Free Republic

Actions often have unforeseen consequences. Throughout the campaign and the first few months of the new administration, Barack Obama adopted a number of personas and positions that only now may be coming back to haunt him. Or in the words of the right Reverend Wright the proverbial “chickens are coming home to roost.”1. The WarsObama and the Democrats once understandably figured that the war in Afghanistan was nearly won (between 2002-5 fewer of our soldiers were dying in an entire year there than in a single bloody month in Iraq), while (to quote Harry Reid) Iraq was already “lost.” Obama,...

The more Europe professes to be egalitarian, the more cynical and conniving the people have become. After concluding another 16 days in Europe. I am again reminded how different their form of socialism  is, and yet how closely it resembles the model that Obama seeks for America. The vast majority of citizens lives in apartments, even in smaller towns and villages. Cars are tiny. Prices are higher than in the states; income is lower (The government taxes you to pay for things like “free” college, so you won’t have much to spend on antisocial things like your Wal-Mart plastic...

The debate over health care reform — what constitutes it and what public opinion of such reform really is — has become more polarizing as the summer has gone on. Below are five key liberal talking points about health care “reform” and an accompanying dose of truth their peddlers so desperately need to hear.1. Republicans, who either believe the health care status quo is perfectly acceptable or are in the pockets of lobbyists who pay them to say so, are opposed to the very idea of reform and want to block any effort to fix our health care system. This...

A brilliant must see video - 9min - by Bill Whittle    More:Afterburner with Bill Whittle Beyond the Angry Mobs: Only You Can Bring Congress Back From the Abyss of Corruption Aug 10 / Afterburner with Bill Whittle   9min BizarroBurner: Where Black is White and Racists Don't Get a Pass Aug 3 / Afterburner with Bill Whittle   8min The Media, The Left and GOP Elitists vs. Sarah Palin: A Lesson on How to Destroy a Leader Jul 27 / Afterburner with Bill Whittle   13min LunarPalooza Part 1: The Future of Space Exploration Is In Your Hands...

[If you would rather hear and see this (and it's better with some vocal steam and supporting pictures), you can view the Afterburner version for free, here.] TRANSCRIPT OF THE VIDEO: THE DESTRUCTION OF SARAH PALIN Well, Sarah Palin has stepped down as Governor of Alaska. Fighting a seemingly endless string of harassment lawsuits has taken pretty much all of her time and $500,000 of her money. That’s real money to the Palins. That’s real money to me, and probably to you too.At least fifteen ethics complaints had been leveled against Governor Palin, and all of them have been dismissed...

Suddenly, a RevolutionWhy public disagreement with the Obama administration rapidly became fury. The approval ratings on nearly every one of the President’s key policy initiatives—cap-and-trade, health care overhaul, government take over of industry and finance, deficit spending, stimulus—are already less than half of polled voters. Obama’s own popularity has fallen dramatically and hovers near fifty percent. A number of well-publicized town meetings have erupted in shouting, as administration and congressional representatives try, often in condescending fashion, to explain the Obama agenda. The Republicans—written off just a few weeks ago as an obsolete party headed for oblivion—are now often polling...

Obama Regresses to Cold War Mythology … and Switches Sides Oleg Atbashian, a writer and graphic artist from Ukraine, currently lives in New York. He is the creator of ThePeoplesCube.com, a satirical website where he writes under the name of Red Square.     The world needs post-Cold War thinking. But Obama is stuck in a world of parochial clichés. (This is Part 1 of a series.) http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/obama-regresses-to-cold-war-mythology-and-switches-sides/ Why is this president always doing the opposite of what needs to be done?Instead of supporting Iranian protesters, he snubs them. Instead of snubbing the ousted Honduran would-be dictator, he invites him to...

Italy…I have been traveling as a lecturer on a Hillsdale College Byzantium Cruise (from Venice to Athens, with several stops in the Adriatic, Mediterranean, and Aegean) for the last few days, and here are some eccentric reflections on civilizations of the past. VeniceI spent yesterday in Venice—hot, humid, and crowded, as I had never quite seen it before. So much for the global recession that has supposedly curtailed world tourism.Venice was not a classical city, and one can see why. It was malarial, without natural harbors or any readily identifiable deep ports or surrounding cliffs. It is instead a conglomeration of...

  Obama has unwittingly made his real beliefs clear. From time to time, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Clarence Thomas have naturally talked about growing up African-American under far less tolerant conditions than those we take for granted today. Yet their biggest contributions to American race relations have been their admirable abilities to transcend such racial intolerance — to make being black incidental, not essential, at least in public, to their sterling characters and impressive achievements. They all paid a price for emphasizing individuality rather than adhering to identity politics. Those on the left often criticized them as somehow inauthentic,...

What Might Have HappenedRemember Obama’s initial signature speech (e.g., “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America”), and all the subsequent conciliatory talk of no blue state, no red state America? Obama won, of course, because he captivated the tiny, but influential left, registered vast numbers of new minority voters, raised a billion dollars, and reconstituted the liberal base. But the key margin that got him from 45 to 53% were the independents and old Reagan Democrats. And what put them on board was not just their weariness with George...

