Free Republic

Is the U.S. Flag Offensive? The right of free speech is guaranteed by the Constitution. The right to not be offended is not. But guess which right trumped the other in a California school last week. The two students were minding their own business—just sitting at a table on a school break, chatting with their friends. And then the vice principal of the school walked up to the boys—and ordered them to remove their American flag bandanas. Their T-shirts also featured the Stars and Stripes. The boys were told to turn them inside out, so the flags wouldn’t show. The...

Barack Obama and the Democrats keep trying to paint the new law in Arizona on immigration as some sort of misguided effort by a frustrated fringe. Unfortunately for them, a new poll from Pew Research shows that they’re the fringe — even in their own party. Almost three-quarters of Americans support Arizona’s new law, and almost two-thirds of Democrats support the already-law requirement for immigrants to carry ID: The public broadly supports a new Arizona law aimed at dealing with illegal immigration and the law’s provisions giving police increased powers to stop and detain people who are suspected of being...

Listening to America’s liberals, who now prefer to call themselves progressives, one would think that free markets benefit the rich and harm the poor, but little can be further from the truth. First, let’s first say what free markets are. Free markets, or laissez-faire capitalism, refer to an economic system where there is no government interference except to outlaw and prosecute fraud and coercion. It ought to be apparent that our economy cannot be described as free market because there is extensive government interference. We have what might be called a mixed economy, one with both free market and socialistic...

Gov. Paterson has granted stunning pay raises of up to 29 percent to several key aides — even as he slaps furloughs on 100,000 state workers, and his lieutenant governor threatens layoffs. The shocking move by the lame-duck governor involves five members of his embattled press office, whose two top-ranking members abruptly resigned earlier this year amid what they privately called misleading statements made by the governor. The double-digit pay hikes, granted within the past 10 days, were first disclosed by Albany TV station CBS6 late yesterday -- just hours after public employee unions went to federal court seeking a...

America’s financial situation is unsustainable. In 2009 the federal government spent $3.5 trillion but collected only $2.1 trillion in revenue. The result was a $1.4 trillion deficit, up from $458 billion in 2008. That’s 10 percent of gross domestic product, a level unseen since World War II. Worse, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that we’ll be drowning in red ink for the foreseeable future, with annual deficits averaging $1 trillion during the next decade. While these figures are dramatic, they pale in comparison to what the federal government owes foreign and domestic investors. According to the CBO, in 2009...

Jonathan Alter’s upcoming book, The Promise: President Obama, Year One, reportedly quotes Obama verbally attacking Americans who participate in the Tea Party movement. The President supposedly said that Republican opposition to his Recovery Act, “helped create the (expletive deleted) and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party where it now controls the agenda for Republicans.” [...] It is un-presidential for Obama to attack Americans who are exercising their 1st Amendment rights to protest against big government. The President owes Tea Party members and the American people an apology.

What is going on in the UK? In what amounts to a legal rejection of the Right to Religious Freedom, it seems that Christians are a casualty of the homosexual equality/equivalency agenda. Apparently tolerance and equal protection under the law does not include those of the Christian faith. Dale McAlpine, a British Baptist street preacher, was arrested and jailed on April 20 by a homosexual police community support officer (PCSO) for allegedly saying homosexuality is a sin according to the Bible.

Liberals say that they love the poor, needy, and disadvantaged. Unfortunately, however, the economic philosophy that liberals favor constitutes a direct assault on the economic well-being of the poor, along with nearly everyone else in society. Liberals claim to combat poverty in two principal ways. First, they use the force of government (e.g., income taxes) to take money from those who have earned it in order to give it to the poor. Second, they restrict people’s use of their property to enable the poor to have access to such property.

Liberal journalists (but I repeat myself) – a fraternity for whom indignation is proof of sentience – believed they had found just cause to be aghast last week in the nation’s fourth largest state. Deeming themselves the keepers of political Wisdom, the chattering class bayed at the news that Florida Governor Charlie Crist is leaving the Republican Party to continue his pursuit of a seat in the U.S. Senate as an Independent. [...] If the Republican Party is turning to the right, it’s because it found out what life in the center was like. Per the axiom of southern politics,...

For true conservative victory, simply voting Republican won’t do Barack Obama is the most socialist president in American history. Before Obama, George W. Bush was the most socialist president in American history. Before Dubya, it was Bill Clinton, then Bush Sr., Reagan, and so on. Each successive administration, by and large, has presided over a federal government that has assumed more power and spent more money than the last. [...] Conservatives who continue to make the case that Obama is worse than Bush are right, but the fact that Rush and like-minded pundits and politicians are unable to find fault...

