Free Republic

Think of it as the Empire strikes back. Two days after Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas took to the floor of the Senate and called Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar, Republican senators, apparently on the behest of the Republican leader, refused to second a motion to back a Cruz amendment to the highway bill to make the lifting of sanctions against Iran contingent on that country recognizing Israel’s right to exist and freeing four American hostages. As the Washington Examiner reported on Sunday, the lesson was struck home by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah when he delivered a soliloquy about...

The Conservatives4Palin blog noted on Sunday that former Alaska governor and presidential candidate Sarah Palin has arranged for SarahPac to provide funding to the reelection campaigns of Republican House members who opposed re-electing John Boehner as House Speaker. As the New York Times reported at the time, Boehner suffered the embarrassment of having 25 members of his caucus vote to deny him a new term as speaker. The Republican majority in the House was large enough to have Boehner reelected by a comfortable margin in any case

The Washington Post ventured down to Bastrop, Texas on Saturday and found an undetermined amount of people who fear that President Obama is plotting to impose martial law in the Lone Star State as part of a military operation called Jade Helm. Other citizens of Bastrop, mainly Democrats, said that this paranoia was racially motivated because the president is African American. It is unknown exactly how many people hold to these views.

On this Independence Day, one of the sadder aspects of American life we have to consider is the tendency of some Americans to wag their fingers at others about the way they choose to live, sometimes with disastrous results. The temperance movement of the 19th Century led to Prohibition which led to Al Capone, for example. Now someone writing in the New Republic on Friday wants to take away our right to barbecue.

The president’s chest thumping boasting to the contrary, Obamacare is still a mess that has caused health insurance premiums and deductibles to skyrocket. Some advocates of Canadian-style single-payer systems, such as socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, maintain that this state of affairs will lead Americans to accept a universal, government run “Medicare for all” system. Such a system would also feature rationing and death panels, as has been the case in countries that have adopted such arrangements. However, a Wednesday article in the Wall Street Journal suggests that Obamacare will, inadvertently, lead to a free market, customer-driven health care system...

USA Today reported on Wednesday that TV Land, a nostalgia network that shows episodes of old TV series, has yanked “The Dukes of Hazzard” from its schedule. The series, which aired from 1979 to 1985, depicted the hijinks of the cousins Luke and Bo Duke of Hazzard County, Georgia, whose main occupation seemed to be defying authority, an occupation in which they were aided by their customized, red Dodge Charger, the better to outrun the law. The car, dubbed the “General Lee,” is what got them banned from the airwaves. The General Lee has a Confederate battle flag on the...

Recently, Parisian taxi drivers decided to deal with competition they have been getting from a new Internet car service called Uber by rioting and physically attacking cars they suspected of being part of that company. French authorities decided to deal with the situation by detaining two Uber executives and accusing them of running an “illicit service,” according to a Monday story in USA Today, The action illustrates how a bureaucratic, European socialist company reacts to change brought on by technology and entrepreneurial activity, by trying to ban it.

NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission is still gasping along, but at least one space blogger suggests that its cancellation is all but inevitable. In the meantime, Space News just on Tuesday reported that the space agency has decided that the ARM must actually capture a boulder and take it to a retrograde lunar orbit to be considered a success. This metric was actually in doubt, with some NASA managers suggesting that as long as an unmanned probe, propelled by a solar selection propulsion engine, rendezvoused with an asteroid and then returned, even without anything resembling a rock, it would be a...

“Echoes of Apollo” by George Thompson is the sort of space faring technothriller that Tom Clancy would have been proud to have placed his name on if he was still alive. The novel is a near future story of what amounts to the first space war between China and the United States. “Echoes of Apollo” not only involve the sort of cutting edge technological toys inherent in the genre, but also makes clever use of the technology of the past. The story also casts a new light on the ongoing debate as to whether or not to return to the...