It's crazy for a group of mere mortals to try to design 15 percent of the U.S. economy. It's even crazier to do it by August. Yet that is what some members of Congress presume to do. They intend, as the New York Times puts it, "to reinvent the nation's health care system".Let that sink in. A handful of people who probably never even ran a small business actually think they can reinvent the health care system. Politicians and bureaucrats clearly have no idea how complicated markets are. Every day people make countless tradeoffs, in all areas of life, based...

It’s worth recalling that when the Founding Fathers led the American colonists in revolt against British oppression, they weren’t rebelling against torture on the rack or being chained in galleys or having to let aristocrats deflower their daughters. They were rebelling against taxes. To them, having to pay duties they hadn’t voted for themselves was a tyrannical taking of property—theft—and, in true Lockean fashion, they concluded that since government exists to protect life, liberty, and property, a regime that does the opposite renders itself illegitimate. What would they make, then, of today’s New York City, where 1.2 percent of the...

Sarah Palin celebrated Bastille Day Tuesday with an op-ed against "cap and trade" in the Washington Post. Bless the editors of that newspaper for permitting it. Predictably, even Pavlovianly liberal, as they may be on almost any issue, there is a little streak of "wicked" mischief in them that makes their paper worth reading occasionally. Their op-ed policy is to run real conservatives from time to time -- including Charles Krauthammer, currently the doyen of "no we can't" opposition to the whole agenda of Barack Obama and the Nancy Pelosi Congress.Whereas, other liberal newspapers -- the New York Times...

Debt MattersOver the last two decades it became an article of popular faith that budget deficits did not matter that much. Conservatives began to talk of annual red-ink in vague terms of percentages of the gross domestic product rather than in real billions of dollars — as in “Don’t worry about the 2004 shortfall of $605 billion; it’s still only 5.3 percent of GDP.”Ronald Reagan ran large deficits; so for a while did Bill Clinton. Both Bushes did every year. And Barack Obama, who admittedly came to office amid a liquidity crisis that called for fiscal stimulus, trumped them all...

On the eve of the celebration of the birth of the United States, Oleg Atbashian looks at our history through the competing lenses of progressivism and progress. Refusing to get bogged down in the merits of relativity, he finds freedom where equality fears to tread. Excuse me while I question your patriotism, progressive comrades. The Fourth of July is coming and you will not be celebrating it — not with the same thoughts and emotions as the rest of your countrymen. If you have been undermining this country for most of the year, why should this day be different?A critical...

Stimulus, stimulus and not a drop…A “stimulus” of nearly a trillion dollars was proposed, without which we were told, unemployment would skyrocket and credit would tighten further. Six months later — unemployment having risen even higher than the administration’s forecast of what would have been the case had their stimulus package not been implemented — now the same proponents of massive borrowing demand a second stimulus to accomplish what the first ’successful’ borrowing apparently did not. If you fail, then try the same thing to fail even bigger the second time — while calling for more success to follow the...

There are few places in the world Robert D. Kaplan has not visited and written about in his books and magazine articles. He travels to countries hardly anyone else even considers – to Turkmenistan, for instance, during the time of the lunatic "Turkmenbashi" who transformed his post-Soviet republic into the North Korea of Central Asia. He has an uncanny ability to see conflicts looming on the horizon well in advance and – reversing the standard relationship between journalists and officials – U.S. defense policy professionals often ask him for briefings about what he has seen.His regular dispatches in the...

with an observation from Hilaire Belloc and an admonition from Friedrich Hayek A robust challenge to Obama's health care plan appears ... in the Times. Written by a Harvard professor. Let me start with the observation from Hilaire Belloc. In his book The Servile State, Belloc writes that “The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.”I rather doubt that President Obama or any of his inner circle is a student of Hilaire Belloc. But they have demonstrated again and again their intuitive grasp of Belloc’s insight. If only, they reason, they can turn over...

  Helen Thomas: “I’m not saying there has never been managed news before, but this is carried to fare-thee-well--for the town halls, for the press conferences,” she said. “It’s blatant. They don’t give a damn if you know it or not. They ought to be hanging their heads in shame.”    Obama's administration is arrogant. Who'd thought so?Is slobbering love affair over? I don't think so, the media is too deeply in bed with Obama to turn on him yet, but it's a good start - somebody retained some journalistic decorum, maybe some principals too.No graphic photos, please.   Helen Thomas...

Obama’s policy is a lose/lose proposition that will please neither side Last month, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets to protest a rigged presidential election. Our president was extremely cautious in his initial criticism of the Iranian government’s fierce crackdown against the protestors. At first, President Obama said that the United States — given our history in Iran — should not be “meddling” in the country’s internal affairs. Obama suggested that the leading opposition candidate, the reformer Mir-Hossein Mousavi, might not be that different from the entrenched theocracy’s choice, the incumbent (and declared winner of the...