Free Republic

PHOENIX -- A Phoenix area Republican is hoping to parlay his family name and GOP roots into becoming the state's next governor. Don Goldwater confirmed Friday he is seeking his party's nomination to challenge Democratic incumbent Janet Napolitano. Goldwater has planned announcements Tuesday in Sun City, Phoenix and Tucson. Goldwater, the nephew of former U.S. Senator and presidential hopeful Barry Goldwater, has been active in state party politics for years. He heads the GOP committee for his legislative district and has been a delegate to the Republican National Convention. He is joining what could become a crowded field that already...

Last August, Edvard Munch’s famous masterpiece, “The Scream,” was stolen again. Armed gunmen took the painting from the Oslo Munch Museum in Norway. Saturday, the Democratic National Committee will elect former Governor Howard Dean as the Chairman of the DNC. Are these events connected? Sometimes, reality is its own parody. As the satirical website ScrappleFace.com reported this week, “Faced with the fact that former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean is the only person still seeking the chairmanship of the Democrat National Committee (DNC), the nine-member panel of elected officers announced today that it had posted the job on CareerBuilder.com, and would...

It's no accident I've hated Social Security for 40 years. That's exactly how long the federal government has been skimming money from my paycheck and putting it into its Social Security "lockbox" for my retirement. In 1964, the summer I made $547 as a stock boy in Eat 'n Park's warehouse, I heard Barry Goldwater boldly declare that Social Security should be voluntary. I dug that message at age 17 and I still do, though at 57 I know I'll never live to see it happen. In fact, I'd bet my 401(k) no one will ever live to see Social...

PRESIDENT'S ESSAY The 2004 Essay: The Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater Foreword by Edwin J. Feulner, Ph.D. Among the many analyses about the 2004 Republican National Convention, one offered by the eminent conservative columnist George F. Will caught my eye. "Barry is back," he wrote, referring to Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who won the Republican presidential nomination forty years ago but was then crushed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the general election, receiving only 38.5 percent of the popular vote and carrying just six states. Notwithstanding his resounding defeat in the fall of 1964, wrote Will,...

I have been watching with amusement as the left has been vainly struggling to describe American conservatism, in a sort of know-your-enemy exercise, in order to attack the ideology due to their monumental loss at the polls last month. The amusing thing is that none of them seem to have the first clue what American conservatism even is. They lack the first idea how different American conservatism is in comparison to the concept in other countries. They think that conservatism is some “new” phenomenon ginned up by a sly class of demagogues and liars to lead the “stupid” public by...

I am a baseball fan – especially of the Atlanta Braves - so you might expect me to decry the evils of steroid use. Well, I don’t particularly care whether or not Gary Sheffield used steroids; he is still one of the most amazing athletes to ever step onto a diamond. Maybe athletes shouldn’t use anabolic steroids; maybe baseball should be purged of steroids – but, that should be up to baseball. Congress is threatening legislation to ban steroid use in professional baseball. Okay, let me dig out my copy of the Constitution…”We the people”…….etc., etc., “Congress shall make no...

Phoenix — They continue to celebrate Barry Goldwater. An Institute, now 16 years old, gets in speakers, most of whom reflect on the achievements of their favorite son. Goldwater was an enormously accomplished man, indulgent of life’s amenities and challenged by its perversities. He attracted an extra-political following by cultivating pursuits not easily done by those more timorous than he. He inclined to do that which was risky, including national politics, and he emerged in the early 1960s as spokesman for the conservative wing of the Republican party. A question arose at the Goldwater Institute’s proceedings last week when the...

