Free Republic

Ancient philosophers and tragedians would have understood the human folly—from the media, the president, and his party—that led to last week’s debate debacle. A day before Thursday’s presidential debate, the New York Times ran a front-page story in its print edition railing against the posting of unflattering videos of Joe Biden. Among the president’s many “adversaries,” observed the Times, was the “distorted, online version of himself, a product of often misleading videos that play into and reinforce voters’ longstanding concerns about his age and abilities.” Such voter concerns were misguided, according to the Times and its sources. Former Illinois representative...

Archaeologists are interested in the rubbish left by past civilizations: by their detritus shall ye know them. What people throw away reveals as much about them as what they buy in the first place. But we don’t need to await the passage of three millennia before the study of what people discard becomes instructive. My country, Britain, is now the litter bin of Europe, a kind of vast rubbish dump, and I have been interested in British litter, and littering, for a number of years. The thoroughness with which the country has been befouled, from the grandest city thoroughfares to...

All the current nationalist parties of small nations in Europe—the Scots, the Welsh, the Basque, the Catalans, the Flemish—strongly support membership in the European Union, which is dedicated to, and even predicated upon, the extinction of national sovereignty. One would have thought that these parties wanted, at a minimum, national sovereignty. The contradiction is so glaring that it requires an explanation. The human mind is not a perfect calculating machine, and no doubt all of us sometimes contradict ourselves. Perfect consistency tends to be disconcerting—but so does glaring inconsistency. It’s possible that the nationalist parties’ leaders don’t perceive the contradiction,...

A Man Alone Jesse Lee Peterson versus the “black experience” By Andrew Klavan In December 2001, the Toyota Motor Corporation held a public meeting at the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce in conjunction with racial activist Jesse Jackson. The purpose of the gathering was to discuss Toyota’s “Twenty-First Century Diversity Strategy,” a ten-year program worth some $7.8 billion in contracts for minority-owned businesses. At even a casual glance, the program seemed a capitulation to Jackson, who had threatened to call for a black boycott of the carmaker over some ads that he deemed racist. Toyota’s denials that it had given...

The Clinton administration has turned the Community Reinvestment Act, a once-obscure and lightly enforced banking regulation law, into one of the most powerful mandates shaping American cities—and, as Senate Banking Committee chairman Phil Gramm memorably put it, a vast extortion scheme against the nation's banks. Under its provisions, U.S. banks have committed nearly $1 trillion for inner-city and low-income mortgages and real estate development projects, most of it funneled through a nationwide network of left-wing community groups, intent, in some cases, on teaching their low-income clients that the financial system is their enemy and, implicitly, that government, rather than their...

Why Palin’s Speech Worked A former vice-presidential speechwriter breaks it down. 4 September 2008 Last night, Sarah Palin, the previously obscure governor of Alaska, demonstrated before a national audience that she has an extraordinary ability to communicate with Americans. As someone who used to make her living writing political speeches, I can say that Palin certainly knows how to deliver one. She is talented at properly inflecting words to maximize dramatic punch, and she doesn’t stumble over timing. These skills, and not the writing, are what make it possible for an audience to really hear a speech. Consider that the...

Barack Obama’s much-discussed speech in Philadelphia earlier this week was not only about race. It was also about economics and, specifically, about poverty. Measures of group wealth, or the lack of it, are often used to support claims that our society is racist. Obama’s speech revealed that though he may be, to many people, a refreshingly new kind of post-racial politician and a healer, when it comes to notions of poverty and economic advancement, his ideas are right out of the 1960s and 1970s. At one point in his speech, for instance, Obama suggested that some black poverty today can...

(snip) Denise Mafi, a nine-year veteran of homeschooling, has confirmed to WND she and her children packed up their essentials – clothes and homeschool materials – and fled Utah over the weekend, spending more than 50 hours on a bus trip to an undisclosed part of the country. There she has obtained an empty home and is spending the Christmas break trying to find beds for her children and herself. After the New Year she will involve the children in a local homeschooling process. "We're shampooing carpets right now. We have no furniture. We have no beds," she said. "But...

The British parliament’s first avowedly atheist member, Charles Bradlaugh, would stride into public meetings in the 1880s, take out his pocket watch, and challenge God to strike him dead in 60 seconds. God bided his time, but got Bradlaugh in the end. A slightly later atheist, Bertrand Russell, was once asked what he would do if it proved that he was mistaken and if he met his maker in the hereafter. He would demand to know, Russell replied with all the high-pitched fervor of his pedantry, why God had not made the evidence of his existence plainer and more irrefutable....

In 1861, free institutions seemed poised to carry all before them. In Russia, Tsar Alexander II emancipated 22 million serfs. In Germany, lawmakers dedicated to free constitutional principles prepared to assert civilian control over Prussia’s feudal military caste. In America, Abraham Lincoln entered the White House pledged to a revolutionary policy of excluding human bondage from the nation’s territories. The new machinery of freedom, though Anglo-American in design, was universal in scope. At its core was the idea, as yet imperfectly realized, that all human beings possess a fundamental dignity. This was a truth that, Abraham Lincoln believed, was “applicable...

Three disturbing trends threaten the free speech of all Americans: 1. the attempts by certain liberal judges to have constitutional issues decided by the application of international laws, 2. “hate speech” being redefined as any criticism of a religion or of any characteristic of a group, and 3. the attempts now underway to reinstate what is cunningly called “the Fairness Doctrine”. Supreme Court justices Breyer and Ginsburg, both liberals, have recently given speeches in which they argued for the application of international laws in deciding cases that came before the Supreme Court.

It’s a strain being a Mexican diplomat in the United States these days, as the plaintive expression on Mario Velázquez-Suárez’s dignified features suggests. Diplomacy may be the art of lying for one’s country, but Mexican diplomacy requires taking that art to virtuosic heights. Sitting in his expansive office in Mexico’s Los Angeles consulate, Deputy Consul General Velázquez-Suárez gamely insists that he and his peers observe the diplomatic duty not to interfere in America’s internal affairs, including immigration matters. “Immigration is an internal discussion,” he says. “We have to respect that regardless of whether it pleases us.” Well, at least one...