Free Republic

The “Road to Damascus” has long served as a term signifying discovery and conversion, a reframing of one’s attitude toward life. It may be gradual, or it may be instantaneous, just as one may spend a long time traveling a road, hundreds of miles even, or one may just turn a corner onto a new road, and be immediately overwhelmed. Known as the “City of Jasmine,” Damascus is the capital of Syria, and has therefore been identified as one of America’s key enemies for many years. Bashir Assad, like his father before him, has supported terrorist organizations – Hezbollah in...

Too many government school districts begin the year with the threat of teachers’ strikes looming around the corner. Children wonder if they’ll start on time, parents wonder if they’ll need to arrange alternate child care options for a day, a week, even a month. And still such schools don’t lose customers, because it’s “free” – the parents pay for it in their taxes anyway, if they even pay property taxes at all; in any case, they may as well go. So the districts that employ “teachers” who would rather march, chant and yell than do their jobs are never immediately...

On August 8, 1974, Richard M. Nixon, fearing certain conviction by the United States Senate in an impeachment trial, resigned the office of the Presidency, the only person ever to do so. There were good reasons to impeach him. He had committed the economic sin of signing and managing a leviathanate Democrat hodgepodge of wage and price controls. He had negotiated and signed an Anti-Ballistic Missile reduction treaty that basically advertised that we could not now, and never would, defend ourselves against ICBMs. He oversaw the creation of nanny-state agencies such as the EPA and OSHA. He created the well-intentioned...

The President of the United States is committed to supporting the rebels in Syria, in their effort to overthrow the vicious dictator Bashir Assad. No one on earth – not his supporters, not the authors of a dictionary, not his closest friends, would ever argue the point. He is a vicious dictator, a malevolent cancer on the map of the middle east. So the American President commits to sending American aid – guns and ammo, technology and funding – to support the rebels trying to pull this vicious dictator off his perch. But who are these rebels? They are loosely...

Late on a Saturday night in the big city, fleeing the scene of a shooting, a criminal plows into an intersection, the police in hot pursuit. The suspect totals an otherwise uninvolved car, in which a mother is picking up her daughter from work. The innocent mother is killed. By morning, there is an uproar, as activists and pundits rise up to blame the police for the poor lady’s death. One February evening in a gated community in Florida, a neighborhood watch volunteer notices a young thug in the bushes, apparently high, likely casing potential homes to burglarize. The watchman...

Reflecting on the real-life impact of the IRS "Questionnaire-Gate" scandals… “Congratulations, Restauranteur!” You’ve just signed a lease on a great property. It’s a beautiful restaurant, just the right size, with a modern kitchen, and a terrific location with plenty of parking. You start decorating – painting, ordering window treatments, maybe updating the floor a bit, bringing in a custom bar that you found at an auction, re-upholstering the chairs, no, every other chair, to make it distinctive. You’re making it your own. You’ve had the menu in mind for a while, so you start outfitting the kitchen to meet your...

Each Memorial Day, Americans proudly, and solemnly, display our flags only at the half-staff position for the morning, not to return them to the full-staff position until noon. This we do in memory of the million-some casualties whom our nation has lost in battle since the Founding era. We hold parades in their honor; we hoist a flag and raise a toast at city parks and private barbecues. We may wear red, white and blue clothing, or flag lapel pins, or decorate our homes with bunting. But for all this show of support, who are we really honoring? Do we...

The feast of Pentecost is the celebration of one of the most important moments in church history. It commemorates the day when, after the Resurrection of the Lord, the Holy Spirit gave the Faithful a special ability to speak to crowds of different nationalities in their own languages. Now, we don’t know exactly what happened that day – whether the Apostles instantly learned other languages, or their audiences instantly learned to hear them in their heads as if they had. All we know is that the leaders of the Church were suddenly, miraculously, able to reach people, and this was...

On May 11, 1996, 105 passengers boarded a ValuJet flight in Miami, bound for Atlanta. They never made it. Shortly after takeoff, a small explosion in the airtight cargo hold developed into a fire, which should have burned out quickly, but didn’t. The 27-year-old plane’s crew of five, and all 105 passengers, were killed as the plane plummeted into the Everglades. Many chalked this up to the dangers of plane travel and the poor maintenance record of ValuJet, which, as a budget carrier, certainly gave plausible grounds for the argument… but it wasn’t a lack of maintenance that caused this...

There aren’t many things that this nation of immigrants agrees on, but there is one: that our immigration system is broken. Not just mildly in need of correction, but terribly, destructively and counterproductively errant. Americans are horrified that there are tens of millions of noncitizens in the United States, without permission, while others are horrified that those millions aren’t granted the same full legal status that citizens enjoy. The severity of the problem is such that an effort is afoot for what its supporters call “comprehensive immigration reform,” and its supporters have the mainstream media so deep in their pocket...

