Free Republic

The Biden re-election campaign should be dead in the water. Inflation is surging again, wokeness is deeply unpopular with most Americans, bills are beginning to come due for the Left’s “green” initiatives, and, most of all, Biden himself is so far gone in dementia as to be dysfunctional. How can he possibly win in November? By running on abortion. We saw it in many areas of the country in 2022. What should have been a red wave petered out, as the Democrats grabbed the lifeline that Dobbs gave them and often rode it to victory. Can it happen again in...

Because leftists cannot win in the war of ideas, they will inevitably choose violence over reasoned debate. In 2004, when I got curious about what blogs were, I started investigating blogs on both the left and the right. I quickly realized that leftists dealt with obscenity, invective, and America hatred, and that I preferred the polite, reasoned debate on the right. One of my favorite sites was Power Line, started by a cadre of four Minneapolis-based attorneys. I still check in with Power Line on a regular basis, which is how I learned that leftists firebombed the offices of the...

It is true that I have been in Washington, mostly to attend the Michael Mann v. Mark Steyn trial. I will write up my thoughts on the trial (or at least, those portions I have seen) when I have time. But something else has been distracting me: leftists firebombed my office last Saturday night. At around 2 am, they broke into the building that houses Center of the American Experiment and two other conservative organizations with which we often collaborate, along with many other businesses. The arsonists set two fires: one was in the first floor corridor between American Experiment’s...

The Biden administration is demanding that Israel take even more extraordinary measures to avoid harming “innocent civilians” as it tries to eradicate Hamas. Around the world, politicians and others express dismay at the alleged number of innocent civilians who have been killed by Israeli bombardments, even while admitting that Hamas’s casualty numbers include its own terrorists, people killed by terrorists’ awol missiles, and so on.But my complaint is more fundamental. Watching videos of Israeli captives being paraded through Gaza, and seeing “civilians” spitting on them, hitting them, joyously celebrating their capture, I have asked: where are these innocent civilians we...

The Jews are just a warm-up. Many people have made this observation, but this is a nice data point: earlier this year, Minnesota’s legislature enacted a statute that requires “Ethnic Studies” to be incorporated into every single class from kindergarten through 12th grade. Including math and biology.And Minnesota is not alone. The “Ethnic Studies” dodge started in California, but it is expanding across the country. And “Ethnic Studies” is just one arrow in the Left’s quiver. The teachers’ unions have converted our public schools into anti-American propaganda centers, and this was well underway long before “Ethnic Studies” came along.So, the...

It is hard to believe, but Germany is on its way to becoming a post-industrial country. What its economy will look like at that point is anyone’s guess, but it won’t be pretty. ... But it is all right. Who needs to make products, anyway? More broadly, the 61-year-old academic said Germany was “too reliant on car manufacturing.” Around 800,000 people work for car makers in Germany, many in highly-paid jobs. The country is home to Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, BMW and Porsche, and produces around 25pc of all passenger cars manufactured in Europe. However, the industry has been slow to...

Over the last week, we have been barraged with stories about a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio who was unable to obtain an abortion in that state and had to cross the line into Indiana to terminate her pregnancy. If you Google “10 year old abortion Ohio,” you get 33,100,000 results. The story is everywhere, internationally. But did it happen? It turns out that the story originated with an abortionist who is also a media figure, seemingly working full-time to promote abortion. And if a 9 or 10 year old was raped, it was a heinous crime. Where is the...

It seems that my friend may have been emailing Ron DeSantis: DeSantis Proposes $8 Million in Budget to Relocate Illegal Immigrants to Delaware, Martha’s Vineyard. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis set $8 million in his 2022–23 budget to transport illegal immigrants out of The Sunshine State. He proposed the spending in the Freedom First Budget to protect against harms resulting from illegal immigration. The spending may include the transportation of unauthorized aliens located within Florida to other states or the District of Columbia. “In yesterday’s budget, I put in $8 million for us to be able to transport people illegally [in...

administration has produced a clownish energy policy. It is simultaneously suppressing petroleum production in the U.S. and begging Saudi Arabia and Russia to produce more. This is idiotic, but Jennifer Granholm apparently thinks it’s funny. You might think the administration’s energy policies couldn’t possibly get worse. But now the New York Times reports: “Biden Administration Plans Wind Farms Along Nearly the Entire U.S. Coastline.” The Biden administration announced on Wednesday a plan to develop large-scale wind farms along nearly the entire coastline of the United States, the first long-term strategy from the government to produce electricity from offshore turbines. Speaking...

Wind and solar energy are both essentially obsolete technologies. There is a reason why only the very rich or the very adventurous sail across oceans: the wind is unreliable, and at best produces relatively little energy. Nevertheless, liberals have concocted fantasies whereby all of our electricity, or perhaps our entire economy, will be powered by those fickle sources. There are a number of reasons why this will never happen, but a paper published last week by Center of the American Experiment argues that land use constraints are the most basic reason why wind and solar are inexorably destined to fail....

