Free Republic

This isn’t about the healthcare system and who can run it best. This is a question of personal liberty: Who is going to control your body? We couldn’t be asking a more profound question than this, and we are going to lose this fight unless we get Americans to see that having the government “take care” of our health is an irreversible and fatal blow to our most inalienable rights—the right to life and self-determination. Obama has recognized this; of course, diminishing individual liberty for the sake of the community is his whole schtick. Democrats in general are fine with...

Ezekiel Emmanuel, Rahm’s health-wonk brother, wants the nation’s seniors to just get on with it. Death, that is. Believing that older Americans have already had their fair share of time, he suggests that they be denied health care resources—out of a concern for justice, apparently. This, from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, sums it up: 'In a January article published in the British medical journal Lancet, Emanuel and his co-authors advocate a health rationing policy that discriminates against older people. They wrote, “Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination … Treating 65-year-olds differently because of...

The glass if half-full. All of the hoopla and razzamatazz about healthcare of late has led me to feel simultaneously hopeful and despairing. I am so heartened that many people seem involved in the conversation, finally! I am such a political wonk—and most people are television junkies—that I have gotten used to blank, gaping stares when I bring up politics. On the issue of healthcare, though, everyone has an opinion! I am discouraged, though, at the number of folks who find it not-at-all frightening that the federal government wants to force us into such things as “mandatory end-of-life counseling.” Well,...

Barack Obama, the weapon. In a laughingly predictable trajectory from the summer of free love through the protests of the war in Viet Nam, the baby boomers have a firm hold on the reins of power in this country—from the media and the board room to the corridors of Congress. Because they really are nihilists, if you scratch off the materialist veneer they now wear, they want nothing so much as they do death. And not just their own, individual demise. They want America dead, toe-tagged, on a slab. And they chose, in the urbane, polished, smooth and charismatic Barack...

Many conservatives have meditated upon the level of and the source of the left’s absolute hatred toward Sarah Palin. I have no quarrel with their perceptions; I have to say that David Letterman’s crass attempt at humor was the epitome of the supposedly presentable liberal exhibiting his skunky nether regions. I would add though that I think George W. Bush attracted just as much insane, slanderous foaming at the mouth. Perhaps with Sarah, due to some lingering notions of chivalry, the repeated eviscerations just seemed worse. But since both of them came in (and still do) for such malignant personal...

Happy Birthday, America!! I wonder if this is the last Independence Day we’ll see America in any way like she used to be. Melodramatic though it may be, such a thought is frighteningly possible. Barack Obama and the statists in Congress and the judiciary are forming an intrusive government that is several orders of magnitude beyond anything we have yet known. How many Americans know that in the name of Al Gore’s lucrative (to him) folly, they won’t be able to sell their house without the government’s environmental stamp of approval? How many know that Obama’s Deathcare will eventually decide...

That is my favorite line from David Kahane’s new piece over at NRO. Mostly because it’s the kind of non-sequiturish afterthought that I append in my speech all the time…a kind of verbal tic where one of the LPIMH hijacks the conversation for 10 seconds and throws everybody off the scent. I judge whether a person can keep up with me by whether or not he can follow my train of thought as it leaves the track every now and then. David Kahane is like that a lot when he writes, which is just one reason I like him. Go...

I asked the QC this question last night. I’d been mulling it over in my head for several days. Evil is not just when something is bad; some things are bad without being evil. Evil has an element of intent; it is a humanly-oriented phenomenon; although (as the QC pointed out), evil has a supra-human dimension as well. If we are going to talk about evil, we must know what it is. We can’t rely on the “I know it when I see it” approach. The problem with defining and discussing evil, as we will see, is that such an...

Lies, damned lies and statistics. One of the more deceitful arguments for socialized medicine hinges on the assertion that Americans don’t live as long as citizens in other industrialized countries because we don’t provide health care for everyone. The press is complicit in this prevarication by running stories like this one from the AP: "WASHINGTON—Americans are living longer than ever, but not as long as people in 41 other countries. For decades, the United States has been slipping in international rankings of life expectancy, as other countries improve health care, nutrition and lifestyles. Countries that surpass the U.S. include Japan...

This from a Jewish research organization that sends me emails on their work: "A woman suspected of recruiting more than 80 female suicide bombers has confessed to organising their rapes so she could later convince them that martyrdom was the only way to escape the shame." The woman is Iraqi and, it goes without saying, Muslim. I don’t think I need to add anything, except to say that I will be writing about the philosophy of religion later, from a cat’s point of view; and this most certainly underlines my assertion that not all “God hypotheses” are created equal.

