Free Republic

elcome to Washington, Mr. Smith, and welcome to the Agency. I salute your determination to apply common sense in Washington, to fix what’s broken in order to serve the public interest and the common good. Weirdly enough, everybody in Washington wants to do that: Republicans, Democrats, Tea Party patriots, Barney Frank. These guys don’t agree on much, but they all sincerely want to do what’s best for the country, pretty much to a man. I know, I know: Counterintuitive, right? But you’ll see. In fact, one of the shocking things about Washington is how little cynical self-service there turns out...

<p>ON JAN. 16, 1861, delegates to a Georgia state convention gathered to consider whether to secede from the United States. Three days later, voting 208-89, the convention adopted an “Ordinance of Secession,’’ which “repealed, rescinded, and abrogated’’ Georgia’s ratification of the federal Constitution in 1788.</p>

Our greatness is simply a fact. When the likes of Marco Rubio, the new Republican senator from Florida, say this is the greatest country ever, sophisticated opinion-makers cluck and roll their eyes. What a noxious tea-party nostrum. How chauvinistic. What hubris. Yet, what other countries deserve this designation? For the sake of convenience, start at 1648, when the Peace of Westphalia ratified the modern system of nation-states. And grade on power, prosperity and goodness. Is Spain the greatest ever? It had a nice run a couple of hundred years ago based on plundering the New World of its gold and...

I used to wake up in the middle of the night, here in Istanbul, wondering how I’d pay my bills. As I’ve noted in City Journal, the demand for foreign news is shrinking. The wire services provide coverage from Turkey at low operating costs. To be honest, I also spend a lot of money on things I can’t afford, like my cleaning lady. She’s been working for me for five years and has three kids, so I can’t fire her. If I go down, she’ll go down, and so will my landlord, the guy who sells cleaning supplies to my...

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors' "toxic assets" was the only alternative to the U.S. economy's "systemic collapse." In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment...

Speaking to graduating cadets at West Point on Saturday, President Obama noted the "ultimate sacrifice" of 78 of their predecessors who gave up their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq. But he did not mention that just days before, five U.S. soldiers were killed in Kabul, bringing the toll of American dead in Afghanistan to over 1,000. As we pass this grim marker, the Obama administration's strategy in Afghanistan is foundering because it is fundamentally flawed. It lacks a clear, achievable mission, isn't in our national security interest and costs too much in treasure and lives.

With all the hollering about the Nazi nature of the Arizona law, I got to wondering about the laws of other countries that might be in close sync. I'm not well traveled, and am too lazy to do a lot of research on the subject. But I thought a central location where those who are familiar with the immigration laws of other countries could post their knowledge might be a useful tool. If you're willing to help, please post how the laws of various other countries parallel the new law in AZ, in particular with regard to requiring non-citizens to...

When I was a kid in the 1960s and we came back from a visit to my grandmother’s, my mother used to call my grandmother, let the phone ring twice, and then hang up. It was important for my grandmother to know that we’d arrived home safely, but long-distance telephone calls were too expensive to indulge in unnecessarily. When I entered Vanderbilt University in 1971, my parents had to decide whether to pay for a telephone in my dorm room. They decided to do so, but most of the thoroughly upper-middle-class students on my floor did not have phones. Phones...

Hillary Clinton, America's secretary of state, was in Canada the other day. She criticized Ottawa for not inviting Aboriginal groups to a meeting on the Arctic, and for not including the facilitation of abortion in the Canadian government's "maternal health" initiative to developing countries. ...One-worldism is often a convenient cover for ignorance: You'd be hard pressed to find a self-proclaimed "multiculturalist" who can tell you the capital of Lesotho or the principal exports of Bhutan. And so it is with liberal internationalism: The citoyen du monde is the most parochial president of modern times.

Panorama Road runs along the summit of Mount Carmel, the Table Mountain (so to speak) of Haifa. Just below the crest, the golden dome of the Bahai temple catches the eye. Below that, down the steepest of gradients, is the harbor and then the great sweep of the coast stretching towards Acre. I spent most of 1962 at Number 30, and from there the view of that bay is as varied and spectacular as any. In every way it was a place in which to experience the reality of Israel. Longmans had just published my first novel, and it sold...

In our current armed conflicts, there are two U.S. drone offensives. One is conducted by our armed forces, the other by the CIA. Every day, CIA agents and CIA contractors arm and pilot armed unmanned drones over combat zones in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including Pakistani tribal areas, to search out and kill Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. In terms of international armed conflict, those CIA agents are, unlike their military counterparts but like the fighters they target, unlawful combatants. No less than their insurgent targets, they are fighters without uniforms or insignia, directly participating in hostilities, employing armed force contrary to...

