Free Republic

Top Republicans on the Senate and House armed services committees went so far as to accuse President Obama of having broken the law, which requires the administration to notify Congress before any transfers from Guantanamo are carried out. “Trading five senior Taliban leaders from detention in Guantanamo Bay for Bergdahl’s release may have consequences for the rest of our forces and all Americans. Our terrorist adversaries now have a strong incentive to capture Americans. That incentive will put our forces in Afghanistan and around the world at even greater risk,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Howard P. McKeon (R-Calif.) and...

Imagine this. You send your 13-year-old daughter to her first day of high school. She goes into the school bathroom, and standing there is a 6' 2", 19-year-old male student. She screams. But instead of school officials expelling the boy from school and turning him over to the police, your daughter is arrested for committing a hate crime. Something like that will happen soon in California. On January 1, the state imposed on children Assembly Bill 1266, mandating that all bathrooms, gym showers, and sports teams in public schools be open to everyone, regardless of sex. The bill’s official title...

The Democrat playbook for 2014, we are told, intends to focus on U.S. inequality and to suggest that only redistributive taxation will solve or even alleviate it. Certainly it's possible to reduce inequality through punitive levels of taxation—at the cost of making everybody poorer. I thus thought it worthwhile to disentangle the current causes of U.S. inequality to see how we might alleviate it by raising the incomes of the poor rather than simply depressing those of the rich. With good policies, this could even provide general economic uplift rather than depression, which would happen with redistributive tax. The policy...

PARIS — It is difficult to go more than a day in France without hearing someone express the conviction that the greatest problem in the country is its ethnic minorities, that the presence of immigrants compromises the identity of France itself. This conviction is typically expressed without any acknowledgment of the country’s historical responsibility as a colonial power for the presence of former colonial subjects in metropolitan France, nor with any willingness to recognize that France will be ethnically diverse from here on out, and that it’s the responsibility of the French as much as of the immigrants to make...

(1) As long as the Muslim population remains around or under 2% in any given country, they will be for the most part regarded as a peace-loving minority, and not as a threat to other citizens. (2) At 2% to 5%, they begin to proselytize from other ethnic minorities and disaffected groups, often with major recruiting from the jails and among street gangs. (3) From 5% on, they exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to their percentage of the population. For example, they will push for the introduction of halal (clean by Islamic standards) food, thereby securing food preparation jobs...

His Grace apologises for this post, but it is as unavoidable as the decline and fall of the Coalition. What two grown men or two grown women get up behind closed doors in the privacy of their own homes is not, of course, a matter for the Conservatively-inclined. But, thanks to the Government’s intention to legislate for same-sex marriage, it will, at some point very soon, be a very public matter for the courts to consider and the media to pore over in salacious detail. His Grace is merely prematurely jumping on a future bandwagon hereby foreseen and foretold with...

Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong each killed tens of millions of people, and John Maynard Keynes was a pacifist who never fired a shot in anger. However economically, when the billions come to be totted up, it may well be the case that Keynes was the most destructive of the four. He cannot entirely be blamed for mistakes in monetary policy, which he never understood, and even his “stimulus” ideas owed much to those who came before him – for example Arthur Pigou – and after him – for example Joan Robinson. Yet the other value destroyers had...

According to Bloomberg and other sources around the web: Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. agreed to buy $3 billion in preferred shares that pay an annual 10 percent dividend and are callable after three years at a 10 percent premium. GE also said it will sell $12 billion in common stock, gathering more cash to fund operations. Somehow, this is a new program/sales pitch to build confidence in the stock by showing that the world’s savviest investor bought into the company. This is clearly designed to entice investors as the company is looking to raise money through some kind of stock...

President Obama was on the way to Alpha when a plea came for him to be, well, more alpha.... Let us take today’s lesson from Frost, who deliciously wrote in “The Lesson for Today”: I’m liberal. You, you aristocrat, Won’t know exactly what I mean by that. I mean so altruistically moral I never take my own side in a quarrel.

Apologies for the vanity post, but this question is really piquing me. I remember reading something kind of wacky that claimed that sometime in 2007, Bill and Hilary Clinton were called before a panel of the top international financeers, mainstream press lords and other political bankrollers and told in no uncertain terms that they would not be going back into the White House in 2009. Does anyone have any leads to how this story began? The naïve may well dismiss that anecdote as nothing more than a paranoid John Birch-type speculation, but while one should always be skeptical of conspiracy...

