Free Republic

Barack Obama ran on the promise of bringing America together, but Democrats in Congress seem more eager to use their majorities to expand and cement their power across the entire federal government. If Republicans are to avoid becoming a permanent minority, they need to stop five hyperpartisan bills likely to come to the floor over the first half of 2009. 1) Card Check: Labeled the Employee Free Choice Act, this bill would fundamentally undermine the rights of workers and business owners. The law now guarantees workers' right to a secret ballot in deciding whether to unionize. This bill (which Obama...

...If it's any consolation to Senator Clinton, she's not the only female to find that social progress is strangely accommodating of old-time sexism.... There's a lot of that about. Sex-selective abortion is a fact of life in India, where the gender ratio has declined to 1,000 boys to 900 girls nationally, and as low as 1,000 boys to 300 girls in some Punjabi cities. In China, the state-enforced "one child" policy has brought about the most gender-distorted demographic cohort in global history, the so-called guang gun — "bare branches." If you can only have one kid, parents choose to abort...

It's an article of faith on the left that the Bush administration has done nothing that has enhanced our security-rather, its alleged blunders have only contributed to the number of jihadists who want to attack us. Empirically, however, something clearly has made us safer since 2001. Successful attacks on the United States and its interests overseas have not increased, as had been widely predicted, but instead dwindled to virtually nothing.... 1988: Marine Lt.-Col. William Higgins, chief of the UN Truce Force in Lebanon, murdered by Hezbollah. Pan Am flight 103 blown up, killing 270.... There are a number of reasons...

...That is, unless we come together and fix America's myriad flaws (like poverty, which never disappears), we're all doomed. This went well past the standard graduation calls for community service and voluntarism. The senator chided those who seek life's material rewards: "Fulfilling your immediate wants and needs," he insisted, "betrays a poverty of ambition." In fact, Obama himself was betraying a poverty of understanding US history. After all, it's not too many Americans pursuing their dreams that threatens the nation's greatness- it's too few. Obama's America has two groups: those in need- and those who care for them. Missing are...

...ANTI-COP agitators and politicians are fond of claiming that the police are a threat to black lives. In fact, no single private or public agency has saved more minority lives than the NYPD. Had murders stayed at their early 1990s levels, before the NYPD got smart about policing, 13,000-plus more New Yorkers- the overwhelming majority of them black and Hispanic- would be dead today. ...[E]ven as the NYPD brought down homicide a remarkable 70 percent, it was driving down its own use of force. In 1973, there were 1.82 fatal police shootings per 1,000 New York officers; in 2006, there...

...Released quietly on the Fourth of July weekend, the report concluded that the qualities of the families from which children come to school matter much more than money as predictors of schools' effectiveness. The crucial common denominator of problems of race and class- fractured families- would have to be faced. But it wasn't. Instead, shopworn panaceas- larger teacher salaries, smaller class sizes- were pursued as colleges were reduced to offering remediation to freshmen. In 1976, for the first time in its 119-year history, the National Education Association, the teachers union, endorsed a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter- who repaid it by...

Both opponents and supporters of the war in Iraq seem reluctant to raise the issue of what's going on there now as an issue in the presidential race. Opponents, of course, can't deny that things are better than a year ago - and may fear that this could persuade voters that President Bush was right after all. After all, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid decided that the war was "lost" a year ago. And critics have sounded the tocsins about the supposedly coming Iraqi civil war for five years. (Some even suggested at times that Iraq was already in civil...

The latest number of Fortune magazine brings the news that more Fortune 500 companies — the largest American firms ranked by revenues — are now headquartered in Texas than in New York. An Associated Press dispatch datelined Dallas summed it up this way: "The Lone Star State passed New York as home to the most big companies in the latest list compiled by Fortune magazine. Texas now boasts 58 headquarters, three more than New York, the previous No. 1." The wire, not generally known as a font of supply-side economics, went on to report, "Business experts say it's a matter...

...Secular gun-free big-government Europe doesn't seem to have done anything for people's happiness. Consider by way of example the words of Keith Reade. He's not an Obama speechwriter, he's a writer for the London Daily Mirror. And the day after the 2004 Presidential election he expressed his frustration in an alarmingly Obamaesque way: "Were I a Kerry voter, though, I'd feel deep anger, not only at them returning Bush to power, but for allowing the outside world to lump us all into the same category of moronic muppets. The self-righteous, gun-totin', military-lovin', sister-marryin', abortion-hatin', gay-loathin', foreigner-despisin', non-passport ownin' red-necks, who...

