Free Republic

The [CRU] e-mails show, among many other things, private admissions of doubt or scientific weakness in the global warming theory. In acknowledging that global temperatures have actually declined for the past decade, one scientist asks, "where the heck is global warming?... The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." They still can't account for it; see a new article in Der Spiegel: "Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out." I don't know where these people got their scientific education, but where I come from, if your...

The goal of the Democrats' plan for health-care reform is coming more and more out into the open: they want to eliminate health insurance. This has turned out to be the most passionate source of public opposition to the Obama health-care bill. People are terrified that they will be deprived of any choice or any control over their own health care if their only option is to depend on the government to pay their medical bills. Astoundingly, the Democrats' answer to this has been, not to reassure people that they will be allowed to keep their existing coverage—since this lie...

The breadth of President Obama's assault on capitalism is breathtaking: from seeking to regulate fine details like credit card fees, to exerting control over major banks, restructuring the auto industry from the Oval Office, seeking to nationalize the entire health care industry, and proposing a national cap on fossil fuel consumption and a thinly disguised system of energy rationing. But that kind of sweeping control over the economy is not compatible with a system of government designed to protect individual liberty. America's traditional legal system is all about laws and rights and contracts—a fine web of protections for the rights...

I have been wondering whether Barack Obama will turn out to be another Jimmy Carter or another Franklin Roosevelt. The least bad option is Carter: a leader whose policies are disastrous for the economy and for US foreign policy, but who ends up being rejected by the American people and voted out of office after only one term--as opposed to a leader like FDR, whose policies are also disastrous, but who ends up being loved by the American people nonetheless and voted back into office. After viewing Obama's speech last night, I am forced to conclude that he has the...

It looks as if we are going to have to relive all of the mistakes of the 20th century one more time--let's hope it is one last time--before we relearn the big lesson of that century: the moral and material superiority of capitalism and the disastrous consequences of socialism in all its forms. I thought we had learned that lesson well enough already, but it turns out I was wrong. Given a few decades to recover from the collapse of the Soviet Union--and given an opportunity to take advantage of the ideological confusion and muddled pragmatism of the pro-free-market right--the...

In his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush promised that he would not "wait on events while dangers gather." The United States, he vowed, "will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons." The phrase "wait on events" was an indirect reference to a French general in 1940 who was asked what he was doing to fight back against the Nazi invasion and replied that he was "awaiting events" before forming his strategy. Bush was promising that, unlike that general, America after September 11 would not wait to act until...

The new Lebanon War, like much of the War on Terrorism, has a strange character. It is a war in which everyone knows the enemy's strategy, in which it is child's play to see through all of his ruses and propaganda tricks--and yet our leaders, rather than devising their own counter-strategy, fall for every ruse and play along with the enemy's game. You hear a lot of talk these days about the "clever" Iranians and what good "chess players" they are in the contest of international diplomacy. But the Iranian strategy is, in fact, crudely transparent and obviously morally bankrupt....

The new Lebanon War, like much of the War on Terrorism, has a strange character. It is a war in which everyone knows the enemy's strategy, in which it is child's play to see through all of his ruses and propaganda tricks--and yet our leaders, rather than devising their own counter-strategy, fall for every ruse and play along with the enemy's game. You hear a lot of talk these days about the "clever" Iranians and what good "chess players" they are in the contest of international diplomacy. But the Iranian strategy is, in fact, crudely transparent and obviously morally bankrupt....

The Democrats have traditionally relied on a simple technique: appeal to the values of American individualism, while actually selling the American people the virtues of the all-powerful collective. That is the theme that emerges from the first three nights of speeches at the Democratic convention. Note the pattern of this bait-and-switch philosophy.

Those looking for "a virtually unbroken series of mistakes and miscalculations" might be tempted to remember, not the past 32 months, but the 444 days of the Iran hostage crisis, when Carter stood passive and paralyzed, his only attempt at action ending in a pathetically under-supported, doomed rescue mission. If one were to look for a moment at which America lost credibility and respect in the world, this would be it.

The result is that people act as if they can ignore the history and origins of a great American corporation, like Microsoft or Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and treat it as if it just bloomed into existence as a fluke. And thus, the effort and virtue needed to create such a business seems, to them, just as vague and substanceless as the claims that insider trading is a terrible crime. The two ideas are equally devoid of substance and thus hold equal weight in people's minds.

"As to the new civilians leaders of Iraq, if they will not support vigorous action to crush the insurgency, then we have no reason to care whether they approve or not--since, under those circumstances, they will not last long. New Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi must openly back a US assault on Fallujah, or he will have failed to show the leadership necessary to keep the new Iraqi government alive. But if we are to have any hope of winning the war in Iraq, one first step is necessary. The order must come all the way down from President Bush:...

The Fallujah standoff is being run by the politicians, and so we have entered a world where the Law of Identity has been repealed—where A is non-A and everything both is and isn't at the same time.........