Free Republic

Every day, I run into Republican friends who can't stomach a vote for Donald J. Trump but don't know what to do. Vote for Hillary Clinton, who has trouble with the truth, wants to raise taxes and opposes free trade with Asia? Vote for the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, an outlier who once ran a marijuana business and embraces isolationism? Or not vote at all, maintaining a certain purity but allowing others to decide the next president? I faced exactly these choices myself. I have voted for every Republican nominee for president since 1980, but I will not this time....

President Bush intends to name a well-known conservative commentator and journalist to lead the State Department's struggling efforts to improve the U.S.'s image abroad, replacing long-time confidante Karen Hughes, who is leaving government by the end of the year, The Associated Press has learned. Bush plans to tap James K. Glassman, now chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the Voice of America, to be the new undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, administration officials said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcement has not yet been made. The officials said the...

Just last week, the shareholders of P&O, that venerable relic of the British Empire, agreed to sell their company to a group called Dubai Ports World, for $6.8 billion. DP World won a bidding war with another company from a developing country, Temasek Holdings of Singapore. Pacific & Oriental Steam Navigation was created in the 1830s and, by 1868, had the largest steamship fleet in the world. But the days of Kipling and Maugham (who, by the way, wrote a wonderful short story called "P&O") are over. Today, four-fifths of P&O's revenues come not from ships but from ports. The...

As I write, 1,576 days have passed since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and still there has been no subsequent terrorist assault on American soil. Every day, 130 domestic and 118 foreign airlines serve the United States. Air traffic controllers handle 20 million flights a year -- without a terrorist incident. In fact, the past three years have been the safest in aviation history. The United States remains the most open nation in the world. Since 9/11, scores of millions of sealed trailer-size containers have entered U.S. ports, and 6 million legal international immigrants have joined the American population....

Next week in Geneva, delegates from 192 countries will gather for the 58th annual World Health Assembly -- a giant confab that sets policies for the World Health Organization (WHO), an arm of the United Nations. The WHO faces a severe crisis. Its efforts to fight the two worst global epidemics -- AIDS and malaria, which together killed 4 million last year -- are failing. The WHO has ballyhooed its "3 by 5" program, which set a goal of having 3 million HIV/AIDS patients in treatment by the end of 2005. Despite the modesty of the target (5 million new...

The clock is ticking. Unless Congress acts -- who knows? -- we could see a wave of suicides, patricides, matricides and rich-uncle killings in 2010. That's the year that the federal tax on estates -- also known as the "death tax," the most hated tax exacted by the U.S. Treasury -- will be repealed. If you die in 2010, you can pass along all your assets to your heirs without a penny to Uncle Sam. But the repeal recedes. If you die after 2010, only $1 million of your estate is exempt from tax, and the rest gets hit with...

“THERE IS nothing Europeans want to hear from George Bush, nothing that will change their minds,” wrote Thomas Friedman of The New York Times recently after he spent 10 days in Europe. “Mr. Bush is more widely and deeply despised than any U.S. President in history.” Well, I have just spent eight days in Europe, and I couldn’t disagree more. Sure, many Europeans still caricature and despise President Bush (just as many Blue Staters do), but European policymakers are excruciatingly interested in what he will be saying on his trip here in less than two weeks. The truth is that,...

This inauguration marks the seventh out of the past 10 in which a Republican president parades down Pennsylvania Avenue. At the Capitol, the procession's starting point, Republicans hold a 10-seat majority in the Senate and a solid grasp, for the 10th year in a row, on the House. The majority of governors, including those of the four largest states, are Republican, and the GOP controls most state legislatures. Most significantly, Americans, by a 3-to-2 margin, identify themselves as conservatives rather than liberals. Over the past quarter-century, U.S. politics has changed dramatically. Republicans, conservatives and free-market advocates have moved from the fringes to center...

Taking stock of America at Inauguration Day. The work of changing American institutions is just beginning.  This inauguration marks the seventh, out of the past ten, in which a Republican president parades down Pennsylvania Avenue.At the Capitol, the procession's starting point, Republicans hold a 10-seat majority in the Senate and a solid grasp, for the 10th year in a row, on the House. The majority of governors, including those of the four largest states, are Republican, and the GOP controls most state legislatures. Most significantly, Americans, by a three-to-two margin, identify themselves as conservatives rather than liberals.Over the past quarter-century,...

THIS inauguration marks the seventh out of the past 10 in which a Republican President parades down Pennsylvania Avenue. At the Capitol, the procession’s starting point, Republicans hold a 10-seat majority in the Senate and a solid grasp, for the 10th year in a row, on the House. The majority of governors, including those of the four largest states, are Republican, and the GOP controls most state legislatures. Most significantly, Americans, by a 3 to 2 margin, identify themselves as conservatives rather than liberals. The American left — liberalism, collectivism, statism, New Dealism (call it what you want) — remains...

