Free Republic

How awful are world politics today? It has me giving money to two billionaires — Donald Trump and Elon Musk. They are real life Obi-Wan Kenobis. One is fighting for my country, the other for my God-given, shove-it-up-the-censors right to free speech. Google messed around with me and I ditched it for Substack, where I am happier and my readers don’t have to put up with advertisements. While the Derp State keeps going after Trump with indictments, mugshots and assassination bullets, Musk is fighting the second worst people in the world — the European Union. The worst work at the...

I was not going to write about Oliver Anthony’s brilliant song, Rich Men North of Richmond, because I have nothing worthy to add. The video puts all other commentary to shame. North of Richmond refers to the federal government, which is too large, too powerful and too uncaring. But Mark Antonio Wright, executive editor of the Never Trump National Review, butted in with a Learn-to-Code column attacking Anthony for daring to complain about DC’s treatment of the working class. It lectured Anthony to be more like Woody Guthrie, the Nazi apologist and communist. Anthony’s song says: I’ve been sellin’ my...

Tranny rights. Black lives matter. Support Ukraine. It seems every day leftist fascists are throwing something new at us. Their latest cause is Youth Attracted People — pedophiles. The left puts real Americans constantly on the defensive. We are forever back on our heels in the battle between right and wrong. This is deliberate, for as Sun Tzu said in The Art of War 2,500 years ago, “The whole secret lies in confusing the enemy, so that he cannot fathom our real intent.”I call this fascism because that is what it is, the use by the government of business to...

Gorbachev ended the Cold War like Louis XVI ended the French monarchy WaPo praises USSR's BidenI don't speak ill of the dead not because they cannot argue back but because they cannot hear me. Why waste my breath? Instead, let me take on David Hoffman's fact-challenged obituary of Mikhail Gorbachev, the 8th and final thug in charge of the Soviet Union, a communist dictatorship best known for killing about 50 million people and starving Ukraine into submission in the 1930s. Hoffman wrote, "Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, who embarked on a path of radical reform...

The cable channels have granted Zelensky billions of dollars worth of free air time to sell the public on having Americans finance his war with Russia. So far, he's received commitments to $13.6 billion in U.S. aid, money he will gladly share with the children of congressmen. Anyone who questions this is labeled a Putin puppet.Well, I have been called worse.There is another side of the story, weak as it may be. In a speech Power Line called, "The Madness of Vlad the Inhaler," Putin made a Zelensky-style plea to his colleagues. Most of it was BS. There is no...

It may be difficult to believe in this enlightened age but there was a time not so long ago when the National Review was the intellectual heart of America's conservative movement. Its writers were sharp, gifted and irreverent. Their appearances on Fox News and other TV outlets made them rock stars. All that ended on January 22, 2016, when the magazine posted online its "Against Trump" issue. Once again, the editors proudly chose to stand athwart history rather than make it. They chose to lose with what they consider honor rather than win. 22 writers signed on, each penning...

The frustration from Charleston Daily Mail's editor and publisher Brad McElhinny was clear when TPM reach him by phone on Tuesday afternoon. "I've had better days," he said. His exasperation was understandable. On Saturday, Don Surber, the West Virginia paper's lone editorial columnist, took to his personal blog to offer his thoughts on "police brutality" and the killing of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown. "This summer I had an epiphany as I watched packs of racists riot in Ferguson, Missouri, in support of a gigantic thug who was higher than a kite when he attacked Ferguson Police Department Officer Darren...

John McCain has to be the biggest ingrate in Washington, which is not a town noted for its gratitude. As House Republicans valiantly try to brings some semblance of fiscal sanity to the federal budget there is the 2008 Republican presidential nominee carrying water for the Democratic Party and splashing it in Republican faces. His daughter, Meghan, is a chip off her father’s block. More on that further down. John McCain made another appearance on CNN, this time to discuss House Republican action on tax cuts, and said: “It is harming the Republican Party. It is harming the view, if...

IF a few billion dollars' worth of cruise missiles, bombs and jet fuel rid the world of Moammar Gadhafi, then it is money well spent. But there are sharp contrasts between President Bush's painful decision to invade Iraq and President Obama's unauthorized attack on Libya exactly eight years later, and the differences should not go unnoticed. Obama contradicts himself. In 2002, he delivered a stirring speech against the war in Iraq. "What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate,...

Robert Fogel won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1993. He wrote a piece last week in which he explained the two reasons why Americans spend more money on health care than everyone else in the world. First, Americans have had more money to spend. "Between 1875 and 1995, the share of family income spent on food, clothing, and shelter declined from 87 percent to just 30 percent, despite the fact that we eat more food, own more clothes, and have better and larger homes today than we had in 1875," Fogel wrote. If we limit the basics to these...

AS I watched President Obama address Congress on his health insurance plan on Wednesday night, I was struck by his anger, his contradictions and his big omission. The omission was a recognition that America offers the best health care in the world. In his speech, Obama cited the recent death of Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy. Bad example. When Kennedy was struck with an inoperable brain tumor, he did not seek treatment in France, which we are told is the best health system in the world. (Just don't get sick in August; all the French doctors are on the beaches.) Kennedy...

John McCain has been a better candidate than Republicans deserve. As readers have guessed by now, I am a contrarian conservative. Whilst the fair-weathered friends blow the way of the opposition party this year — adieu, adieu — I have come to admire McCain. Oh, I will never forget or forgive McCain-Feingold. But Republicans — including President Bush — made it the law of the land. In a Democratic year, against a rock star, and against the most massive war chest in political history, McCain has done an extraordinary job as a candidate, which indicates he may be a better...