When it comes to health care, liberals and conservatives often seem to be living in two different worlds. To those on the left, America's health-care system is a heartless capitalist jungle: a place where the bottom line is king, and the working poor are exploited. President Obama, for example, has accused insurance companies of holding Americans hostage in exchange for profits, and doctors of cashing in on children's sore throats by needlessly removing their tonsils. The right, meanwhile, sees American health care as an outpost of socialism: The government distorts prices and suppresses innovation, impairing the quality and affordability of...

IN INDIA each year, it is estimated that as many as a million baby girls are aborted by parents determined not to raise a daughter. Those unborn girls are the victims of a fierce cultural preference for boys — and of modern imaging technology that makes it easy to learn the sex of a baby in the womb. Ultrasound scans started becoming widely available in India in the 1980s; since then, an estimated 10 million female babies have been destroyed during pregnancy. Sex-selection tests are illegal in India. So are sex-selective abortions. But the laws are rarely enforced and easily...

To begin: I really like Pat Buchanan. I think he’s a fine writer and a sometimes brilliant polemicist. Also: I really hate Pat Buchanan. He sometimes writes things that make me clutch my head in dismay and disbelief. Buchanan’s on again about industrial protectionism, one of his oddball hobby horses. Buchanan’s been delightfully indignant about the Wall Street bailouts, but he fails to appreciate that what he proposes for American heavy industry is precisely the same thing he opposes for the American financial industry, economically and morally: a giant wealth transfer from taxpayers and consumers to politically favored owners and...

The reason that the monstrous crime of pedophilia matters is simple: In an increasingly secular age, it is one of the few taboos about which people on both sides of the religious divide can agree. It remains a marker of right and wrong in a world where other markers have been erased. And that is also the reason that the questions surrounding the attempted extradition of Roman Polanski for a 1977 child rape briefly became the Rorschach tests of our times. Sophistication vs. prudery, the morality of the 1970s vs. the morality of today, European artistes vs. American law, Hollywood...

(This was a post on NRO Corner) Mark - Interesting point. It reminded of an email I got last week that I thought was particularly interesting and provocative. FWIW: Dear Jonah I am 34 years old, born in the U.S., raised as a (nominal) Muslim in Iran, and returned back to the U.S. in 1990 (thank Goodness). I converted to Catholicism in 2002, and became a reservist in the Navy (through the Direct Commission Officer program) in 2004. Growing up in Iran, religious instructions in schools started in 1st grade. Sixth grade is when our religious instructions began in earnest...

I am delighted by the Roman Polanski controversy. Don’t get me wrong: I am horrified and disgusted by what the acclaimed director did — and admitted to — but there is an upside. Just to recap, Polanski drugged a child put in his care for the purposes of a photo shoot. He tried to bully her into sex. She said no. He raped her anyway. He pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse but fled the country before sentencing, allegedly for fear the judge wouldn’t keep his end of the plea bargain. He spent the subsequent three decades living the life...

Fascism. It’s the ultimate political epithet, the atomic blast that ends calm and measured debate. This makes those who seek to be reasonable and persuasive understandably reluctant to use the word… and those who aren’t interested in either reason or persuasion eager to hurl it at their opponents. There is nothing surprising about the visceral emotions conjured by the mention of its name. The history of fascism is written in the blood of innocents, on a scale that challenges the limits of human imagination. Our natural repulsion from the concept of fascism, coupled with the way it has been cheapened...

A highly influential Shi'a religious leader, with whom Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad regularly consults, apparently told followers last month that coercion by means of rape, torture and drugs is acceptable against all opponents of the Islamic regime. ... Warning: The imam's question-and-answer session, partially reproduced here, contains disturbing descriptions of the sanctioned brutality. According to Iranian pro-democracy sources, the gathered crowd heard from Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi and Ahmadinejad himself regarding the issue... Mesbah-Yazdi is considered Ahmadinejad's personal spiritual guide. ...The ayatollah gave the identical answer when asked about confessions obtained through drugging the prisoner with opiates or addictive substances....

This Sunday Telegraph column generated a lot of mail a decade ago, and we've had a lot of requests for it over the years. I regard the "right" to defend one's property not merely as a right but as a moral obligation. Remove it and an awful lot of civic life crumbles in its wake, as it has in Britain: Let's take a hypothetical situation: I'm up late working on a Sunday Telegraph column at home. I hear a noise downstairs and cautiously investigate. It's a fellow I've never seen before, hunched over my stereo. What do I do? I...