Free Republic

...  when government restricts freedom of action It's not a free marketplace when a union can cry for government to use its coercive powers to tell a company that it can't open that new airplane factory it just built. That is exactly what happened in the Boeing case that was just resolved. The National Labor Relations Board has dropped its controversial case against airline manufacturer Boeing, which had become a lightning rod for conservatives. The labor board argued for much of the past year that Boeing decided to locate a new plant to build its new 787 Dreamliner jets...

President Obama went on Safari, killing a defanged, declawed, compliant old lion, already hobbled into docility.  All that's missing is a picture of the "brave" hunter standing astride his prey, brandishing the blunderbuss, oversize pith helmet propped  up only by his cartoonishly large ears... Khadaffi was once a dangerous beast, killing American GIs in Germany and bringing down an airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, among many other bloody predations. His eccentric behavior and outlandishly gaudy costumes brought to mind perhaps a darkly dangerous Michael Jackson of North Africa.  And the busty female bodyguards... What happened to them?  Given the track...

Liberals are up in arms over the Al-Awlaki killing. And so are many conservatives... Uber liberal Glenn Greenwald sums up the case against Obama, leveling the charge of Due-Process-Free Assassination: No effort was made to indict him for any crimes (despite a report last October that the Obama administration was “considering” indicting him). Despite substantial doubt among Yemen experts about whether he even had any operational role in Al Qaeda, no evidence (as opposed to unverified government accusations) was presented of his guilt. This controversy involves two questions. One of law, and one of motives and legitimacy. Let's look...

While Obama tries his best to send our economy and our currency the way of Argentina, his governing model is straight out of Chavez's Venezuela. What does an Obama-favored crony crapitalist say? "Upon the advice of my council I invoke the privilege afforded to me by the fifth amendment of the US Constitution and I respectfully decline to answer any questions." That's an actual quote from the congressional hearings on the Obama administration-Solyndra criminal enterprise held this past Friday. Industry lackeys in the Democrat party like Ed Markey and the ever more porcine Henry Waxman did their best to defend the malefactors...

Rick Perry continues to fascinate me. He is the only candidate other than Ron Paul who poses a real threat to both the GOP Establishment and the Obama Democrats. Karl Rove has stopped attacking democrats and is now going all MSNBC on Perry.  In response, the left has gone from bawling for The Texas Turd Blossom’s imprisonment to praising his Perry-bashing sagacity. The reason I like Perry right now is because he has kicked off a loud and much-needed dialog about the size and scope of government, complete with talk of jobs, overregulation and tort reform. He’s not the...

America has become the despised superhero Among nations, we really are a superhero.  We assimilate immigrants like no other nation, we come to the aid of everybody, destroy dictators and kill bad guys...  Our frightful military prowess is unrivaled. No Good Deed Goes Unpunished We've earned nothing but hatred for our efforts.  We are Batman, fighting nihilistic Jokers but pissing everybody off in the process.  They level charges of torture, illegal prisons and habitually bombing Muslim wedding parties and killing innocent civilians. We are excoriated for invading Iraq and Afghanistan...  by the same crowd that urges us to kill Khadaffi...

Marinated in Reverend Wright's Church of Jew Hating, as well as academic America-loathing third-world victimology, Obama's call for Israel to retreat behind indefensible borders was not surprising. He knew nothing about foreign policy when he assumed office, and he's apparently learned nothing about it since.  Not surprising since he is surrounded by pseudo intellectuals just as ignorant as he is. What will this inept man do next?  Unilaterally return Texas and the American Southwest to Mexico?  Think that's funny?  We took that territory in a war, just like Israel took the territory they now hold.  Only Israel did it...

Fuzzy Slippers makes a great case for dumping The Donald. He backed Harry Reid when tea party candidate Sharron Angle was ahead in the polls, and he got government to declare imminent domain on an old lady's house so he could build a parking lot. She just googled up a little dirt. Imagine what the Obama operatives will do to Trump. Here's an excerpt from Fuzzy Slippers: Look, I get it. I was warming to Trump. Big. I even told Adrienne that he was the top of my list of potentials. But then I started watching him more closely, listening...

Angry anti-GOP mobs are rampaging across the internet, screaming that this budget deal is the worst betrayal in US history, right up there with Nixon signing the Paris Peace Accords, The Compromise of 1877, and Art Modell's betrayal of the city of Cleveland We Have Not Yet Begun to Fight How would these critics of Boehner and the GOP have reacted after the battle of Lexington that began the Revolutionary War?  Would they have gone home in defeat because there were still British left standing?  This is just an early skirmish in a long war to reshape the federal...

