Free Republic

By almost any measure, Joe Biden’s first 100 days have been hugely successful. Getting millions of Americans inoculated against Covid-19 and beginning to revive the economy are central to that success. In his first 100 days, how has Biden handled the four crises he outlined? Read more Two-thirds of Americans support Biden’s $1.9tn stimulus plan, already enacted. His infrastructure and family plans, which he outlined on Wednesday night at a joint session of Congress, also have broad backing. The $6tn price tag for all this would make it the largest expansion of the federal government since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society....

A recent Washington Post article written by Post columnist and prominent “Never Trumper” Max Boot attacks the GOP for having “shifted to kooks” and become a “cult of personality” and a bastion of “irrationality,” “conspiracy mongering,” and “racism,” while calling for those on “center-right” GOP voters to join in support of President Biden. The Wednesday article, titled “The GOP can’t be saved. Center-right voters need to become Biden Republicans,” begins with a quote from Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of ten House Republicans who voted to impeach then-President Donald Trump earlier this year, stating that Trump is a “Republican usurper”...

It is infuriating that the Trump administration left so many of these things undone. I wish I could tell you that the incoming Biden administration had a genius plan for combating Covid-19, thick with ideas no one else had thought of and strategies no one else had tried. But it doesn’t. What it does have is the obvious plan for combating Covid-19, full of ideas many others have thought of and strategies it is appalling we haven’t yet tried. That it is possible for Joe Biden and his team to release a plan this straightforward is the most damning indictment...

So, we are going to build Trump’s wall. The White House has pressured the U.S. military to divert $3.6 billion away from more than 100 national security projects to start building the fence. You will not be surprised to learn that Mexico won’t pay for this; U.S. taxpayers will. We can’t afford toothbrushes or flu shots for immigrant children seeking asylum, but we can, apparently, afford to build a $60 billion wall over mountains and through deserts. By the end of 2020, just after the election, Trump says there will be 500 miles of completed wall. Thus, he will be...

The Trump administration is, it goes without saying, deeply anti-science. In fact, it’s anti-objective reality. But its control of the government remains limited; it didn’t extend far enough to prevent the release of the latest National Climate Assessment, which details current and expected future impacts of global warming on the United States. True, the report was released on Black Friday, clearly in the hope that it would get lost in the shuffle. The good news is that the ploy didn’t work. The assessment basically confirms, with a great deal of additional detail, what anyone following climate science already knew: Climate...

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-VT, is a communist. I learned this from a right-winger so extreme he can’t tell communists from socialists. Conservatives have now moved so far to the right that they label moderates as “socialists” and liberals as “communists.” Sanders doesn’t hide the fact he’s a socialist and a liberal. He’s a relic of a bygone era before the Right turned “socialist” and “liberal” into pejoratives akin to “terrorist” or “pedophile.” I once told a sensible conservative that I prefer socialists to fascists. His response — “How can you tell the difference?” —sounded clever, but it’s essentially nonsense...

....concepts that still help me make sense of the world, like the "racial nadir" — the downturn in American race relations, starting after Reconstruction, that saw the rise of lynchings and the Ku Klux Klan. In doing so, Lies My Teacher Told Me overturned one assumption embedded in the history classes I'd been sitting through all my life: that the United States is constantly ascending from greatness to greatness. "I started out the new edition with the famous two photographs of the inaugural crowds of this guy named President Obama, his first inauguration, and this guy named President Trump, his...

In 2015, in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election, Bernie Sanders infamously insisted that open borders is “a Koch Brothers proposal,” and free immigration is a “right-wing proposal, which essentially says that there is no United States.” Vox’s Ezra Klein, Bernie’s interviewer, quite correctly observed that open borders would “make the global poor richer.” As philosopher Jason Brennan writes in “Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know,” “When economists estimate the welfare losses from immigration restrictions, they tend to conclude that eliminating immigration restrictions would double world GDP.” Sanders’ assertions of concern for the global poor ring awfully hollow...

The cries of children pierce our hearts. Scientists say they're meant to. They move us to love and protect children. This response is healthy; it's human; and it keeps humanity going. As Dr. Marc Bornstein at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development told The Scientist, "the infant cry and the caregiver response, have developed together to ensure the survival of the species." Public figures, including the pope, bishops, senators of both parties, and every living spouse of a president spoke out against the Trump administration policy that separated more than 2,300 children crossing the...

Last week, I wrote a column arguing that liberals concerned about ongoing failures in the American experiment should consider socialist remedies. I knew there would be quite a bit of disagreement. And I knew that most — though, crucially, not all — of it would unfold in bad faith. What is bad faith? It’s a term coined by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre that means, in the helpful gloss of George Mason University anthropologist Roger Lancaster, when you tell a lie and you start to believe it, then forget it was a lie. In the argumentative context, engaging in bad faith...

