Free Republic

As President, Barack Obama has shown the occasional capacity to recognize good policies when he sees them. As a candidate for president, Mr. Obama continuously condemned George W. Bush for the Guantanamo Bay enemy combatant facility, for enhanced interrogation techniques, rendition, black site interrogation facilities, virtually everything else the nation was doing in the “War on Terror,” and also for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That technique played well with voters and helped him win the election. But as president he learned that things look different from inside the Oval Office than from outside on the campaign trail, and...

With the current brouhaha over the national debt and projected trillion dollar budget deficits, one side wants to cut spending to solve the problem, the other wants to raise taxes on the wealthy and on businesses. The tax raisers talk about cutting spending, and make a token effort to cut a little bit, but mostly they’re just talking. They don’t do spending cuts; they only want to raise taxes. Like many liberal solutions this one sounds good in the abstract. After all, when you want money, where better to get it than from those that have it? The notorious bank...

Did you know that the United States paid $413 billion in interest on the national debt in 2010, and that was more than we spent running a dozen federal departments and agencies (Health and Human Services, Transportation, Energy, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, Homeland Security, Agriculture, Commerce, Treasury, Labor, and the Small Business Administration) combined? The US spending addiction is so bad that since 1988 we have spent $8 trillion on interest payments alone. According to governmentgonewild.com, that’s enough to buy every taxpayer – more than 140 million of us – a really expensive Lotus sports car. The...

“The fundamental principles of economics are not hard to understand,” writes Hoover Institute fellow and economist Dr. Thomas Sowell, “but they are easy to forget, especially amid the heady rhetoric of politics and the media.” Perhaps that helps to explain why so many Americans seem to think a $14 trillion national debt and annual deficits of $1.5 trillion aren’t really a problem. Misunderstanding or misapplying sensible economic principles is easily observed in the US government, the governments of several of the United States, as well as the socialist governments of several European countries (that our leaders for some odd reason...

Democrats behaving badly: Hysteria on display over spending cuts As last week progressed the prospect of a government shutdown loomed, and some Americans had a hissy-fit. Demagogues did their level best to make it seem as if the world would end if the government was shut down, although not long ago a snowstorm in DC shut things down for a couple of days, and no one seemed to notice. The Heritage Foundation provided some insight on just what a government shutdown really means: “During the last shutdowns, only 20 percent of Washington-area federal contracts were suspended, as were visa and...

Speaking to public sector workers in Madison, Wisconsin last week liberal film maker Michael Moore made this statement: “America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash.” Michael Moore is an interesting study in contradiction. He’s made a career of trashing his country, and made a fortune doing so under the same capitalistic economic system he so bitterly criticizes and tries so hard to discredit. Question: Does a successful capitalist have any credibility at all trashing capitalism? Normally, no, but that doesn’t stop Mr. Moore, who is upset that the country’s wealth...

Judging Barack Obama’s policies on drilling for oil under the lands and waters of the United States evokes words like “incoherent,” “confused,” and “bizarre.” While Mr. Obama decries our dependence on foreign oil, his administration cripples oil producers’ efforts to harvest oil reserves from US lands and waters through regulatory excess, administrative mischief and outright bans. In the Gulf of Mexico alone, 2011 will see 130 million barrels less production than the Energy Information Administration (EIA) predicted last May, and that number will grow to 200 million barrels in 2012. Those numbers represent a third of the Gulf’s total capacity...

The United States Congress is one branch of our tripartite government, the one through which the people have the most direct input into how their government operates, through elected representatives. Congress looks after us and tends to our needs, and assures that we don’t do crazy things that will hurt us, and let’s thank our lucky stars that it does. And without the insight of our elected public servants we would not have had banks making home loans to unqualified buyers, toilets with mandated water use standards, or unwary UPS shippers going to jail for putting the wrong sticker on...

Of the interesting comments about democracy is this one attributed to Scottish historian Alexander Fraser Tytler: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse (money-benefits) from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years." Alas, those are not Mr. Tytler’s words, but...

The turmoil in Libya that halted oil shipments from the country for a period has played havoc with oil prices, pushing them above $100 a barrel for the first time since September of 2008 and causing average gasoline prices to edge closer to $4 a gallon. "Traders are concerned about potential loss of supply," Andy Lebow, oil analyst at MF Global in New York told the Wall Street Journal. "We can ill afford the loss of Libyan production." The Middle East is less stable today than in many, many years, and this latest crisis adds yet another serious concern to...

