Free Republic

President Obama said again Tuesday that it has been a long time since the Supreme Court struck down an economic law passed by Congress, but he mixed up the decisions and their timing. “We have not seen a court overturn a law that was passed by Congress on an economic issue, like healthcare, that I think most people would clearly consider commerce,” the president said. “A law like this has not been overturned at least since Lochner. Right? So we’re going back to the ‘30s, pre-New Deal.” Actually, that’s wrong. The case of Lochner vs. New York was decided in...

Puritanism 2.0Puritanism can grate even more once its practitioners have lost their god. If 19th-century liberals were courageously at the forefront of abolition, religiously inspired college education, and the notion of American budgetary parsimony — in accordance with their notions of religious piety and soulful duty — their descendants have substituted Lord Logos for God. Still, they are now just as zealous in condemning the sins of the supposedly less educated and poorly informed, but on the quite different premise that they are simply smarter, better educated, and more enlightened. In the past, the premise was that they were the...

I know we are in the first month of 2010 and should be inclined to look forward rather than backward. Yet I think it's only fair to look back President Obama's past year in office and revisit some of the dumber things he did. Now one must realize that the challenge here hasn't been to come up with six stupidest things Obama has done. That's the easy part. The challenge is what to leave off the list. There was his joke about the Special Olympics. There was the time he told our troops they made a good photo-op. Who could...