Trayvon sparked a movement that stands up to fascism and white supremacy. We need to hold him in our memories. February 5th marks five years and 339 days since Trayvon Martin’s memorial service; it would also be his 23rd birthday. The day is necessarily somber. Nearly six years ago, Trayvon’s death at the hands of white supremacist vigilante violence indicated the beginning of an escalating attack on Black lives and demanded that this nation confront its overtly racist past and present. The urgency of #Justice4TrayvonMartin turned into a global urgency to fight for Black lives — one which persists today....

Al Franken announced his resignation on the floor of the Senate today, a development that makes abundantly clear that the Democratic and Republican parties have never been more different in modern American history than they are right at this moment. Franken’s speech started off on a surprisingly defiant note, going much farther than he had up until this point in asserting that the charges made against him are not true. But that only reinforces the point I’m making about the two parties, as I’ll explain in a moment: “Over the last few weeks, a number of women have come forward...

Hillary Clinton’s book is a pensive exercise to make sense of something Americans haven’t been able to understand either — why she lost the presidential race Book: What Happened Author: Hillary Rodham Clinton Publication: Simon & Schuster Pages: 464 Price: Rs 699 For many, in America and around the world, almost as astonishing as the fact that Donald Trump is now occupying the White House, is the fact that Hillary Clinton is not. Mrs Clinton herself does not quite understand that deplorable fact. Her memoirs are a thoughtful and candid attempt to understand what to her is still almost incomprehensible....

If only Stephen Paddock had been a Muslim … If only he had shouted “Allahu akbar” before he opened fire on all those concertgoers in Las Vegas … If only he were a member of ISIS … If only we had a picture of him posing with a Quran in one hand and his semiautomatic rifle in another … If all of that had happened, no one would be telling us not to dishonor the victims and “politicize” Paddock’s mass murder by talking about preventive remedies. No, no, no. Then we know what we’d be doing. We’d be scheduling immediate...

A historian of conservatism looks back at how he and his peers failed to anticipate the rise of the president. --- Until Nov. 8, 2016, historians of American politics shared a rough consensus about the rise of modern American conservatism. It told a respectable tale. By the end of World War II, the story goes, conservatives had become a scattered and obscure remnant, vanquished by the New Deal and the apparent reality that, as the critic Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950, liberalism was “not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.” Year Zero was 1955, when William F....

All four suspects in the Chicago torture video now face charges of aggravated battery, hate crimes and kidnapping. See Jordon, Tesfaye, Brittany and Tanishia. See the crime they committed. See how swift justice is dispensed when the perpetrators, rather than the victims, are black. I’m having such a hard time trying to compartmentalize my feelings about the videotaped torture of this precious young man. Let me tell you why.

For those of you confused over the latest fight between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel, let me make it simple: Barack Obama and John Kerry admire and want to preserve Israel as a Jewish and democratic state in the Land of Israel. I have covered this issue my entire adult life and have never met two U.S. leaders more committed to Israel as a Jewish democracy.

**SNIP** A flyover state is the huge region between the coasts. As opposed to the eastern seaboard, northern post-industrial states and Pacific Ocean states. They’re overwhelmingly Republican, stanchly conservative, regressive right wing, evangelical Christian and working class, well, the loudest, most ill-informed of them are. The term wasn’t commonly used in a political manner until recently with the emergence of the Tea Party and the election of Obama. **SNIP** Since the inception of the term silent majority almost 50 years ago, and all of its iterations since, this block of voters was hardly a majority and never silent. This group...

In 16th-century England, the age of consent was set at 10 years old in an effort to protect young girls from sexual abuse by adult men. In 1875, parliament raised the age of consent to 13; in 1885, it upped it to 16. Now, a leading public health advocate has proposed that the United Kingdom bring the age down again in light of the high proportion of British adolescents who are having sex—with one another—before they’re legally capable of granting consent. Lowering the age of consent to 15 (where it stands in Sweden) or 14 (where it’s set in Germany...

In n 2013 Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal called on the GOP to “stop being the stupid party.” A former Rhodes scholar with serious policy chops, he appeared perfectly positioned to elevate the discussion of ideas. Instead, Jindal has chosen to run in 2016 as the stupid party’s standard-bearer. As Jindal prepares to make his White House bid official on Wednesday, he is struggling to break the one percent mark in national polls. That puts him a dozen places behind the top-tier triumvirate of Walker, Bush and Rubio. It’s possible Jindal will emerge from the back of the pack at some...