Christians are entering a time of tribulation. The past almost two thousand years have been years of safety and security for us in the West. Christianity has been the modus vivendi, and while internecine battles have at times made disagreement dangerous, we haven’t faced an enemy from without. That has been changing for the past few decades, with the secularization of Europe and forces here in America insistent upon banishing religion (well, Christianity) from the public square. I believe that the Islamization of the West, a process our politicians are not only not opposing, but facilitating, will push Christianity further...

I have a foolproof plan for carbon sequestration. The costs are low, the effectiveness high. I have been conducting a trial right here in my own home. What we need is an army of Horuses. The concept is quite simple: no matter how little I feed Horus, he keeps getting bigger. Undoubtedly, he is sequestering carbon for reasons known only to his little cat brain. What we need to do is take advantage of this. I am sure that two or three Horuses assigned to every US household should offset the carbon footprint of each home. Yes, Horus produces poop,...

Every cloud has a silver lining. It is an ill wind that blows no good. Every crisis is an opportunity. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Even the brontosaurus-sized governmental monstrosity Obama is getting ready to cram down our throats has an upside. Those clowns in Congress are getting ready to throw a lot of money up in the air; a Boy Scout-like person (thrifty, prepared, wise, all that) will grab some of it. Hypocritical? Yes. But why stand on principal? If they’re wasting it, why not let them waste it on you? A friend of mine is in...

Is the funniest man on the face of the planet… "Appearing on “The Rush Limbaugh Show” last week, I got a little muddled over two adjoining newspaper clippings – one on the stimulus, the other on those octuplets in California – and for a brief moment the two stories converged. Everyone’s hammering that mom – she’s divorced, unemployed, living in a small house with parents who have a million bucks’ worth of debt, and she’s already got six kids. So she has in vitro fertilization to have eight more. But isn’t that exactly what the Feds have done? Last fall,...

That’s one of the big-ticket items in the porkulus stimulus plan: building schools in districts that already have buildings sitting unused. NRO notes that the Minneapolis school district is an egregious example of this. But should one be surprised? Not at all. Bureaucrats are nothing if not the kings of inanity. Let’s build schools for no students; let’s create “scholars” no one heeds (what will we do with all those gender-studies majors?); let’s pave roads for no drivers; let’s build windmills with no place to store the energy (oh wait, can’t do that; no one wants to look at them)…hell,...

Horus is perched on my lap, purring softly and enjoying having his ears rubbed. He is feeling smug, having just won a face-off with Henry. They do that occasionally—just stand a few paces apart and stare at each other. This time, Henry was in his kennel; and Horus sat a few feet away, watching Henry. Henry gave several woofs of defeat, refusing to come out of his kennel while Horus sat so close. Henry shows weakness, and Horus takes advantage…a feline/canine lesson for the humans running our national security apparatus. Meanwhile, I notice Tiger trying to eat the blueberry waffles...

When your pet cause has been used as the background for an advertisement for Preparation H, you know your public support must be hitting a nadir. I almost drove off the road yesterday when I heard a commercial for the hemorrhoid medication that portrayed a father relating his daughter’s school play on global warming to his burning, itching nether regions. Give it up, Algor; America is officially tired of you. Maybe you could replay a few old Rodney Dangerfield routines to cheer you up; he didn’t get any respect, either

This is a time when I need your prayers. I haven’t in the past really given any details about my life. Just the superficial stuff that anyone who meets me might see. I am going to share information that I normally might not, but our family needs your prayers. Max is going into the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. He tried to hurt himself yesterday by jumping out his bedroom window. Thankfully, as I pointed out jokingly some time back, the only possible harm one might incur by defenestrating one’s self at our house is a sprained ankle (which is...

When a society is essentially free, provocation is child’s play, and those that gratuitously insult others seem childish. In an oppressive system, provocation incurs great risk and requires tremendous courage. So now, as our liberties erode here and in other Western countries, I begin to understand those who act as agents provocateurs. In a Western world that is submitting to a non-indigenous moral order and using its own police authority to silence critics, provocation is a necessary and potent weapon. The authoritarian teeth that Christianity has lacked for the past 100 years sit ferociously in the mouth of rabid Islam....

A telecommunications company has confirmed for this columnist that its vice president for policy—who is also an Obama donor and a former lobbyist—is advising Barack Obama’s transition team on telecom policy. Obama’s transition team, which has failed to disclose this executive’s involvement, happens to have proposed a significant change in telecom policy that will profit that very company, called Clearwire. ...snip... Salemme, a former telecom lobbyist who has given thousands to Obama, including $5,000 to Obama’s transition team, has helped Obama craft a policy that will benefit Salemme’s company. This is just the sort of arrangement that led to years...