Free Republic

Conservative authors are banding together to publish a manifesto Friday denouncing the ideas of Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump. Leading conservatives including Erick Erickson, William Kristol and Yuval Levin have written essays for a special issue of National Review to be published Friday, The New York Times reports. "Donald Trump is a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot on behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as The Donald himself," reads an editorial accompanying the essays in the issue, according to the newspaper. The issue will include essays from 22...

Earlier this summer, when Senate Democrats (with significant support from some Republicans) offered a bill that would expand federal subsidies for children’s health insurance , conservatives accused them of trying to bring government-funded health care in through the back door. Now, as if to prove the point, House Democrats this week are preparing to introduce a much more ambitious plan to fortify and expand the government’s role in health care. The New York Times reported that the plan, slated to be made public in the coming days, would not only vastly expand the scope of the State Children’s Health Insurance...

This week offers a perfect snapshot of the sorry state of the embryonic-stem-cell-research debate. On Monday, the newspapers were full of headlines about a new scientific paper showing that stem cells derived from amniotic fluid appear to have many of the same capabilities as embryonic stem cells, but without the ethical pitfalls of embryo destruction. But on Thursday, the House of Representatives plans to take up once again a bill that would overturn President Bush’s stem-cell-research-funding policy, and have the government use taxpayer money to encourage the destruction of embryos for their cells. That disconnect mirrors the larger detachment of...