Earlier this week, fellow Homespunner Chris Berg published the text of a very funny Barry Goldwater speech the other day, promting Steve Green to call BG "The funniest, most self-deprecating bloodthirsty warmonger ever." Listen to the speech by clicking the following link

Not Nixon's War - Something Else Bruce Walker, 01/27/04 The day after the Iowa caucus, I wrote an article entitled "Is John Kerry a Good Democrat? Is John Kerry a Good Man?" It took me only one day to answer both question. In his victory speech after the Iowa triumphant, Kerry spoke of "Richard Nixon's War." That, sadly, answered every question about this particular incarnation of Leftist evil. Richard Nixon's War? Kerry served in Vietnam when Lyndon Baines Johnson was president not when Richard Nixon was president. The Vietnam War had been a big political issue, but that issue was...

South Dakota U.S. Senate Race Races of the Week: Thune vs. Daschle by John Gizzi Posted Jun 7, 2004 The last time a Senate leader of either party went down to defeat in his home state was in 1952, when Majority Leader Ernest McFarland (D-Ariz.) lost re-election in a spectacular race against a young merchant named Barry Goldwater. McFarland was perceived as too much a part of "the mess in Washington," by Arizona voters, who were willing to jettison his political clout in favor of a fresh candidate with very different ideas. Now, in what is shaping up as the...

Most of us old enough to have been reading newspapers and watching television in the mid-1980s remember when the Soviet-backed Marxist-Leninist junta “Sandinistas” were battling the anti-communist guerrilla army of “Contras” in Nicaragua. And who could forget the overblown Iran-Contra affair, the attempt to arm the Contras through a deal to swap arms for hostages with the mullahs in Iran. What might be hazy in the memory after 20 years, however, is the Keystone Kops, I-want-to-play-president role of the freshman senator from Massachusetts, John Forbes Kerry. Still humming his “Give peace a chance” mantra from Vietnam days, Kerry jumped into...

(SH) - Too bad Barry Goldwater is no longer with us to opine on the offal of the conservative political revolution. Events in Utah might not only prompt him to exit the grave but to explode right out of it and launch a counterrevolution. Goldwater led the battle for individual liberties and stood as a bulwark against government intrusion into citizens' private lives. He embodied the finest traditions of "quarantine" conservatism (my term for keeping the government out of private concerns). As such, he would probably liken the prosecution of Melissa Ann Rowland (described by her lawyer as seriously mentally...

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. -Barry Goldwater (1964 Republican Convention Acceptance Speech) If, as Oscar Wilde opined, homosexuality is "the love that dare not speak its name," then we might say that Conservatism is "the political philosophy that dare not speak the truth." Liberals are wont to bathe the masses in comforting but demonstrably false platitudes, because at the root of their political philosophy they maintain a series of fictions, like: (1) we're all essentially...

The Conscience of a Conservative - The Conservative 1960's From the perspective of the 1990s, it's the big political story of the era by Matthew Dallek The year 1960, though, brought a turning point for the conservative movement. That year Barry Goldwater published The Conscience of a Conservative. Generally dismissed in the national media, the book stands today as one of the most important political tracts in modern American history. As the historian Robert Alan Goldberg demonstrates in Barry Goldwater, his fine new biography, The Conscience of a Conservative advanced the conservative cause in several ways. Building on William F....

Revisiting a jarring television commercial from the Cold War era, a grass-roots anti-war group has remade the 1964 "Daisy" ad, warning that a war against Iraq could spark nuclear Armageddon. Like the original, the 30-second ad by the Internet-based group MoveOn.org depicts a girl plucking petals from a daisy -- along with a missile launch countdown and a nuclear mushroom cloud. The original ad was produced by President Johnson's campaign to paint his Republican rival, Barry Goldwater, as an extremist who might lead the United States to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The ad created such negative reaction...

Confronted with economic uncertainty, the congressional response is to promulgate new laws and regulations rather than cut taxes or exercise spending restraint. This is as true for the Republican-controlled House of Representatives as the Democrat Senate. When it was reported that the Bush administration was considering a tax package that would alleviate double-taxation of corporations and lower taxes on investors, some congressional Republicans were unenthusiastic. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-CA) doesn´t want to bring these proposals up for a vote. Robert Novak wrote that Thomas was opposed to the administration´s initiative, while columnist Bruce Bartlett reported...