Free Republic

@nickgillespie skewers the latest #CovidReliefBill and how upper-middle-class giveaways like this harken back to Bush's Medicare Part D expansion. We should NOT be subsidizing people who are completely capable of covering these expenses on their own. Video...

Though unapologetically progressive, the 53-year-old former lawyer never shrinks from fighting with the left. A week before the 2020 election, he quit The Intercept, the online news organization he co-founded in 2014, because, by his own account, it refused to run a story unless he "remove[d] all sections critical of" Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Denouncing what he called "the pathologies, illiberalism, and repressive mentality" that led him to be "censored" by his own media outlet, Greenwald railed that "these are the viruses that have contaminated virtually every mainstream center-left political organization, academic institution, and newsroom."

Matt Ridley is one of the best-selling—and best-regarded—science writers on the planet. He wrote recently that in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, "We are about to find out how robust civilisation is" and "the hardships ahead will be like nothing we have ever known." Given that Ridley's best-known book is called The Rational Optimist, this is bracing stuff. Ridley's next book, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, will be published in May. Nick Gillespie spoke with him from his home in northern England. They discussed why the coronavirus caught him by surprise, when he thinks the...

"The cases of misreported or erroneously reported major news stories begin to make you wonder, "Are the news media just out there to get Trump," says W. Joseph Campbell, communications professor at American University and the author of Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism. "The relationship with the president is very tense and is very strained and very stretched, and probably more stretched than strained than it has been in the recent past." Campbell also runs Media Myth Alert, a blog that tracks the recycling of fake news stories in the mainstream media. In...

Behind the Headlines by Justin RaimondoAntiwar.com April 8, 2002 WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA POSTREL?Post-9/11: Who speaks for libertarianism – the Old Right or the Neocon Clones? A note from the author: I apologize, in advance, for the sheer length of this column, but since it addresses the sell-out of basic libertarian principles by people and institutions who purport to speak in its name, I thought it important to address these questions thoroughly, with extensive quotations from those I name. Too bad, in attacking Antiwar.com, these pathetic losers didn't do the same – but then what can one expect from craven...

Mother Jones does love found footage, doesn't it? The progressive mag's airing of Mitt Romney's "47 percent" comments at a fundraiser definitely hurt the former Massachusetts governor in his attempt to boot President Obama in 2012. Now Mojo is back with the vid above, which the mag must hope will discombobulate Republicans and help put the brakes on a libertarian-leaning senator whose anti-war and anti-NSA stances draw long looks from disaffected liberals and lefties."Rand Paul: Jimmy Carter was better on the budget than Ronald Reagan" is how the vid begins. It shows the Kentucky senator in a variety of settings...

Ramesh and Reason’s Nick Gillespie have been going back and forth over Rand Paul’s claim (from a number of years ago) that Jimmy Carter was a more fiscally conservative president than Ronald Reagan. Mother Jones collected a series of appearances over the years in which the Kentuckian argues that Reagan’s budget performance, compared with Carter’s, is evidence Republicans don’t really mean it when they claim the mantle of fiscal conservatism. Gillespie argues that Reagan’s deficits means he wasn’t a fiscal conservative, while Ramesh argues (and Nick seems to agree to some extent) that probably a better measure is rate of increases in spending...

So last week, Mozilla, the mission-based makers of lagging web browser Firefox, fired its newly appointed CEO Brendan Eich after the dating site OK Cupid publicized Eich's donation to Prop. 8, a California ballot initiative that barred same-sex marriage in the Golden State.As I wrote here and for Time: Now that we’re well past a subsistence economy, we live in a world of largely symbolic exchange, where we don’t simply choose something because we’re hungry or naked but because we want to make a statement about what sort of person we are, what sort of taste we possess, and what...

Among the most hilarious things uttered by Rachel Maddow came when she appeared on "Real Time with Bill Maher" last June. Maddow was a guest along with Reason.com editor Nick Gillespie, publisher Mort Zuckerman and actor Mark Ruffalo. When Gillespie and Maher tried to pin Maddow down on whether she supported the health care law signed by then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in 2006, the template for Obamacare four years later, Maddow got testy. (video, audio clips after page break)Maddow plays dumb on sex-selective abortion ban in North Dakota "Leave me alone about Romneycare, all of you!" Maddow whined. "Listen, my...

As we all look forward to more sputtering news conference antics from Sen. Larry Craig, here's hoping that the Idaho politician will eventually draw on traditional Republican principles and stand up for his right to engage in consensual sex in toilet stalls with men. Craig, a critic of the Patriot Act who weakened some of its worst provisions during last year's renewal vote, clearly understands the need to keep the government from snooping willy-nilly on its citizens. At first flush, the news that the 62-year-old senior senator from the Gem State pleaded guilty Aug. 8 to misdemeanor charges of disorderly...

A dozen years ago on October 15, Clarence Thomas' nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court barely passed senatorial muster, sadly ending the most priapic, innuendo-ridden television series this side of Three's Company and Full House. That incredibly heated "high-tech lynching," to use Thomas' evocative, hyperbolic term for the proceedings, did more than momentarily pump some blood into the flaccid career of Long Dong Silver, tempt Coca-Cola to introduce a pubic-hair flavored version of soda pop, and paradoxically usher in the so-called Year of the Woman and what history will surely remember as the Decade of the Penis. The Thomas hearings...