Free Republic

In the novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, described as "a classic commentary on narcissism, decadence, and the wages of sin," author Oscar Wilde wrote: Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. An empty canvas was offered by Barack Obama in the prologue of his book, The Audacity of Hope, with his admission: "I serve as a blank screen on...

In an age when many Americans do not recognize that we are at war, most Americans still respect the sacrifices that our military men and women make on their behalf. According to a Rasmussen poll last May, the military continues to have the highest favorable and lowest unfavorable ratings of any group or institution in the United States Whether it is on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, on the mean streets of a third-world hell-hole, or as a silent sentinel on the Korean border, the servicemen we place in harm's way perform with dedication and excellence. They do...

Some months ago I related to you how I stood in the parking lot of one of the Big Box stores and counted 22 cameras observing everything going on around me. Those were just the cameras I could see from my vantage point. There were more. Please note: That was OUTSIDE the store. Upon entering the store there were uncountable cameras peering at shoppers -- some obvious and others strategically located and camouflaged, I expect. Some years ago, in a nearby city, my wife and I had been shopping in a large grocery store in route home from attending church....

Obama's detractors seem to believe he is either an incompetent pawn in over his head as president or an evil mastermind directing an international conspiracy to subvert America. The fact is that Barack Hussein Obama II was an Illinois state senator of little notice or importance who managed to win election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, where he remained undistinguished. Obama has benefited from staged rhetorical skills dependent on the availability of a teleprompter and the perception that he embodied the culmination of left-wing values in an electable package. As his presidency has progressed, his lack of experience and...

From the beginning of the week to the end, the president made crystal-clear to anyone who paid attention that he was over his head in this position and that he was startlingly disengaged in all but the most trivial of ceremonial matters. Obama's agents hammered out a proposed tax deal in which he seemed to play no significant role and which totally undercut his promise to end tax cuts for the rich. That redistributive, economically ridiculous position is one of the few things on which he has not heretofore been a slippery, tilting-at-straw-men con man. It is perfectly consistent with...

<p>LOUISVILLE, Ky. — A Kentucky man who acknowledged writing a poem threatening the life of President Barack Obama was sentenced Monday by a federal judge to 33 months in prison.</p> <p>Johnny Logan Spencer apologized for writing the poem, which depicts a fatal sniper shooting of the president. Spencer, 28, said he was upset at the time over the death of his mother and had fallen in with a white supremacist group.</p>

This is a special Thanksgiving show. We have a tradition on this program. Every Thanksgiving we read from my book. See, I Told You So. Book #2. That book also sold over 2.4 million copies in hard cover. The first two million copies were sold in eight weeks during November and December, when the book came out. It was the second book. Of course they said second books never do as well as the first. Just another one of these little bits of conventional wisdom that we here at the EIB Network have blown up. But it's the true story,...

On November 22, 1963 I was in the office of a human rights organization in downtown Miami, Florida, fresh from service in the U.S. Army. I was happy that President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev had not gone to war in October 1962 over Soviet missiles in Cuba. My battalion, part of the Second Infantry Division, had been put on alert to invade. A U.S. naval blockade had stopped any new missiles from being delivered and those that had been were withdrawn. The Cold War had been going on since 1945 and tensions between the U.S. and Russia had...

November 20, 2009 is an important date because it was the day that “global warming” ended. It was the day that a total fabrication, a hoax, was revealed to be the work of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), aided and abetted by a vast network of governmental and business leaders, a compliant media, and scientists who sold their souls for grants and other funding. It was the day that Al Gore was shown to be unworthy to share a Nobel Peace Prize with the iniquitous IPCC, nor an Oscar for his documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” It...

It’s been one year to the day since hero or heroes still unnamed and unrewarded bestowed upon the world a virtual dossier, the contents of which should have ended the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) debate abruptly and evermore. Remarkably, it didn’t. Despite the revelations exposed in the now public climate huckster’s handbook, one year later the specter of governance and wealth redistribution both national and international based largely, if not solely, on pseudo-scientific hocus-pocus persists. By all measures, last year’s U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen was an embarrassing flop for those who again tried to sell an international progressive fund...

