Free Republic

In my thirty years of work in the science arena, as a government scientist, an industry consultant, and an academician, I have witnessed an increasingly adverse influence of progressivism on the practice of science. This influence has been especially visible in my specialty, environmental science (with a focus on air-pollution meteorology). From the start of the modern environmental movement with the publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson in 1962 followed by The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich in 1968, the science of the environment became overly contentious. Certainly, diversity of opinion and positions in the scientific community is desirable...

American conservative radio host Glenn Beck took aim at Israel's 'social protests' comparing organizers to "communists." In a video clip from Beck's show entitled "Radical leftists protest in Israel" posted on his website, Beck criticized the protesters' demands for guaranteed housing, raising the minimum wage, and providing daycare for children aged three months.

In the wake of the recent and raucous debt ceiling debate, The Daily Beast's Peter Beinart noted two important developments: The good news is that the Tea Party, more than Barack Obama, has now ended the neoconservative dream of an ever-expanding American empire. The bad news is that it has also ended whatever hopes liberals once entertained that roughly 100 years after Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, roughly 75 years after the New Deal and roughly 50 years after the Great Society, we were living in another great age of progressive reform. Beinart’s observations are generally-and hopefully-correct. They’re also even...

What to make of the riots that began in parts of London and have spread to Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool? Are there any root causes we can identify? First, it is apparent that far too many commentators interpret these events based entirely on pre-conceived paradigms. For socialists like Ken Livingstone (former mayor of London), the riots are the fault of the government’s spending cuts and the “social division” they have supposedly fostered. Meanwhile, the far-Right British National Party characterizes the mayhem as a repeat of the race riots that occurred in Oldham in 2001. Only this time, the primary...

Citizens, Not Victims Why aren’t voters moving to the left, toward parties favoring bigger government, during what increasingly looks like an economic depression? That’s a question I’ve asked and one that was addressed with characteristic thoughtfulness by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg in the New York Times last week. Greenberg argues that voters agree with Democrats on issues but don’t back them on policy, because they don’t trust government to carry it out fairly. I think he overstates their agreements on policies: They may favor “investment in education” until they figure out that it actually means political payoffs to teachers’ unions....

The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker caught Mitt Romney explaining how to think about economic policy when the labor market is depressed, housing has tanked, households are broke and the Fed is limited by near-zero interest rates: Romney criticized Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package, saying it did not create long-lasting jobs. He said he would have lowered tax rates, instituted fair trade policies and boosted energy independence to help create sustainable private-sector jobs. "The challenge with so-called stimulus is it tends to be throwing a little gasoline on the fire," Romney said. "It causes some heat. . . . It just doesn’t cause...

The debt ceiling compromise is the end of the liberal dream that the Obama presidency would do for the left what Ronald Reagan’s time in office did for the right. Stanley Greenberg, one of the best pollsters anywhere and a leading intellectual light of the Democratic party, has a must read in the NY Times on the mysterious inability of Democrats to turn widespread public support on individual issues into a stable governing majority. It’s perplexing. When unemployment is high, and the rich are getting richer, you would think that voters of average means would flock to progressives, who are...

Democracy is exactly what we have in America today and it’s even worse than Thomas Jefferson warned when he said - “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” It’s really much worse than Jefferson indicated… it’s what Karl Marx said it was, “the road to socialism.” Thomas Jefferson was a well-traveled and studied individual, commissioned to write our Declaration of Independence at the founding of our country and a significant player in the formation of our Constitutional Representative Republic. He was also one of...

Look, I am past exhausted talking about liberal media bias. It’s real, we all know it, and people who deny it aren’t even fooling themselves. But some things just have to be pointed out. This morning I watched the first 15 minutes of the Today Show. I don’t particularly love or even like the program, but I find it useful to see what the producers think is the big news of the day. And sometimes Chuck Todd is on, and I like him. If I sound defensive about watching the show it’s only because I am. Anyway, the first ten...

Combine class warfare, demonizing the rich, getting as many people onto the welfare rolls as possible, and pushing the economic system to collapse and you have a flawless formula for Cloward-Piven 2.0 -- and a vehicle that ensures Obama remains in power. Cloward-Piven is a much talked-about strategy proposed in the mid-1960's by two Columbia University sociology professors named Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. The Cloward-Piven approach was sometimes referred to as the "crisis strategy," which they believed were a means to "end poverty." The premise of the Cloward-Piven collective/anti-capitalist gospel decried "individual mobility and achievement," celebrated organized...

I wish I was kidding: Would Americans increase peace in family life and strengthen family bonds if they adopted more accepting attitudes about sex and what’s allowable under the family roof? I’ve interviewed 130 people, all white, middle class and not particularly religious, as part of a study of teenage sex and family life here and in the Netherlands. My look into cultural differences suggests family life might be much improved, for all, if Americans had more open ideas about teenage sex. Amy Schalet is a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, via an education at Berkeley and...

