Free Republic

If you are under 30, you really need to read this column and pass it on to your friends. Your elected officials are dooming you to a new sort of bondage, a form of 21st Century slavery, if you will. First, some background. On October 16, 1854, Abraham Lincoln, then a former one-term Congressman, gave a three hour speech in Peoria, Illinois in which he decried the extension of slavery into the territories. The Republican Party was barely three months old. Lincoln warned that slavery was a “monstrous injustice” based on the raw principle of “self-interest” at odds with the...

SIRAKANO, Uganda — At age 45, after giving birth to 13 children in her village of thatch roofs and bare feet, Beatrice Adongo made a discovery that startled her: birth control. "I delivered all these children because I didn't know there was another way," said Adongo, who started on a free quarterly contraceptive injection last year. Surrounded by her weary-faced brood, her 21-month-old boy clutching at her faded blue dress, she added glumly: "I fear we are already too many in this family." (snip) Under President George W. Bush, the United States withdrew from its decades-long role as a global...

Activists are expressing disappointment with President Barack Obama’s plans for the Aids treatment programme in Africa, charging that he has fallen short of the achievements of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Obama pledged to increase Pepfar spending by $1b a year, but in his first budget, called for only $165m in new funds. Gregg Gonsalves, a leading US anti-Aids campaigner, warned an audience in New York last week, “I am about to say something shocking: I miss George W Bush.” “President Obama has all but failed to fulfil his commitments to wage an aggressive battle against global Aids,” a coalition...

Republicans like to point to Ronald Reagan for inspiration. However, we have to resign ourselves to the fact that Ronald Reagan is dead. Worse, his legacy was killed off by his own party, the same Republicans who say he inspired them. The only lasting legacy to George W. Bush was the nomination of two constructionist judges and a fading response to terrorism. For eight years, we saw GW insist more on getting along than being right. Even the war in Iraq was fought on the cheap, probably out of fear of the cost of waging war, which defies the logic...

Washington (CNN) – A leading Republican strategist and one-time aide to former Vice President Cheney said Sunday that President Obama’s recently announced decision to send an additional 30, 000 troops to Afghanistan is “a reassertion of the Bush doctrine.” “The [Bush] doctrine is no safe havens [for terrorists intent on harming the United States] and we go after those that provide a harbor [for such terrorists]. That’s the doctrine,” Republican strategist Mary Matalin explained Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. Obama’s decision to surge additional troops into Afghanistan is “solid policy,’ in Matalin’s view and “a reassertion of the...

Many conservative politicians, radio hosts, and pundits have repeatedly stated their shared belief that the Republican Party “lost its way” prior to the 2008 election. In their minds, the entire conservative movement believed in limited government and low spending and was simply corrupted by absolute power. They may be surprised to learn that this is not the case at all. The fact that party leadership turned its back on limited government and low spending was entirely predictable. In fact, it should have been expected. The conservative movement is not homogeneous. Rather, the movement consists of fiscal conservatives, limited government conservatives,...

(snip) I am concerned, however, that a number of the legislative proposals being circulated would significantly reduce the capacity of the Federal Reserve to perform its core functions. Notably, some leading proposals in the Senate would strip the Fed of all its bank regulatory powers. And a House committee recently voted to repeal a 1978 provision that was intended to protect monetary policy from short-term political influence. These measures are very much out of step with the global consensus on the appropriate role of central banks, and they would seriously impair the prospects for economic and financial stability in the...

Americans believe Washington squanders half of every tax dollar. BY STEPHEN MOORE If you want to know why Americans are so fearful of a government takeover of the health-care system, take a look at the results of a new Gallup poll on government waste released Sept. 15. One question posed was: "Of every tax dollar that goes to Washington, D.C., how many cents of each dollar would you say is wasted?" Gallup found that the mean response was 50 cents. With Uncle Sam spending just shy of $4 trillion this year, that means the public believes that $2 trillion is...

Says Abuse of Detainees Helped al Qaeda Recruit Terrorists, But Opposes Investigation into "Enhanced" Interrogations. BY MICHELLE LEVI Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) said he thinks it is a "serious mistake" for the administration to focus on the past when investigating the interrogation techniques of the CIA under President Bush on "Face the Nation" Sunday. "For us now to go back, I think, would be a serious mistake. "I believe that the president was right when he said we ought to go forward and not back. I worry about the morale and effectiveness of the CIA. I worry about this thing...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Federal Reserve threatened to force the ouster of Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis if he didn't follow through with plans to buy Merrill Lynch & Co., Republicans said Wednesday after reviewing internal documents. Republicans also said there was evidence that the government tried to restrict information related to the merger from being publicly released. However, none of the documents showed that the government explicitly instructed Bank of America to hide Merrill Lynch's losses from shareholders, they said.