George Soros -- hedge fund billionaire, major funder of so-called 527 groups, early supporter of Barack Obama, and sugar daddy of the Democratic Party -- is one of America's most powerful political players. He had a bad November 2 when Republicans took control of the House. But he is not down for the count. He has already begun focusing on states as his next political playground -- where he wants to be the biggest bully on the block. George Soros has seen his game plan work quite well for years in Washington. He has created a phalanx of powerful think-tanks...

When I was growing up, the dark miasma of the Holocaust was still so pervasive that the famous slogan "Never Forget!" seemed almost irrelevant. How could anyone forget Hitler and his murderous goose-steppers? It was hard to imagine a world where that supreme evil was not remembered as a stern and awful warning. I heard Holocaust survivors insisting that we must never forget, and I thought they were just repeating the obvious. Why did they have to keep on saying it? Well, they were right, after all. They understood more about human nature than I did. It was necessary to...

Many readers of American Thinker will recognize Midway as the scene of our first and in many ways our greatest naval victory of World War II. It is not remembered now, but for the first six months of 1942, we were losing World War II. After sinking most of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese occupied Wake Island and Guam in December 1941. In April 1942, they defeated our army in the Philippines and put it on the Death March. After Jimmy Doolittle bombed Tokyo in April 1942, the Japanese decided to eliminate the U.S. Navy in a...

The most baffling aspect of last week's election "wave" is the fact that a few areas of the country remained untouched by it. When Scott Brown was elected in Massachusetts early this year, there was reason to believe that even some of the deep "blue" states might succumb to a turn to the right. But in November, they didn't. In California, voters kept Barabara Boxer in her Senate seat, but more tellingly, they voted to put Jerry Brown—the washed-up old hippie known as Governor Moonbeam from his previous term in office—back into the governor's mansion. In Massachusetts, only ten months...

“Are things in our country so bad that it might actually be time for revolution?” Dylan Radigan asked yesterday on his MSNBC show. His unequivocal reply: “The answer is obviously ‘yes.’ The only question is, ‘how to do it?’” So what kinds of abuses are we obviously going to rise up against? “Wrongful wars,“ ”corrupt economy,“ ”special interest industries,” “the political system itself,“ and ”gerrymandering.” “To clear our dire problems may require even more drastic solutions,” he said. While introducing his cartoonist guest, Ratigan says those solutions might include “violence or at least the threat thereof”:

November 7, 1917: Communist Revolution in Russia In response to Russia’s defeat on the front, Czar Nicholas II was dethroned in a revolution in March 1917 and a new government of mixed liberal-conservative complexion came into being. As political deadlock and defeats on the front continued, the socialists gained in popularity and their radical wing, the Bolshevik party, under Lenin, called for immediate peace and apportionment of land to the peasants. In November 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power. The new government concluded an armistice with Germany in December 1917 and a separate peace treaty with Germany in March 1918, but...

There is a revolution coming that is likely to burst the green global warming bubble: the temperature trend used by the IPCC (the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) to support their conclusion about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is likely to turn out to be fake. The situation will become clear once Virginia's attorney general, Kenneth Cuccinelli, obtains information now buried in e-mails at the University of Virginia. Or Hearings on Climategate by the U.S. Congress may uncover the "smoking gun" that demonstrates that the warming trend used by the IPCC does not really exist. It has become increasingly clear...

Sarah Palin endorsed a total of 43 candidates for the House of Representatives. Thirty of them won, with another nine still to be decided. In the Senate, Palin backed twelve candidates and seven won. The left like to falsely portray Palin as a quitter for resigning as Governor of Alaska. The long term benefits of this strategic move are now plain to everyone other than the most bigoted Palin hater. She has skewered Obama and his mainstream media cronies and suckholes at every turn. “My observation of Sarah Palin,” says CBS News political analyst Nicolle Wallace, (yeah that’s right- CBS...

In the first five parts of this series, and particularly in Part 5, I presented a new theory of history and the role of philosophical ideas in history. This article presents the theory behind that theory, discussing the deeper epistemological issues that are raised by the rest of the series. To begin, let me briefly summarize the essence of my theory. I have argued that the standard Objectivist theory—the view that a culture is changed by explicit philosophical ideas propagating downward from the ivory tower to the specialized sciences, to art, to the man on the street—is incomplete. This "top-down"...