In the wake of the massacre at the Emanuel AME Church, America seems to be bent on eradicating even the hint of any symbol regarding the Confederacy, from removing the Confederate battle flag from public spaces to even deleting Civil War computer games. Serious people have proposed banning “Gone With the Wind” and sanitizing “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Others have advocated blowing up the Jefferson Memorial and other monuments to famous Southerners whether they had anything to do with the Civil War or not. However, if America is serious about expunging any hint of the Confederacy, it must even ferret...

n an op-ed published in Florida Today on Wednesday, Jeff Kottkamp, a former lieutenant governor of Florida, and Rich Ramos, a Florida businessman, proposed a new justification for sending humans to Mars. A Mars program would serve, in their view, as a means to foster national unity of the sort that is rarely achieved outside times of war. Some recent polling data suggests that they may be on to something.

According to a Tuesday piece in Motherboard, Noam Chomsky, a philosopher and political commentator, and Lawrence Krauss, a physicist and cosmologist, had a public dialogue about space exploration. Being both men of the far left, they concluded that space travel should be best left to robots and conducted by governments. The conclusions are the exact opposite of what the prevailing trends are in space policy.

A Monday piece in IO9 contained some revelations about the upcoming sequel to 1996’s “Independence Day,” which is entitled “Independence Day: Resurgence.” 20 years after the great alien invasion flattened many of Earth’s largest cities and killed untold millions of people, the world is still united in building up its defenses against a return engagement. These defenses apparently include a moon base.

Gizmodo, as part of a series of stories about space, ran a piece on Thursday called ‘What is Stopping Us from Building Cities in Space? No, it’s not Tech.” The article attempts to examine some of the political impediments that have stymied the settlement of the high frontier. Unfortunately, the piece would have been more convincing had it not been for one rather glaring error. The piece suggested that the United States attempted to claim the moon as sovereign territory when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted the American flag at Tranquility Base on July 20, 1969. “So much of...

One has to hand it to the now concluded fifth season of “Game of Thrones.” The season has not stinted on the carnage and the horror. From the rape of Sansa to the ritual barbecuing of Stannis’ little girl, life in Westeros and environs has proven to be very grim indeed, for the highest to the lowest. The atrocities in the final episode “Mother’s Mercy,” which aired Sunday, will set a high bar for season six, no question.

The drama surrounding funding for NASA’s Commercial Crew program has started up once again. In the wake of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s cutting funding for the program by over $300 million, supporters have fallen back on familiar patterns of futile complaining. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden claimed that the funding shortfall would delay the restoration of American spaceflight capability by as much as two years. Bolden was mild compared to some of Commercial Crew’s supporters on the Internet.

RT reported on Tuesday that San Diego prankster and conspiracy theorist Mark Dice took to the streets of San Diego and solicited signatures on a petition to support what he called President Obama’s plan for a preemptive nuclear strike against Russia. A surprising number of people signed the petition with barely a comment. Vocativ suggested that the news of the fake petition was causing quite a bit of consternation inside Russia, being seen as proof of American hostility against that country.

Deadline Hollywood announced that the trailer for the latest collaboration between Steven Spielberg, one of the greatest directors of our time, and Tom Hanks, one of the world’s most popular actors, has been released. The collaboration is a film called “Bridge of Spies,” which relates the career of James Donovan, a lawyer who risked his career to defend Rudolf Able, a captured Soviet spy, in 1957, the height of the Cold War. Later, Donovan would negotiate for the release of captured U2 spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers, in exchange for Able. Spielberg has, for the most part, shone when...

By now, the story of the Duggars, the family features in the reality show “19 Kids and Counting,” is all too familiar to those who follow the sordid side of the news. When Josh Duggar, now an adult, was found to have molested four of his sisters when he was an adolescent, the show was cancelled and Duggar was obliged to resign from a position at the Family Research Council. The glee with which the Left has treated the news of a fundamentalist Christian family having been found to have a dark secret has caused Sarah Palin to rouse herself...