Free Republic

I logged on to this IRS portal this morning. https://www.irs.gov/coronavirus/get-my-payment After entering all my info it said you are eligible to receive the stimulus check, but we don't have your bank information! How is that possible when I get my social security via direct deposit to my bank account every month? So I entered my bank information and then the portal said we will deposit the stimulus check to that account! (which is the same account as my SS deposit account).

Any honest man, looking back on a very long life, must admit — even if only to himself — being a relic of a bygone era. Having lived long enough to have seen both "the greatest generation" that fought World War II and the gratingest generation that we see all around us today, makes being a relic of the past more of a boast than an admission. Not everything in the past was admirable. Poet W.H. Auden called the 1930s "a low dishonest decade." So were the 1960s, which launched many of the trends we are experiencing so painfully today....

Random thoughts on the passing scene: The presidential election prospects for the Democrats are so bad this year that only the Republicans can save them — as Republicans have saved them before. Will a Supreme Court without a single Protestant justice rule that an "under-representation" of any group is evidence of discrimination? Here is a trick question: What percentage of American households have incomes in the top 10 percent? Answer: 51 percent of American households are in the top 10 percent in income at some point in the course of a lifetime — usually in their older years. Those who...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: Will this November's presidential election come down to a choice between a felon and a pied piper? People who call Barack Obama a lame duck president seem not to have noticed that he is exercising more power than ever, and has turned the Republican Congress into a lame duck branch of government. The best New Year's Resolution I ever made was to stop trying to reason with unreasonable people. That may be especially valuable during an election year. With 4 of the 9 Supreme Court justices being more than 75 years old, the next...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: Some financial institutions may be considered "too big to fail," but contemporary Western society may be too frivolous to survive. The Romans had bread and circuses to keep the masses passive and unthinking. We have electronic gadgets, drugs and pornography. Like the Roman Empire, we too may decline and fall. What happened in Paris may be just the beginning. With the "global warming" zealots predicting catastrophic consequences over the next century, I wonder if anyone has studied how accurate five-day weather forecasts turn out to be. Cheap shots at the police by politicians and...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: Stupid people can cause problems, but it usually takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe. President Obama's "agreement" with Iran looks very much like "the emperor's new clothes." We are supposed to pretend that there is something there, when there is nothing there that will stop, or even slow down, Iran's development of a nuclear bomb. The endlessly repeated argument that most Americans are the descendants of immigrants ignores the fact that most Americans are NOT the descendants of ILLEGAL immigrants. Millions of immigrants from Europe had to stop at Ellis Island, and...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: When President Obama keeps talking about "violent extremists" in the abstract, you might wonder whether Presbyterians are running amok. The mainstream media seem desperate to try to find something to undermine Republican governor Scott Walker's rise in the polls. The worst they have come up with is that he didn't finish college. Neither did Bill Gates or Michael Dell. The Wright brothers didn't finish high school. Neither did Abraham Lincoln or George Washington. Have you noticed that there seem to be an ever growing number of things that we are not supposed to say...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: Who says President Obama doesn't promote bipartisanship? His complicity in Iran's moving toward nuclear bombs has alarmed some top Senate Democrats enough to get them to join Republicans in opposition to the Obama administration's potentially suicidal foreign policy. Before the current measles outbreak, measles was once almost wiped out in the United States. But an article in a medical journal more than a decade ago had many parents afraid to have their children vaccinated, for fear that the vaccine causes autism. After scientific studies refuted that claim, the medical journal repudiated the article, and...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: Now that Barack Obama is ruling by decree, he seems more like a king than a president. Maybe it is time we change the way we address him. "Your Majesty" may be a little too much, but perhaps "Your Royal Glibness" might be appropriate. It tells us a lot about academia that the president of Smith College quickly apologized for saying, "All lives matter," after being criticized by those who are pushing the slogan, "Black lives matter." If science could cross breed a jellyfish with a parrot, it could create academic administrators. Mitt Romney...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: The great boxing champion Joe Louis once said about one of his opponents, who was known for his speed: "He can run but he can't hide." In the Congressional elections this year, many Democrats are running away from Barack Obama, but they can't hide their record of voting for Obama's agenda more than 90 percent of the time. Now that the Western democracies have learned the hard way what the consequences are when you admit all sorts of people into your country — including people who hate both the principles and the people of...