I you haven’t visited the Website of the Islamist organization Shariah 4 America, you need to do that soon, to see just what Muslims in America have in mind. To whet your appetite, read the short piece below: The Islamic Demolition of the Statue of LibertyOne of the founding principles of the Islamic constitution is to ensure that all sovereignty and supremacy belongs solely to God; the Shari’ah is a practical manifestation of this sovereignty and supremacy because it seeks to establish His command in society. The status of a nation subsequently does not depend on its number, strength or...

In Wisconsin, newly elected Governor Scott Walker wants public employees to increase their contributions for health insurance to just 13 percent and start contributing at least something to their pension to help reduce budget over-runs, and to fix it so public employees cannot gain excessive benefits from state legislators paying unions back for their election support. For trying to follow state law and balance Wisconsin’s budget, Gov. Walker has been labeled a “union buster,” but despite the accusations, the governor does not want to take away collective bargaining from public employees; he only wants to take fringe benefits out of...

Making the rounds through email a few months ago was something called the “Profound Paragraph,” attributed to the late Dr. Adrian Rogers, who was a Southern Baptist minister and president of the Southern Baptist Convention. The Profound Paragraph was part of a sermon Dr. Rogers delivered in 1984. It is comprised of five statements: “You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When...

President Barack Obama is generally considered to be a good basketball player, but he might have chosen football, instead, because in the two years as our president he has shown us that he is a world class punter. After being sworn in the American people were suffering from high unemployment and expecting government to focus on how to help businesses create jobs, he punted on that one, preferring to focus on health care reform, instead. He energetically advocated for dramatic changes to the health care delivery system and the health insurance industry, but Mr. Obama punted on that one, too,...

Over the last several decades the nations of Europe were not good role models for self-reliance and good judgment, embracing crazy ideas that led some to financial catastrophe and caused serious problems for others. Today, however, we see that at least on one subject the Europeans finally have seen the light and the error of their ways. Last Thursday French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared that multiculturalism had failed. And he is not alone; other European leaders like British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Spanish ex-premier Jose Maria Aznar also say that multicultural policies have not successfully integrated...

Just when you think it can’t get worse, it does. The Environmental Protection Agency has been the bane of business for years, imposing burdensome regulations in its over-zealous effort to clean up America’s air and water, whether they’re really that dirty or not. In our last look at this bureaucratic nightmare it was going to regulate dust, believing there was still too much particulate matter in the air, having already addressed the issue of “soot,” which is particulate matter than isn’t dust, and is actually harmful in large amounts. But dust doesn’t result from burning coal or oil, or even...

For a long, long time the State of the Union address has been anything but a mechanism for communicating useful information about the state of the nation to the Congress, but despite the overwhelmingly political atmosphere that dominates this annual spectacle, President Barack Obama was able to send an important message. The president noted in his address that America does “big things,” and who could argue with that? “America is the nation that built the transcontinental railroad, brought electricity to rural communities, constructed the Interstate Highway System,” he said. “We’re a nation that says, ‘I might not have a lot...

It ought to be obvious that you cannot continue to amass debt beyond your ability to pay it off, but our leaders in Washington have not yet figured this out. US Treasury data shows the national debt is $13.95 trillion, which has accumulated over many years of spending more than we took in. We have a statutory debt ceiling of $14.29 trillion, raised to that level less than a year ago. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner informed Congress recently that sometime between March 31 and May 16 the federal government will have spent enough to breach that boundary, and that Congress...

The year 2011 begins with control of the federal government divided. Democrats still control the White House and the Senate, albeit with a narrower 51-47 majority, but Republicans now control of the House of Representatives, 242-193. As the 112th Congress got underway outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was gracious in her final comments, if long-winded and hallucinatory in reviewing her speakership. "Deficit reduction has been a high priority for us. It is our mantra, pay-as-you-go," she declared, not mentioning that during her four-year reign the House added $1 trillion to the federal debt each year. Such irresponsible spending can’t be...

The US economy continues to languish, despite an occasional bit of good news and as much positive spin as the Obama administration can generate without sounding completely unbelievable. The latest piece of good news is that the unemployment rate dropped from 9.8 percent to 9.4 percent; good news, yes, but not as good as it seems on the surface. A four-tenths-percent drop represents a decline of about 4 percent, but clouding that marginally good news is that the decline would be smaller were it not for the number of people who have become discouraged at being unable to find a...