Hundreds of hourly employees of fast food restaurants and clothing shops, radicalized by the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago, walked off the job last week, to protest the fact that the minimum wage isn’t a “living wage,” to encourage further unionization, and especially, to do their day’s service to the Democratic Party that keeps them in bondage. This periodic saber-rattling of the American Left – about the alleged “need” to force other people to pay employees more than they think a job is worth – masquerades as a show of solidarity with the underpaid denizens of America’s lower class. But...

The week of April 15, 2013 was a week of contrasts. Monday was practically a high holy day for the American Left, the day known as Tax Day, when personal income tax forms have their formal deadline in the United States. The Democrats planned for an exciting and successful week of passing unconstitutional programs, as gun control and immigration amnesty bills were to be the business of the day in the United States Senate. But then reality set in, and two very different kinds of terror rocked the nation. First, a pair of Chechen muslim brothers set off horrific bombs...

Ever think of what gun control has to do with crime prevention? Ever think about the political parties desires regarding crime prevention at all? Just as an intellectual exercise, let’s imagine for a moment that you weren’t happy about the level of crime in America, and you wished there was more of it. I know, sounds ridiculous, even impossible. But just for the moment, let’s consider what one might do – what policies one might further, what positions a political party might adopt – in pursuit of such a goal. FREEDOM FOR THE GUILTY You might want to start by...

NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUES DON'T END AT THE BORDER For over a decade, the British Crown had been at war with the American colonies. One could argue that April 6, 1776 was the day that the American colonies had finally had it. The sundering of the bonds between two peoples is not something that happens in a day. The relationship between Great Britain and what was to become the United States of America began as a close-knit bond. The link between these frontier territories and their mother country was tight and fond at first; Americans were proud to think of themselves...

On March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan delivered a speech that horrified the liberal establishment of the time: his call for a Strategic Defense Initiative. Ronald Reagan was not your typical politician. The only president born and raised in Illinois (yes, Lincoln, Grant, and Obama moved to Illinois as adults, but only Ronald Reagan grew up there), he came to politics with a heartland sensibility: do what makes sense, do what’s right; don’t worry about what the elites from the Ivy League or Foggy Bottom insist upon. Reagan came to party activism late in life, running for public office for...

The Second Amendment is completely misunderstood by half the country. People who would never dream of challenging the meaning of freedom of speech, or the right to be from search and seizure, assume all sorts of imaginary limitations to the right to keep and bear arms, limitations that, upon thoughtful consideration, would be detrimental to the nation’s health and safety. Others have written whole books on the subject, but for those who don’t need a whole book, just a quick clarification, here it is, part by part. "A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state,...

The 2013 spending cuts known to horror fans everywhere as “The Sequester” are not really spending cuts, because the Continuing Resolution form of government financing allows annual increases of over $85 billion per year. These adjustments of the automatic budget increases are therefore only a cut in the rate of growth, which, anywhere but the Bizarro World in which we now live, would still be called spending increases. Still, the WAY in which the money is being cut will have victims in the short term. -) There are government agencies that hired too many people because they thought they’d have...

For one brief moment on Sequester Day – March 1, 2013 A.D., a day that will live in insolvency – President Barack Obama let down his guard. In one of his rare real press conferences, he accepted questions, and soon wished he hadn’t. Asked a very softball question – whether there was anything he might have done differently, or might do differently in the future, to break the gridlock and make progress on the government’s budget – Obama snapped back “Well, Julie, give me an example of what I might do!” Simply incredible. All over the nation, people stared at...

A year into his second term, President George Washington celebrated his 63rd birthday on February 22, 1794, and received one of the best birthday presents any head of state ever received. The new minister from France, Jean Antoine Joseph Baron Fauchet presented his credentials as the new ambassador from France, replacing the troublesome Edmund-Charles Genet at last. Citizen Genet was many things. A child prodigy, fluent in six languages by age twelve, he was born at Versailles in 1763, the only son of a French civil servant. Genet served as court translator in his youth and was then sent to...

On a winter day in 2013, Barack Obama flew home to Chicago and tried to channel Jack Kemp. As the Democratic Party and the Main Stream Media do his bidding, focusing their coverage on the “gun violence” of America’s cities, Obama attempts to ride this manufactured PR wave with a new political issue as his snowboard, the establishment of Promise Zones. The idea is to take the worst neighborhoods – the cities most in need of help – and revive them with a public-private partnership of new businesses and more – much more – government assistance. The plan is to...