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: What a non-judgmental society amounts to is that common decency is optional — which means that decency is likely to become less common. The biggest issue in this fall's election is whether the Obama administration will end when Barack Obama leaves the White House or whether it will continue on, by appointing federal judges with lifetime appointments who share President Obama's contempt for the Constitution. Whether such judges will be confirmed by the Senate depends on whether the Senate continues to be controlled by Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid. Why in the world would...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: I don't know why we are spending our hard-earned money paying taxes to support a criminal justice system, when issues of guilt and innocence are being determined on television — and even punishment is being meted out by CNN's showing the home and address of the policeman accused in the Ferguson, Missouri shooting. One of the big differences between Democrats and Republicans is that we at least know what the Democrats stand for, whether we agree with it or not. But, for Republicans, we have to guess. It is amazing how many otherwise sane...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: Will the Veterans Administration scandal wake up those people who have been blithely saying that what we need is a "single payer" system for medical care? Delays in getting to see a doctor have been a common denominator in government-run medical systems in England, Canada and Australia, among other places. Class warfare rhetoric would have us resenting "the top ten percent" in income. But that would be a farce, because most of us would be resenting ourselves, since more than half of all Americans — 54 percent — are in the top ten percent...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: It is amazing how many people still fall for the argument that, if life is unfair, the answer is to turn more money and power over to politicians. Since life has always been unfair, for thousands of years and in countries around the world, where does that lead us? I am so old that I can remember when sex was private. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” applied to everybody. However fascinated the U.S. Supreme Court may be with the concept of “diversity,” every one of the 9 justices has a degree from one of the...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: It is amazing how many people still fall for the argument that, if life is unfair, the answer is to turn more money and power over to politicians. Since life has always been unfair, for thousands of years and in countries around the world, where does that lead us? I am so old that I can remember when sex was private. "Don't ask, don't tell" applied to everybody. However fascinated the U.S. Supreme Court may be with the concept of "diversity," every one of the 9 justices has a degree from one of the...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: Many people take pride in defying the conventions of society. Those conventions of society are also known as civilization. Defying them wholesale means going back to barbarism. Barbarians with electronic devices are still barbarians. After the government shutdown crisis, the one thing that Congressional Democrats and Republicans finally agreed on was to kick the can down the road a few more months, so that we can go through all this again -- and perhaps again after that. One of the best peace speeches I ever read was one delivered back in the 1930s --...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: They say that man cannot control the weather. But every time I buy photographic equipment, it rains. Who says that there is no difference between the political parties? When Democrats are criticized, they counter-attack. When Republicans are criticized, they whine that they are innocent. We all enter the world knowing nothing but, by the time we are teenagers, we know it all. Sometimes it is decades later before we know enough to realize how little we know. Nothing is called "second-hand" any more, except "second-hand smoke." Why is it not called "pre-owned" smoke? Civil...

Random thoughts from wise thinkers: "We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish." (F.A. Hayek) "Many respectable writers agree that if a man reasonably believes that he is in immediate danger of death or grievous bodily harm from his assailant he may stand his ground and that if he kills him he has not exceeded the bounds of lawful self-defense. That has been the decision of this court." (Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Brown v. United States, 1921) "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: Not since the days of slavery have there been so many people who feel entitled to what other people have produced as there are in the modern welfare state, whether in Western Europe or on this side of the Atlantic. Economist Edward Lazear has cut through all of Barack Obama's claims about "creating jobs" with one plain and inescapable fact — "there hasn't been one day during the entire Obama presidency when as many Americans were working as on the day President Bush left office." Whatever number of jobs were created during the Obama...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: Edmund Burke said, "There is no safety for honest men, but by believing all possible evil of evil men." Evil men do not always snarl. Some smile charmingly. Those are the most dangerous. If you don't think the mainstream media slants the news, keep track of how often they tell you that the Arctic ice pack is shrinking and how seldom they tell you that the Antarctic ice pack is expanding. The latter news would not fit the "global warming" scenario that so many in the media are promoting. Someone has referred to Vice...