Font Size: How to Save the Democratic Party By James K. Glassman  Published   11/12/2004  Last year, Georgia Sen. Zell Miller wrote a book called A National Party No More, warning fellow Democrats that they had lost touch with America and -- unless they returned to their pro-growth, strong-defense, values-oriented roots -- they were doomed to permanent minority status. The Democrats didn't listen. Instead, they ostracized Miller, who became the keynote speaker at the Republican convention in September. Miller turned out to be right. George W. Bush won a stunning victory, and Republicans tightened their grip on the House and increased...

PARIS -- At the end of one of Europe's many holiday weekends, the irony is so thick here you can layer it on with a trowel. Europeans, with a few laudable exceptions, detest what the American cowboys have done in Afghanistan and Iraq and are happy to tell you so. The irony, of course, is that 60 years ago, American troops liberated Paris, marched on to Berlin and saved Britain and the rest of Western Europe. Our interest in defeating the Nazis was the same as our interest in defeating the Taliban and Saddam Hussein: in the short term, to...

The Bush Economy By James K. Glassman Published 10/07/2004 E-Mail Bookmark Print Save TCS Iraq won't win the election for John Kerry. He has to convince voters that George W. Bush has botched the economy. That's a tall order right now, with the unemployment rate down from 6.3 percent to 5.4 percent in a year. It's back where it was when Bill Clinton was re-elected in 1996. Kerry has another problem. His debate with Bush on Friday comes the same day as a report that will almost certainly show powerful employment gains, including upward revisions from earlier this year. Still,...

Kyoto Flip-Flopper By James K. Glassman During last night's debate, Sen. John Kerry -- arguing that "you have to earn [the] respect" of other countries, "and I think we have a lot of earning back to do" -- cited the Kyoto Protocol as an example of poor U.S. policy. "You don't help yourself with other nations," he said, "when you turn away from the global warming treaty, for instance." Another flip-flop! And a whopper. What are the views of Kerry himself and the Democratic Party on that famous treaty, which sets draconian and unworkable targets for the reduction of greenhouse...

Forget the polls. The electronic market maintained by the University of Iowa's College of Business, which makes you put your money where your opinions are, was showing Sunday that George W. Bush had become a 3-2 favorite to beat John Kerry. In other words, to win a dollar if you're right on Nov. 2, you have to put up 60 cents today for a bet on Bush but just 40 cents for Kerry. That's the biggest gap, by far, since the market started offering the wager in early June. The Iowa market (check it out at www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem/markets) isn't infallible, but...

Watching John Kerry give his acceptance speech, I was reminded of Richard Nixon. Kerry not only said he would make short shrift of an annoying war - but he also appeared shifty and sweaty, jowly and sallow, bobbing and weaving in front of the camera and "racing furiously," as the Washington Post's Tom Shales put it, through his text, as though he wanted to get finished in time to get to Locke-Ober's for supper. No wonder there was barely a bounce. On the other hand, maybe I don't know what I am talking about. The headline on a Salon.com article...

The Great Divider By James K. Glassman "Is the New York Times A Liberal Newspaper?" asked a headline on Sunday. The first sentence had the answer: "Of course it is." If that sounds like a dog-bites-man story, then consider the kicker: The article appeared in The New York Times itself. Its author was Daniel Okrent, who last December became the paper "Public Editor," or ombudsman. Okrent's skillful, fact-filled piece eviscerates The Times for its coverage of "social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. If you think The Times plays it down the middle on any...

What passes these days for the artsy-intellectual set in America has gone completely bonkers over the prospect of George W. Bush winning a second term as president. Current polls show that Bush continues to run neck-and-neck with John Kerry despite a slower-than-expected economic recovery, bloody setbacks in Iraq, and cheerleading for Democrats from a press corps that admits to an unprecedented identification with the left. The proportion of national journalists calling themselves liberal, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center, has risen 50 percent since 1995. Currently, 34 percent of journalists say they are liberal, 7 percent...

EXTRA! EXTRA! The big news of the past decade in America has been largely overlooked, and you'll find it shocking. Young people have become aggressively normal. Violence, drug use and teen sex have declined. Kids are becoming more conservative politically and socially. They want to get married and have large families. And, get this, they adore their parents. The Mood of American Youth Survey found that more than 80 percent of teen-agers report no family problems - up from about 40 percent a quarter-century ago. In another poll, two-thirds of daughters said they would "give Mom an 'A.'" "In the...

We can only hope that after fence-sitters read Sen. Kerry's grand speech of 1994 -- Kerry himself could benefit from a re-reading of it -- the Senate will come to its senses. The House of Representatives is ready to pass a bill that would sharply limit an attempt by an unelected accounting board in Norwalk, Conn., to force U.S. companies to guess the costs of broad-based employee stock options and write them off as expenses when they are issued. If the Financial Accounting Standards Board gets its way and stock options are expensed, it's almost certain that many businesses, including...