimpel and Ari Abramowitz of TheLandofIsrael.com have released part 2: Iran vs. Israel - No Fear. The video has already garnered more than 250,000 views. video

Washington, D.C.--The acts of war by Hamas against Israel are precisely what people should expect from Bush’s so-called democracy strategy in the Middle East. The administration campaigned for elections in the strongholds of various Islamist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, groups that it should have worked to destroy. In the Palestinian territories, Bush insisted that Hamas be allowed to participate in the 2006 elections--and the jihadist group won a landslide. Thanks to that political victory, Hamas gained an unearned legitimacy for its vicious war to exterminate Israelis and Westerners. Winning power with the aid of their enemy confirmed for...

It's not easy being Alan Greenspan these days. As the former Federal Reserve chairman, he urged government regulators to take a light touch while banks like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers buried themselves—and the economy more generally—under a mountain of debt. Now that his reputation is plummeting faster than the stock market, he's been forced to admit a "flaw" in his hands-off ideology. Of course, things look entirely different to members of "free-market advocacy groups," as they like to be called. One such group is the Ayn Rand Institute, named after the matriarch of the movement, whose antigovernment and anti-regulation...

For decades Washington has been manipulating prices to encourage homeownership and "steer" the economy. To "incentivize" you to buy a house, it made mortgage payments tax deductible, largely exempted homes from capital gains taxes, and created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. After the stock market tumbled in 2001 and 2002, Washington established a policy of artificially low interest rates that created the illusion of cheap credit; leery of the stock market, and looking for someplace else to put all this easy money, Americans began buying homes in droves. But eventually the drug-induced high of artificial credit wore off, and out-of-whack...

Washington, D.C.--Advocates of a bailout for the Big Three claim that if we allow these giants to fail, it will destroy the U.S. auto industry. “In fact,” said Alex Epstein, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute, “it is the bailout, a veritable marriage between Detroit and Washington, that will destroy the U.S. auto industry. “The Big Three have no right to demand that taxpayers risk money on them when private investors won’t. They do, however, have a right to demand the repeal of the policies that have helped destroy the auto industry. These include the labor laws that have...

Washington, D.C. -- Politicians across the spectrum are calling for an auto bailout, arguing that we cannot allow such large companies to fail."If U.S. automakers cannot find a market fix for their problems, they must fail," said Alex Epstein, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. "They should go through bankruptcy proceedings so that creditors and owners can redeploy their assets as efficiently as possible."Every day these companies remain in existence in their current form, they are destroying shareholder wealth and wasting worker effort. To preserve these companies with a bailout would be obscenely unfair. Every dollar...

The financial peril of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--the government-sponsored, government-regulated mortgage giants regarded as instrumental in solving the nation's mortgage market problems--has one benefit. It should help expose the lie that today's financial problems are the result of an insufficiently regulated market. For too long, the refrain has gone, Congress and the administration have been asleep at the wheel when they should have been steering the economy by expanding government control over the housing and financial markets. Economist Paul Krugman slams the administration's "free-market ideology"; he urges Bush to "reverse course now" and "seek expanded regulation." All this overlooks...

Venezuela, Russia, and other countries that nationalize natural resources are violating private property rights. For years, the Canadian operator of a huge Venezuelan gold project known as Las Cristinas has been seeking an environmental permit to start digging. Well, Crystallex International Corporation can stop waiting--the mine is being nationalized as part of dictator Hugo Chavez's long-running program of socialist takeovers. "This mine will be seized and managed by a state administration" with help from the Russians, said Mining Minister Rodolfo Sanz. It's not surprising that a brute like Chavez would want to grab the 16.9 million ounces of gold estimated...

Washington, D.C. --Opponents of the free market are giddy at Alan Greenspan's declaration that the financial crisis has exposed a "flaw" in his "free market ideology." Greenspan says he is "in a state of shocked disbelief" because he "looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity"--and it didn't. But according to Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, “any belief Greenspan ever had in truly free markets was abandoned long ago. While Greenspan long ago wrote in favor of a truly free market in banking, including the gold standard that such...

Everywhere today politicians are blaring that they must save America's financial institutions, alleging catastrophic risk to the economy were any to fail. Paulson and the entire Bush administration, in a discernible panic, are now pouring $700 billion into the big banks, having already bailed out AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Bear Stearns to the tune of $300 billion. Capitalism doesn't work, they declare, but fortunately the government is here to rescue us. Sadly, they have it all backwards. The credit crisis is just more evidence that whenever the government supplants the free market and attempts to "manage," i.e., control,...

Fleischer: Plame came up over lunch By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer 39 minutes ago Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer testified Monday that then-colleague I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby told him over lunch that the wife of a prominent war critic worked at the CIA. Fleischer said the conversation happened June 7, 2003, days before Libby told investigators he was surprised to learn about the CIA operative from a reporter. That discrepancy is at the heart of Libby's perjury and obstruction trial. Fleischer, who was the chief White House spokesman for the first 2 1/2 years of President Bush's...

Fleischer, who was Bush's first press secretary - from 2001 to 2003 - told E&P that Cheney's accidental shooting of Texas attorney Harry Whittington on Saturday during a hunting trip should not have taken nearly a day to be reported. "It would have been better if the vice president and/or his staff had come out last Saturday night or first thing Sunday morning and announced it," he said during a phone interview Tuesday. "It could have and should have been handled differently." But Fleischer also took a jab at the reporting frenzy surrounding the story, saying most Americans are not...

Former Bush aid says 2008 Democratic nomination belongs to Hillary Clinton SYRACUSE, N.Y. (AP) - A former aide to President Bush says the 2008 Democratic nomination for president is all Hillary Rodham Clinton's if she wants it. But former Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said Clinton, now a Democratic senator representing New York, has no chance of actually becoming president. Fleischer's comments were made Friday as he spoke at an Oneida County luncheon attended by supporters of Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-New Hartford. Fleischer said there's not a Democrat anywhere in the country that can beat Mrs. Clinton in a Democratic primary....

One thing I liked about Ayn Rand is that she didn't do bullshit. If she had a position, no matter how unpopular, she defended it without compromise. The same can't be said of her successors at the Ayn Rand Institute in the wake of their tsunami PR disaster. Can anyone make heads or tails of this hairsplitting quote? Obviously, the tsunami, with the thousands of innocent victims left in its wake, is a horrible disaster. The first concern of survivors and of those trying to help them is to provide basic necessities and then to begin rebuilding. The American public's...

The Ayn Rand Institute published an op-ed by David Holcberg during the tsunami disaster arguing that the US government should not give aid to the tsunami victims. After the PR disaster that followed, ARI "clarified" its position in another article (which I will discuss later). I noticed, however, that ARI removed the original op-ed from its web site. The link that originally pointed to it has been redirected to an article about Iraq. Fortunately, Google has a cached copy of it. Clarifying your position is one thing; obliterating history so that you control the discussion is completely unethical and unwise...