Water is wet. The sky is blue. The United States is insolvent. None of these will change anytime soon. Yet as The Great Debt Ceiling Debate continues, it is fascinating to watch both sides spin their rhetoric. President Obama, saying the U.S. must raise its debt limit or the government will default, has apparently forgotten that he and his party have spent incomprehensible amounts of money to put us at that level. Many on the right seem content to play the blame game, arguing that Obama and the Democrats are solely responsible, conveniently forgetting that George W. Bush (who inherited...

Long-time Washington commentator and columnist Tony Blankley delivered an uncharacteristically flawed analysis of America’s political prospects in a July 12 commentary for the Washington Times. He foresees a likely reversal of the United States' current statist course and a restoration of constitutionally limited government. Blankley didn’t say precisely when this about-face would occur, but if not in the coming 2012 election, then probably around 2024. That is the year, Blankley predicts, by which it will become abysmally clear to voters that Obama’s math-challenged $4 trillion deficit-reduction plan (combining “$1.3 trillion in taxes and $2.7 trillion in spending cuts”) didn’t even...

'We're living in a different world than the 1950s' WASHINGTON — For the first time, minorities make up a majority of babies in the U.S., part of a sweeping race change and a growing age divide between mostly white, older Americans and predominantly minority youths that could reshape government policies. Preliminary census estimates also show the share of African-American households headed by women — mostly single mothers — now exceeds African-American households with married couples, a sign of declining U.S. marriages overall but also of continuing challenges for black youths without involved fathers. The findings, based on the latest government...

Children don't like school because they love freedom. Someone recently referred me to a book that they thought I'd like. It's a 2009 book, aimed toward teachers of grades K through 12, titled Why Don't Students Like School? It's by a cognitive scientist named Daniel T. Willingham, and it has received rave reviews by countless people involved in the school system. Google the title and author and you'll find pages and pages of doting reviews and nobody pointing out that the book totally and utterly fails to answer the question posed by its title. Willingham's thesis is that students don't...

My apologies, first, for the hiatus in columns last week – I was moving from Vienna, VA., a suburb of Washington, D.C. to Poughkeepsie, a semi-suburb (it’s 73 miles away) of New York City. Many have clearly regarded this as an eccentric choice, and much of the motivation stems from things like hating the Washington summer more than the Poughkeepsie winter that are personal to each of us. Nevertheless, there is also a philosophical background for the move, in that I believe the rapid growth of the Washington area to be profoundly unhealthy. Washington’s unhealthiness has been highlighted during the...

The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia established the principle that nation states could run their internal affairs as they pleased – it was no longer acceptable for Catholic states to invade Protestant states because they didn’t like their religion (or vice versa). Westphalianism proved a vital organizing principle for the next 300 years, allowing significant periods of peace to appear between all the wars – and thus mankind’s greatest boon, the Industrial Revolution to become established. We now appear to be abandoning that principle – and the economic and political implications of doing so are dire. The Westphalia principle always had...

NEW YORK — A contentious plan for a mosque near the World Trade Center site will get a boost if New York City's landmarks panel votes Tuesday to allow the demolition of the building that the mosque would replace. The mosque would be part of an Islamic community center to be operated by a group called the Cordoba Initiative, which says the center will be a space for moderate Muslim voices. But opponents say building a mosque near ground zero would be an insult to the memory of those who died at the hands of Muslim extremists on Sept. 11,...

The European Commission will give Turkey a two-year deadline to eradicate torture, establish freedom of religion and assert civilian control over the military if it is to succeed at attaining European Union membership in about 10 years. In a sign of how much Turkey will have to change if it is to join the EU, the Commission this month will set Ankara a daunting checklist of almost 150 short-term tasks. The document, a draft of which has been seen by the Financial Times, indicates membership talks are likely to be tougher than expected over the next two years, but is...

An attempt will be made this week to ban Europe's most successful far-right nationalist party, Belgium's Vlaams Blok. A quarter of voters in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern half of Belgium, support its policies for independence from Belgium and repatriation of many immigrants, especially Muslim ones. It is now the biggest party in Flanders, kept out of power only by an agreement among all the mainstream parties to exclude it from any coalition government. But tomorrow Belgium's highest court is expected to rule that the party is racist. The ruling will mean that the Vlaams Blok will have to disband. But...

I wrote the following editorial for our school newspaper:Liberal orthodoxy holds that culture, religion and ethnicity don’t matter. Sure, most of the major conflicts of our time center on those three things, but the United States is different. The U.S. is a free society, built upon the idea that humans of all backgrounds and creeds can come together and build their own destinies. Yet there are limits to the notion that “diversity is our strength.” In the first place, it is not entirely clear that the U.S. always has been what the ACLU makes it out to be. As the...