Free Republic

Democratic election expectations were crumbling Monday after a leading Senate recruit declined to run and another lawmaker announced his retirement. Rep. Marion Berry’s (D-Ark.) departure and Beau Biden’s (D) decision not to pursue the upper chamber came after Democrats said they expected the opposite. And now the party, which has said it doesn’t expect lots of retirements, is facing the possibility of several more. It is the latest bad news for Democrats in a cycle with a growing number of open seats and candidates bowing out. Berry became the sixth House Democrat to retire from politics, and all of those...

Obama Says Sotomayor’s “Castrate White Males” Comment Taken Out of ContextJune 2, 2009WASHINGTON - President Obama said that comments by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor in a 2004 speech in which she called for the “castration of all white males until they no longer hold power,” have been “taken out of context” by right wing ideologues. In the speech delivered to the San Juan chapter of NOW, Sotomayor said, “I want to be perfectly clear about this next comment so that there is no mistaking that my words mean something other than what they plainly say:  the time has come to limit white male oppression by castrating every white...

Oh, yes, it was legitimate to remove the Indians for they didn’t use money, Locke’s benchmark for a commonweal united by a social contract. Nor did American Indians maximize production, which sinfully wasted what God had provided human kind. The point is not Locke’s quaint coin trick and Calvinist apologia for Indian-removal—that would have happened without his imprimatur—but rather the more historically interesting point that he ballasted parliamentary liberalism by assuming imperial control of exploitable resources of conquered overseas societies. Since Locke, Western societies have promised their discontented non-owning classes more and have looked covetously at their imperial holdings and...