Free Republic

An Ally Imperiled: What Egyptians are demonstrating against, whether they know it or not, is socialism. What they - and we - could end up with is another Iran. Is President Obama repeating Carter's Shah betrayal? Three decades ago, Iran - after being saved from Soviet dominance by the U.S. in 1953 - traded in the flawed autocratic rule of the Shah for the bloodthirsty Islamist fanaticism of the Ayatollah Khomeini. At the time, Jimmy Carter's presidency was, in the name of "human rights," on the side of the Islamists. Does the Obama administration realize the difference between freedom-based revolutions...

Same-Sex Marriage: A federal judge decides marriage is a constitutional right and overturns California's Proposition 8 forbidding such unions. The issue is headed to a Supreme Court that Elena Kagan will be sitting on. The imperial judiciary has struck again, with Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker striking down California's Proposition 8, passed in November 2008 with 52% of the vote, on the grounds that the voter-approved law was a violation of gay couples' civil rights. Walker's ruling follows a Massachusetts federal judge's ruling last month that the state's married gay couples, also established by judicial fiat, were being wrongly...

The Internet is a large-scale version of the "Committees of Correspondence" that led to the first American Revolution — and with Washington's failings now so obvious and awful, it may lead to another. People are asking, "Is the government doing us more harm than good? Should we change what it does and the way it does it?" Pruning the power of government begins with the imperial presidency. Too many overreaching laws give the president too much discretion to make too many open-ended rules controlling too many aspects of our lives. There's no end to the harm an out-of-control president can...

Election '08: Barack Obama's economic blueprint sounds like one his communist father tried to foist on Kenya 40 years ago, with massive taxes and succor shrouded as "investments."As a Nairobi bureaucrat, Barack Hussein Obama Sr. advised the pro-Western Kenyan government there to "redistribute" income through higher taxes. He also demonized corporations and called for massive government "investment" in social programs. Writing in a 1965 scholarly paper, Obama's late father slammed the administration of then-President Jomo Kenyatta for moving the Third World country away from socialism toward capitalism. He chafed at the idea of relying on private investors — who earn...

Declassified details of plots pried from high-value al-Qaida detainees should put to rest the left's silly notion that President Bush has been hyping the threat for political gain. Detainees have confirmed that al-Qaida continues to work on operations against the U.S., a fact underscored most recently by the foiled airline plot in London. But don't tell that to war critics such as John Mueller, a political science professor at Ohio State University. He argues in the latest issue of "Foreign Affairs" that the threat from Islamic terrorists "has been massively exaggerated" and that Bush has juiced the war to grab...