Progressives grasp at any opportunity to quash free speech.  The internet and the anonymity it provides is a fat target for them.  How can internet speech be "managed," they ask? Stanley Fish explores this subject in his NY Times piece, Anonymity and the Dark Side of the Internet.  He employs the work of liberal thinkers who claim to be for free speech but then start throwing around concepts like "managing free speech" and coining terms like "low-value speech."  When you hear Sunsteinian progressives talk like this, watch out!  "What is remarkable about this volume is that the legal academics who...

Our public servants have become the master. Federal, state and municipal governments across this great land have gone mad with power. Instead of facing the facts and engaging in an adult conversation with the taxpayers, we get crap like this... PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – Two children were killed in a fire in the city’s Olney section Tuesday, and now an official from the firefighters’ union is questioning if Philadelphia’s cost-cutting “brownouts” of fire companies played a role. If government officials cannot manage cuts and downsizing without risking the lives and safety of citizens they’ve sworn to serve, they need to...

  Eliot Abrams made a good point on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America. We are not worried about “the people” taking over Egypt when Mubarrak falls; we are worried about the Muslim Brotherhood taking over The dictators we prop up in exchange for their cooperation end up suppressing the people, not the dangerous organizations we hope to guard against. They squander the breathing room we buy for them, snuffing freedom and giving oxygen to freedom’s enemies. 84% of Egyptians support killing apostates There is a liberal-conservative tug-of-war going on over the nature of the Muslim Brotherhood. Are they terrorists,...

With progressive screams of “Palin is an accessory to murder!” still fouling the air, a story emerges from Philadelphia of a macabre chamber of horrors sponsored, funded and championed by progressives.  The gory details of abortionist Kermit Gosnell’s charnel house read like something out of a Wes Craven movie. Sadly, it’s all real, right here in America. A Twisted Idea of Morality The morality of a woman’s right to choose trumping human life is twisted and repulsive. It is important to recall that this dubious concept was developed by the likes of racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger. A progressive hero,...

The petty statists at the FCC have wrapped the FCC's bureaucratic tentacles around the internet.  This is just the beginning... What is the problem this "solution" is supposed to solve? Supposedly it will deal with "...bandwidth hogging sites such as Netflix."  Such language in a free-market with unlimited bandwith potential is not only ignorant, it is especially disturbing coming from a government bureaucrat.  Such interventions pervert the natural market incentives and spark inane arguments over who hogs more bandwidth and whether every child has a “right” to surf YouTube all day. It's about power and control What this FCC...

Why sensible people avoid discussing race... I had Monday morning off and I wandered back into Left Blogistan.  I couldn't help myself...  Kinda like driving by an old girlfriend's house... The mid-term elections must have hit the lefties hard; they're cannibalizing themselves over there.I stumbled upon a thread that illustrates why sensible people don't discuss race. The thread is also a beautiful microcosm of liberalism itself. A blogger named Sheria wrote a piece about how she's tired of the left beating up on President Obama.  She larded her sermon with standard liberal pieties and pontifications, and topped it off with...

The WikiLeakers and the Bathrobe Brigades now launching hack attacks from their parents' basements are not free speech heroes, they are leftwing collectivists lashing out at all they hate:  America, Capitalism, and of course, Sarah Palin. Socialism Advances Behind a Screen of BS The Palin attack is what revealed their true colors. What does she have to do with the free flow of information? How does stealing her and Todd's credit cards advance the cause of an open society? Many of these hackers are society’s losers. They are unsuccessful, so they hate society. They lack the skills and self-discipline...

The constitutional rights argument is specious The military discriminates against women, old people, the handicapped, drug users and convicted criminals.  You surrender many rights when you put on a uniform, including the right to free speech, free assembly, and freedom from search and seizure.  You go where they tell you to go and do what they tell you to do.  You shut your pie hole when they tell you to, and you submit to random drug tests and room inspections on demand. Repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell will not be the end, but the beginning.  I wonder if it...

Barack Obama and the Democrats:  Too Extreme for America Thank you President Obama and Speaker Pelosi for showing us what unwashed socialism looks like.  We experienced the Cass Sunstein buggering nudgery, The Van Jones enviro-ripoff and the Plouffian palaver, and we don't like it.  We have spit you out like a wasted wad of gum.  It tasted sweet at first, but now it's just bitter, rubbery goo...  Had this pointy-headed band of collectivists not shamelessly ripped off the moderate mask that hid their true colors, we would still be arguing over just how much more government money and intervention...

Hayek famously dedicated his book, "The Road to Serfdom" to "Socialists of all parties," and Republicans have earned every bit of criticism they get.  They have eagerly participated in the horrible progressive experiment of the last 100 years.  They say they've changed, and I'm willing to give them one more chance.  With the Democrats, we are guaranteed to continue our death spiral. 100 Years of Progressive Statism is Enough! Let’s consider, say, the year 1880. Here was a society in which people were free to keep everything they earned, because there was no income tax. They were also free...