Free Republic

Hillsdale College, a premier conservative Christian college in southern Michigan, has launched a graduate school of government in Washington, D.C. The college announced the new school on Constitution Day. "Today, the connection between liberty and learning is widely forgotten, and their mutual support has grown tenuous," Larry P. Arnn, president of Hillsdale, said in a statement. "Repairing the breach is a task both urgent and noble." The Steve and Amy Van Andel Graduate School of Government offers a Master of Arts in Government, combining the study of political thought, American founding principles, and statesmanship, the college explained. "Our students will...

The Rise of the “Amazonian” Elites In his treatise The Rise and Fall of Elites, Vilfredo Pareto proffers the thesis that “The history of man is the history of the continuous replacement of elites: as one ascends, another declines.” Unduly reductive as this contention is, Pareto attunes us to the persistent presence of elites in even the most revolutionary and populist movements. Elite, here, is not uttered with ressentiment or contempt; rather, for Pareto the term names any group that possesses consolidated influence and power. It would seem that a so-called “synodal Church” would offer an egalitarian, decentralized correction to...

The three-time Italian premier, who has made a career out of rebounding from legal woes, personal scandal, heart trouble and political setbacks, is running for the European Parliament in May elections. The 82-year-old Berlusconi announced his candidacy with his center-right Forza Italia party Thursday in Sardinia. He said he wanted to “bring my voice to a Europe that should change, a Europe that has lost profound thinking about the world.” Berlusconi had been barred from running for public office for nearly five years due to a tax fraud conviction. Citing his good conduct, a court last year ruled that he...

Archaeologists have uncovered the 250-year-old kitchen of Thomas Jefferson's enslaved chef, James Hemings, who introduced mac and cheese and meringues into US culture. Hemings became the property of Thomas Jefferson in January of 1774 when he was just nine years old. His younger sister is Sally Hemings, who had six children believed to have been fathered by Jefferson after the death of his wife Martha Jefferson. Growing up, Hemings was one of Jefferson's favorite servants and even accompanied him to Paris, France, in 1784. In France, Hemings learned the art of French cookery and upon their return to America, he...

A few days ago, in India, Barack Obama gave a three-minute speech in which he referred to himself 118 times. That speech is emblematic of his entire administration. Nearly all of his speeches have been exceedingly self-referential. All Presidents are to some degree full of themselves. Had they not been so, they never would have made it that far. But when it comes to vanity, Barack Obama takes the cake. The whole enterprise has always been about him — and no one else — which helps explain the astonishing damage he has done to the Democratic Party. The way things...

In our constitutional republic there are two criteria for determining if an action by government is moral and/or legal. Would U.S. military action against ISIS, which has become the face of evil in the world at the moment, meet that criteria? The first criteria is the "Laws of Nature and Nature's God." This requires the action committed by government to be moral, which means to be in accordance with natural law. This natural law requires military action to be morally justified given the human toll at stake. Dating all the way back to Augustine's City of God, this is what's...

RUSH: At a press conference, Leader Pelosi was asked by The Weekly Standard: 'The Catholic Church in Washington, D.C., is a self-insured institution. Should the Catholic Church in Washington, D.C., be required to pay for these morning-after pills and birth control if they find that morally objectionable?'" And Nancy Pelosi, who claims to be a devout Catholic, said, "Yes, I think that all institutions who cover, who give, health insurance should cover the full range of health insurance issues for women." So Pelosi is suggesting the Catholic Church (unlike what everybody thought) damn well should provide abortion, damn well should...

You have to hand it to Barack Obama. He has unmasked in the most thoroughgoing way the despotic propensities of the administrative entitlements state and of the Democratic Party. And now he has done something similar to the hierarchy of the American Catholic Church.

When John Lindsay died eleven years ago this month, hardly anyone apart from the obituary writers paid any attention. He had long been out of the public eye, and he is now almost entirely forgotten. But I remember, and we could all, I think, learn a little something from considering his trajectory – for it casts light on the path followed by our current President. ... In the last three years, I have had frequent occasion to think of John Lindsay – for the political machine that he patched together was the forerunner of the coalition that elected Barack Obama...

As I read Paul Rahe’s recent Ricochet post “Rioting for fun and profit,” it occurred to me that events in England had made this Malcolm’s moment — Malcolm as in Professor Joyce Lee Malcolm. Professor Malcolm is a historian and constitutional scholar specializing in British and colonial American history who teaches on the faculty of the George Mason University Law School. Professor Malcolm has devoted much of her scholarly career to the historical roots of the right to bear arms, on the one hand, and the link between the abrogation of the right to bear arms and the rise of...