This will be a weekly post. Count is now 218 judges confirmed. 2 Trade Court judges 161 District Court judges 53 Circuit Court judges 2 Supreme Court justices The Senate this week also confirmed a judge to the Court of Federal Claims (Article I judge, serves 15 years). President Trump is expected to appoint Amy Coney Barrett later today to fill the Supreme Court vacancy resulting from the death last week of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. A Barrett confirmation would then leave a vacancy on the 7th Circuit. Should Trump appoint a replacement and the Senate confirm, that would be...

John Charles Hinderaker, of Arizona, to be United States District Judge for the District of Arizona. Mark C. Scarsi, of California, to be United States District Judge for the Central District of California. Stanley Blumenfeld, of California, to be United States District Judge for the Central District of California.Fernando L. Aenlle-Rocha, of California, to be United States District Judge for the Central District of California. Grace Karaffa Obermann, of Virginia, to be a Judge of the United States Court of Federal Claims for a term of fifteen years.

snip The Battle of the Bulge has a special resonance for me, because my father almost died in it. He was a college student when World War II broke out. He graduated, then enlisted in the Army. He was sent to one of the big Army bases in the South for basic training. In those days, they gave every enlistee an IQ test; maybe they still do. My father’s performance on the test was good enough that he was pulled out of the ranks and sent to graduate school to become an engineer. (Drill Sergeant, with privates lined up: “Hinderaker!...

For the past several weeks a deposition transcript has been floating around implicating Ilhan Omar as a Qatari asset. Bona fide news outlets have hesitated to report on the allegations without some confirmation. Now the Jerusalem Post has stepped forward to serve up the story without confirmation. Al Arabiya English does likewise here. A spokesman for Omar has dignified the story with an outright denial that is included by the Post in its account. When Omar is unable to deal with the facts, she instructs her spokesman to avoid the question on her behalf. That is how she handled the...

The indictment of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that was announced today did not come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. Israeli politics have become less workable and less democratic over time. What we are seeing here is an attempted coup by the Israeli version of the Deep State. I wrote about Caroline Glick’s presentation on the pending charges against Netanyahu at David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend here. Caroline wrote last month at Mosaic Magazine: “The Real Threat to Israel’s Democracy Comes from the Office of Its Attorney General.” The key question—indeed, just about the only question—that has...

Elizabeth Warren Will Never Be President In 2016, I was one of a small number of pundits who predicted that Donald Trump would win the presidential election. This was not because I fully appreciated Trump’s appeal to voters; rather, because I had been saying for years that Hillary Clinton would never be president. She was an appallingly bad candidate, which her party inexplicably failed to understand.I am now ready to say the same about Elizabeth Warren: she will never be president. She, too, is a terrible candidate, incorporating most of Hillary’s flaws and none of her modest virtues. If I...

Joe Biden is being portrayed as the Democrats’ safest potential presidential nominee, despite his obvious flaws as a candidate. But one wonders how Biden’s history of swamp corruption will play if he actually faces the scrutiny of a national run. Biden’s family has gotten wealthy, like those of so many low-paid “public servants”–Tom Daschle and Harry Reid are obvious examples. How does that happen? Politico headlines: “Biden Inc. Over his decades in office, ‘Middle-Class Joe’s’ family fortunes have closely tracked his political career.” It begins:

At the time, I puzzled over why this happened. I think the most likely explanation is that in the middle of a presidential term, when pollsters ask voters whether they approve or disapprove of a president, respondents are comparing the president to a theoretical alternative. If it is easy to imagine how a president might be better, or more in accord with a voter’s own views, the respondent is likely to tell the pollster that he disapproves. This changes once the president is running against a specific opponent. Now, a voter who is asked whether he approves or disapproves of...

Pardon me for the reference to Yeats's poem "The Second Coming," but events this week reminded me of the poem and this line: "the worst are full of passionate intensity." On the one hand, we have the most effective president in my lifetime, who has, as John Hinderaker details , pulled this country out of the economic doldrums, which were the direct result of the idiotic policies of his predecessor in office: American wages unexpectedly... Unexpectedly! ...climbed in August by the most since the recession ended in 2009 and hiring rose by more than forecast, keeping the Federal Reserve on...

As Paul noted last night, Democrats (and some Republicans) turned John McCain’s funeral into an orgy of Trump-bashing. Evidently they thought it made political sense. It reminds me of another politicized funeral, 16 years ago. In the fall of 2002, Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone was running for re-election against Norm Coleman. Tim Pawlenty was running his first race for Governor. And, of course, it was the first midterm election of George W. Bush’s presidency. In the last days of the campaign, Wellstone’s campaign airplane crashed in northern Minnesota, killing Wellstone and a number of others. Former Vice-President Walter Mondale was...