Times Square Bomber, Faisal Shahzad is a registered Democrat. What? a registered Democrat, your kidding, I thought that the violent side of America could only be found in the Tea Party. Oh My! I wonder how Olberman and Madcow will blather about this little bit of news? Perhaps they can get advise from Mathews on what to say on air. If he can stop the quiver from running up is leg long enough to come up with a coherent thought.

Liberals have railed since time immemorial about “corporate greed.” If you grant for the sake of argument that something as impersonal as a corporation can feel the very human urge to acquire inordinate wealth, there is surely such a thing as “government greed.” [...] Nowhere has liberalism gone further than in San Francisco. And few, if any, other cities can boast such a well-heeled work force. Is this what “spreading the wealth” is all about? We have seen the future and it works — for certain people. Take San Francisco municipal workers. The San Francisco Chronicle recently detailed just how...

So Arizona passes a tough law against illegal immigration and suddenly they get Washington’s attention. One poll finds 70 percent of Arizona voters support the new law… hey, maybe we better do something too. So like the lemmings they are when they smell a chance to score political points… and some of them need a lot of help with the midterms approaching – there is talk now of rushing immigration reform through Congress. President Obama called the Arizona law “misguided.” What is misguided, Mr. President, is the federal government’s refusal to enforce the laws already on the books. Read the...

Opponents of the popular expression of conservative opposition to big government, the tea party, regularly note that tea partiers are overwhelmingly white. This is intended to disqualify the tea parties from serious moral consideration. But there are two other facts that are far more troubling: The first is the observation itself. The fact that the Left believes that the preponderance of whites among tea partiers invalidates the tea party movement tells us much more about the Left than it does about the tea partiers. It confirms that the Left really does see the world through the prism of race, gender...

With the support of 70 percent of its citizens, Arizona has ordered sheriffs and police to secure the border and remove illegal aliens, half a million of whom now reside there. Arizona acted because the U.S. government has abdicated its constitutional duty to protect the states from invasion and refuses to enforce America’s immigration laws. “We in Arizona have been more than patient waiting for Washington to act,” said Gov. Jan Brewer. “But decades of inaction and misguided policy have created an unacceptable situation.” We have a crisis in Arizona because we have a failed state in Washington. What is...

Gianna Jessen is a devout Christian. Her life was given to her by the grace of God. She shouldn’t be walking, but more miraculous still; she should not even be alive. Gianna’s biological mother was 17 when she had a saline abortion in her third trimester. Many Americans don’t realize it is legal to have an abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy. After being burned alive for approximately 18 hours in the womb from the saline solution, Gianna was delivered alive in a Los Angeles County abortion clinic. Her medical records state, “born during saline abortion”…this is what caused...

In Christian marriage, authentic and true love seeks to replicate the type of self-sacrifice Christ revealed to us when He became man and dwelt among us (and which is still expressed today in Christ’s faithfulness to His Church). Self-sacrificial love conforms to the Great Commandment to love our neighbor more highly than ourselves in so doing we also love and honor God (Matthew 25:36-40, 1 John 4:19-21). This kind of love between husband and wife, even if imperfectly practiced and not always realized, constitutes what St. John Chrysostom called the “small church” and as such ensures the health and stability...

Happy Earth Day from Obama to all those New York bike riders! Obama has no idea what he just got himself into. Someone sent this photo to the blog This Is FYF, which reports that “citing security concerns that bikes might be secret pipe bombs, NYPD officers clipped the locks of hundreds of bikes along Houston Street this morning in preparation for President Obama’s speech at Cooper Union. The bikes were unceremoniously put in the back of the truck. Onlookers were not given information as to what would become of the bikes. Happy Earth Day!”

Human life is God's most precious gift and the earth's most important and valuable resource. “Our goal is to use Earth Day to get Americans to think more deeply about what it means to truly respect the Earth and creation,” said Brian Burch, President of CatholicVote.org Education Fund.

Christians are rightly concerned that extremists have turned Earth Day into “Worship-Earth Day.” Just listen to a few of these suggestions for Earth Day 2010 that some of the more radical groups are proposing: taking down “global eco-criminals” like Exxon-Mobil; having school kids meditate about the Spirit of Life (that’s “Spirit of Life” with capital letters); seeking international cooperation on reducing the human population; or working for, and I quote, the “ultimate, inevitable, and necessary dismantling of industrial civilization.” We Christians certainly do not want to be yoked with new agers, neo-pagans, or folks who just downright hate humanity. But...