...If journalists expected Benedict to take swipes at President Bush's foreign policy there, they could only be disappointed.... There's a reason that yesterday Bush declared with gusto at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington: "His Holiness believes that freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man, woman and child on Earth." ...When they stood together on the White House lawn in a majestic welcoming ceremony on Wednesday, it symbolized the growing rapprochement of American evangelical Protestantism and the Catholic Church.... It was West Texas meets Rome; plain-spoken man of faith meets intellectual of great depth; representative of America's awesome...

...Up until 1995 the Community Reinvestment Act was largely a requirement to support "community groups" in poor neighborhoods. Of course, this often meant left wing groups like ACORN, etc. But after 1995 the scope of the law was dramatically increased. Over the strenuous objections of the banks themselves and some Republicans in Congress, CRA was renewed and modified in such a way that it gave far more power to the federal government to punish banks for not lending more widely in poor neighborhoods. The classic "fair housing" laws from the Martin Luther King Jr. era of civil rights were deemed...

...The suggestion behind such talk... is that the slowdown is like the Great Depression of the 1930s. You almost expect Senators Obama and Clinton to repeat the lines from President Roosevelt’s inaugural address of 75 years ago: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” The analogy is absurd.... So far, the Dow has declined about 12% from its record high of last fall. In the Depression, it dropped more than 80%. Unemployment is about 5%. In the Depression it was 25%. Maybe 2% of mortgages are in trouble, and abandoned homes line some parts of Cleveland Heights.......

Via Corporal Seamus, I received this email: Gentlemen I am an Australian and my son is an Australian - as far as we are concerned there is no place on God's earth better than Australia , and there are no people better than Australians. That was until the past week or so. My son is in the Australian Army and he is currently on deployment in Iraq . I can not go into his duties in great depth, but shall we say that he and his fellow army buddies are on a glorified guard duty looking after the Australian Embassy....

"You got into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." -- Barack Obama "Anybody gone into...

In recent years, we've heard that climate change could be catastrophic for nature and humanity. But it's becoming increasingly evident that over the next few decades, climate-change policies could prove even more catastrophic. Food riots have erupted in Mexico, Morocco, Egypt.... Supposedly climate-friendly policies in the United States and the European Union- subsidizing the production and consumption of such renewable biofuels as ethanol and biodiesel- have diverted such crops as corn, soybeans and palm oil from food to fuel. This, in turn, has increased prices for food worldwide at a time when the highly populous and newly prosperous East and...

Last week, Russia's lower house of parliament passed a resolu tion insisting that Josef Stalin's man-made 1932-33 famine... wasn't genocide. Not even the Russians dispute that the Soviet government deliberately starved millions. But the Russian resolution indignantly states: "There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines." It notes that victims included "different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas of the country." Translation: We didn't kill millions of farmers because they were Ukrainians; we killed millions of Ukrainians because they were farmers. And that's all it takes to be acquitted of genocide. The United...

...Despite such illiberal pandering, both Clinton and Obama know that a traditional liberal position would be to defend free trade that lowers prices and increases choices for poorer American consumers- while helping foreign economies catch up with the United States. Free trade isn't the only example in which liberal Democrats advocate positions that sound parochial and blinkered. Let's take an environmental issue. It may seem environmentally correct for liberals to oppose oil drilling in a small part of Alaska. But how is this prohibition in any way liberal? Unless Americans are willing to accept a drastic reduction in their standard...

The Great Depression... hit in waves, making everyone feel helpless. First came the crash of the stock market, then the failure of the local banks, then the failure of larger ones, then joblessness, and more joblessness, and hunger. By the time the country elected Franklin Roosevelt on his New Deal platform in 1932, one in four was unemployed.... Overly efficient factories, [economists] said, were producing too many goods for a market that could not keep up. Factories therefore had to lay off workers. It all amounted to "vicious industrial Darwinism," as Nick Taylor terms it in "American-Made: The Enduring Legacy...

...But the real cause of the housing mess is a classic bubble in the housing market, the bursting of which has hammered lenders as well as borrowers. If the market had continued to rise, we never would have heard complaints about subprime loans. In fact, Washington had long encouraged these sorts of loans through the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) as a way to make marginal - largely minority - borrowers into homeowners. What's the difference between socially responsible loans extending the American dream to deserving people with poor credit histories and predatory lending? It's whether those loans work out or...

Here’s one set of wheels that is worth a trip downtown: the $2.4 million, 1001-horsepower Bugatti Veyron “Fbg par Hermès” special edition roadster. Volkswagen AG revived the formidable Bugatti brand name three years ago with the original edition Veyron. With a carbon fiber-composite body and a top speed of 250 miles per hour, it’s the fastest production car ever built. The Hermès edition, unveiled this morning at Battery Park Gardens and on display later today at the new Hermès boutique on Broad Street, costs more than twice the original version and recalls the early 20th-century friendship of racing legend Ettore...