Something that few journalists will honestly do is read through Breivik's manifesto. Sure, they'll talk about the unabomber, but they won't go much further. As is being catalogued in certain places, there's a reason for that. Some of the things we've learned are as follows: Oslo Terrorist anti-Oil, pro-Environment Extremist? Oslo Terrorist – Was He a Christian Conservative? The Manifesto supports: Environmentalism One-Child Birth policies Nationalization (State Control) of Private Companies and the Manifesto criticizes: American Capitalism American Imperialism American Intervention Right-Wing Media Monopolies Weakness of Christianity But there's still more in this manifesto of his.(It's massive, over 1500 pages)...

He goes into this at about 15 minutes into the video. You need to hear these people. The text does *NOT* do it justice. This is what danger we are in. Obama's La Raza speech And I promise you, we are responding to your concerns and working every day to make sure we are enforcing flawed laws in the most humane and best possible way. Now, I know some people want me to bypass Congress and change the laws on my own. (Applause.) And believe me, right now dealing with Congress -- AUDIENCE: Yes, you can! Yes, you can! Yes,...

Marx sharply criticized those who tried to solve their problems philosophically or religiously, i.e., in thought, and advocated that they can only be solved by changing reality in practice so that the problem disappears. In other words, philosophy and religion had to be brought down to earth so that secular redemption could come through revolutionary practice, and not through thought or faith. As such, it was Marx who infamously wrote “the philosophers have only interpreted the world differently, what matters is to change it.” Due to their indifference to the material necessities of life, philosophy and religion could thus only...

But I’ve learned, by participating in over a decade of specific media struggles, that when you are in the short-term and you are fighting to win, sometimes you make tactical alliances. You don’t sacrifice your principles and embrace someone else’s lame political agenda. If you want to win public credibility and advance a progressive media agenda that actually has a broad impact, this is what you do. That is how politics works. Most progressives understand this. But there is always going to be those who say: “here is a checklist of seven-hundred points that we think reflect the ideological foundations...

...In a speech at a mega-church in the Minneapolis area back in 2006, Michele Bachmann explained her decision to pursue tax law. It wasn't her choice, exactly. God had already told her to go to law school; God had also told her to marry a fellow named Marcus Bachmann. Now Marcus told her "to go and get a post-doctorate degree in tax law." This was not a particular desire of Michele's ("Tax law? I hate taxes!"), but she was certain God was speaking through her husband. "Why should I go and do something like that?" she recalled thinking. "But the...

A standoff between public interest groups and Verizon Wireless could determine whether many consumers can use their smartphone as a modem for a laptop or tablet — or whether they’ll have to pony up for an aircard or separate wireless plan instead. Consumer advocates say Verizon has violated its license agreement to operate over a valuable chunk of public airwaves known as the C-Block. According to (soros funded)Free Press and (soros funded)Public Knowledge, Verizon has asked Google to block third-party applications on Android phones that allow “tethering,” or using a smartphone to connect to the Internet on another device such...

The chatter today has been all about Lawrence Lindsey’s WSJ column about our dire fiscal situation. Excuse me — the meaningful chatter. The meaningless chatter has been about Michele Bachmann, and whether she’s the Gaffe-O-Matic or merely gaffetastic. After watching her embarrassing campaign launch yesterday, I can’t say I much care. Honestly, it was the worst GOP presidential announcement since the last one. Bachmann and Jon Huntsman might turn out to be the Dueling Flame-outs, bookending the left and right of the party. But I digress, and we have serious business to cover. What Lindsey says about our spending problem...

The court split along conservative-liberal lines. "It is beyond dispute that the federal statutes and regulations that apply to brand-name drug manufacturers are meaningfully different than those that apply to generic drug manufacturers," said Justice Clarence Thomas. "Indeed it is the special, and different, regulation of generic drugs that allowed the generic drug market to expand, bringing drugs more quickly and cheaply to the public." In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor countered, "These divergent liability rules threaten to reduce consumer demand for generics... ... Thomas acknowledged that from the plaintiffs' perspective in the latest cases, "finding pre-emption here but not in...

I was a strong opponent of same-sex marriage. Fourteen years ago, Andrew Sullivan and I forcefully debated the issue at length online (at a time when online debate was a brand new thing). Yet I find myself strangely untroubled by New York state's vote to authorize same-sex marriage -- a vote that probably signals that most of "blue" states will follow within the next 10 years. I don't think I'm alone in my reaction either. Most conservatives have reacted with calm -- if not outright approval -- to New York's dramatic decision. Why? The short answer is that the case...