On February 19, 2009, when the finance commentator Rick Santelli indulged in a rant against the newly unveiled “stimulus” bill on the CNBC cable network and called for a demonstration in Chicago modeled on the Boston Tea Party, he fired a shot heard round the country. Santelli’s diatribe was focused on the fact that Americans who had played by the rules, had saved much of what they had earned, and had paid their bills on time were being required to bail out fellow citizens who had gotten caught short in purchasing a domicile they could not afford or while speculating...

We're now around 10 days into coverage of the embassy cables. We've done a thorough job of searching for themes, people and issues, but we know we'll have missed many intriguing and important stories. What have we missed? What would you be searching for if you were sitting in front of the database? We'll do our best to look. We can't, as the agony aunts say, enter into personal correspondence or hand out information or individual cables. But we can look for material that could be reported in the Guardian, or on WikiLeaks' own site, or with the four other...

Earlier this month, I posted a piece documenting Barack Obama’s incapacity as an executive. I followed up with a brief examination of Bobby Jindal’s record as Governor of Louisiana and, then, with a short discussion of a display of vigor and dispatch on the part of Chris Christie, Governor of New Jersey – both of whom nicely illustrate what Alexander Hamilton had in mind when he wrote in The Federalist that “energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.” Today, I will take a brief look at Mitch Daniels, Governor of Indiana.

There was one world leader absent for today’s commemorations marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Surprisingly enough, it’s President Barack Obama, who found time last year to give a campaign speech there last year, which Der Spiegel summed up as “People of the World, Look at Me”. The White House has cited a packed schedule, though looking at it he had nothing much on yesterday (brief chat to reporters about healthcare – by far his biggest priority) and just blah briefings and a bill signing today until a metting this evening with Benjamin Netanyahu. This...

Professor Paul Rahe follows up on his post "Obama's gestures": Just under three weeks ago, I wrote a Power Line post drawing attention to a photograph released by the White House, showing President Obama nonchalantly leaning back in his chair with his feet on the desk, the soles of his shoes clearly visible while speaking on the phone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In that post, I noted that some in the Israeli press interpreted the release of the photograph as an expression of contempt intended for Arab consumption, inspired by the hurling of a shoe at President Bush...

Driving north out of New York the other day, I heard a caller to Mark Levin’s show discuss his excellent book Liberty and Tyranny. The word she kept using was “inevitable”: The republic felt exhausted, and there was an “inevitability” to what was happening. A quarter-millennium of liberty seemed to be about the best you could expect, and its waning was—again—“inevitable.” As she spoke, the rich farmland of Columbia County rolled past my window. To many of its residents, the caller would have sounded slightly kooky. Were any of the county’s first families suddenly to rematerialize from their centuries of...

(April 28) - Frank Beckmann talks with Paul Rahe. He holds the Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale College and has authored four books, about despotism and President Obama's friendship with dictators. He is the author of Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect

PAX AMERICANA IN THE ARAB WORLD An Academic Look at the Middle Eastern Spiderweb The following was sent to us by our Friend Professor Paul Rahe. Prof. Rahe is on the academic advisory board for our textbook project. -Declaration Foundation "This article is among the best things that I have read. It is written by a Shi'ite Muslim who hails from Lebanon." -Paul Rahe *************************************************** Foreign Affairs November/December 2001 The Sentry's Solitude By Fouad Ajami Fouad Ajami is Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the School for Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is ...

As those who follow the gyrations of the stock market are well aware, human beings have a propensity for short-term thinking. They react on impulse to that which is recent; they magnify its significance; and they forget what previous generations learned through bitter experience.To this propensity, the study of history can be an antidote. But all too often historians ransack the past in support of current prejudice.For one who wishes to escape the prison of presentmindedness and gain perspective, there is no substitute for works written regarding circumstances similar to our own at a time our prejudices and predilections...

On Saturday, I touched on some of the sources of Mitt Romney's failure on 6 November, noting his almost willful alienation of Hispanic voters and his incompetence in executing a get-out-the-vote effort, but emphasizing, above all else, his decision -- most evident in his contentless acceptance speech at the Republican convention -- to eschew an appeal to first principles, to treat Barack Obama as a decent fellow with decent principles who is merely out of his depth, and to present himself to the voters as a more competent manager. Of necessity, in that post, I ignored aspects of the situation...