John McCain says he "vehemently" objected to the Bush administration's use of harsh interrogation tactics -- and suggested Nancy Pelosi should have done the same when she first learned of waterboarding in Feb. 2003. Pelosi said she was only told Bush administration officials asserted their right to conduct enhanced interrogations during her first briefing on the topic in Sept. 2002. She learned that waterboarding had been used on high-level detainees after an aide attended a briefing in Feb. 2003 -- and tacitly supported a protest letter by Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.). I asked McCain if he bought Pelosi's argument that...

The U.S. Department of Education has just released the latest findings from the “Nation’s Report Card,” the leading nationwide measurement of educational outcomes. The findings contained good news for critics of the 2001 federal education law No Child Left Behind (NCLB). But supporters of the law got good news of their own. The good news for the critics is that the Nation’s Report Card shows reading and math scores still have not substantially changed since 1971. The good news for supporters is that the Nation’s Report Card shows reading and math scores still have not substantially changed since 1971. Welcome...

Earlier This Month, The President Announced He Will Propose A Balanced Budget. On February 5, the Administration will present its five-year budget proposal. The President's budget will reduce the deficit over the next five years and produce a balanced budget by 2012. The Budget will achieve balance while addressing the Nation's most critical needs, including support for the Global War on Terror and sustaining the strength of our economy through permanent tax relief. The President's Tax Relief Has Spurred Robust Economic Growth, Millions Of Jobs, And Rising Wages. A Strong U.S. Economy Is Fueling Higher Tax Revenues. Tax revenues rose...

This week’s defection of Sen. Arlen Specter to the Democrats predictably set off another round of factional flame wars within the Republican party. The mutual finger-pointing is well-known by now. So-called “moderates” or “reformers” claim the GOP has drifted rightward, or that it is now dominated by a social conervativism toxic to the larger body politic. Social conservatives respond that such critics are unprincipled, that the 2008 presidential nominee, Maverick-y reformer John McCain, was a big loser, and so on. We have heard it all before. The debate was clarified for me by an exchange at Instapundit. Glenn Reynolds correctly...

April was a cruel month indeed for new Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. The weeks before the Swine Flu outbreak found her stumbling through reporters’ questions about a DHS threat assessment memo on “Rightwing Extremism.” That memo urged law enforcers nationwide to monitor the allegedly gathering danger from Rightist radicals, including pro-lifers, immigration opponents, and those who reject “federal authority in favor of state and local authority.” Was this a sinister conspiracy by an administration full of Chard-sipping arugula eaters determined to spy on Red-State patriots? That‘s quite unlikely: The memo was commissioned during the Bush administration, as was a...

I have bad news for you. I have it on good authority that the congressional Republican leadership, if that is not an oxymoron, plans to give Barack Obama a pass on all of his major appointments. They'll give them a bye. They'll close their eyes, cover their ears and speak no evil against some of the most dangerous nominees for high posts in an administration in American history. I'm talking about kooks and crazies like Cass Sunstein, the so-called "regulatory czar," who once proposed what can only be characterized as a "Fairness Doctrine" for the Internet including a notion for...

On Wednesday, September 24, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., phoned Reid and told him, “Harry, I am suspending my campaign to come back and help negotiate a deal.” McCain explained that he was also calling upon Obama to suspend his campaign, and together they could convene a meeting at the Bush White House to help come to a deal on a bailout for Wall Street. Reid didn't think it was such a great idea... "They were on the verge of an agreement, and any such McCain stunt would cost us valuable time," writes Reid, also noting that McCain "had no standing...

White House says Holder will decide on prosecutions; Obama opposes special commission on Bush-era policies. BY WILL DUNHAM WASHINGTON, April 26 (Reuters) - Releasing classified memos showing whether harsh Bush-era interrogation methods yielded useful information from terrorism suspects is not necessary, Republican Senator John McCain said on Sunday in a public disagreement with former Vice President Dick Cheney. After President Barack Obama released four memos this month revealing the Bush administration's legal justification for methods such as waterboarding -- a form of simulated drowning -- Cheney called for declassifying any memos showing that these techniques succeeded in producing valuable information....

WASHINGTON (AP) — A leading Democratic senator said Sunday independent investigators should determine whether Bush administration officials ought to face charges over the harsh interrogation techniques used against suspected terrorists. The White House had hoped to put the matter behind it by letting the attorney general make that call. Other liberal Democratic lawmakers appearing on the Sunday news shows joined Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., in pressuring the Obama administration to pursue investigations into the interrogations policies. But they stopped short of demanding charges against the Bush-era lawyers and other officials who devised the policies that critics have denounced as torture....

Arizona Sen. John McCain suggested today that the push to investigate and possibly prosecute Bush administration officials who crafted the legal basis for the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," such as waterboarding, may have grown from a desire to "settle old political scores." Appearing on CBS' Face The Nation Sunday, the former Republican presidential nominee, who was himself tortured as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese, said, "Are you going to prosecute people for giving bad legal advice?" He suggested that Washington should ignore calls to investigate who was behind government lawyers writing memos which gave legal cover to the...