Free Republic

The Constitution requires that the President of the United States must be a natural born citizen: Article II, section 1, pa. 5: "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States." If "natural born citizen" is a synonym for "citizen," then there is no reason for adding...

Last night in his post debate interview with Sean Hannity, Ron Paul was asked once again about the racists newsletters that were published in his name in the early 1990′s. I have heard this subject discussed multiple times and have come to a personal conclusion about his answer to questions and his responsibility for those words. However, this time in his answer, Paul cited a source with information about them that I wasn’t familiar with, a piece done in a magazine called Texas Monthly a decade ago. Here is the portion of the transcript with the relevant question and answer...

Now that Ron Paul is undeniably a front runner, he faces intense scrutiny from the mainstream media. Unlike the rest of the GOP field, Paul has an almost flawless record. With just a few exceptions over the past ~30 years, such as his previous support for the death penalty and the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military policy, Paul has never flip flopped on any of his policy positions. Since the media can’t criticize his consistent record or any extramartial affairs– he has been married to his high school sweetheart for over 50 years– they choose to hammer him about some...

In America, our protests appear leaderless, ill-defined, and uncoordinated. To mask the central planning, the protests began small in a few cities before the national rollout proceeded, a common tactic of most marketing schemes. These protests are not leaderless. And their well-defined agenda can be derived from those manipulating the leaderless mobs behind the scenes. Last July, Adbusters Media Foundation announced they were organizing a street protest to occupy Wall Street. Founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz, this Canadian firm describes itself as “a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators, and entrepreneurs who want...

Congress, then, has no role in determining who is eligible to be president. Does the federal judiciary have a role, then? The scariest remark that I have read by conservatives is that federal courts have some role in judging the qualifications of someone chosen by the Electoral College. Federal courts' jursidiction, including the Supreme Court (except for a few narrow powers of original jurisdiction), are only what Congress confers upon the courts. Beyond that, the Supreme Court could not even exist in our nation until the president and Congress are elected: when Washington was president and the first Congress was...

The Constitution requires that the President of the United States must be a natural born citizen: Article II, section 1, pa. 5: "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States." If "natural born citizen" is a synonym for "citizen," then there is no reason for adding...

Breaking News Out of Waukesha County Wisconsin -- This being reported from witnesses on the ground in Waukesha "At around 2:15pm, we were ready to open the bags for Delafield. There were three bags total. Bags 1 & 2 were fine. The numbers all matched up. When we got to bag 3, we found out that the bag # was NOT RECORDED ON THE INSPECTOR'S statement...! The Republican canvass person said we could assume that the clerk forgot to write the # down on the inspector's statement and we could proceed. Of course, this is a break in the chain...

So George Soros walks into the Cato Institute, and.... No really–George Soros walked into the Cato Institute yesterday, along with libertarian legal super-academic Richard Epstein, preeminent F.A. Hayek scholar Bruce Caldwell, and moderator Ronald Hamowy, to discuss and debate Hayek, particularly his The Constitution of Liberty, a new edition of which (edited by Hamowy) has just been brought out by the University of Chicago Press. You can watch it here: Youtube video

"I just don't trust that people are smart enough to make the right choices. Do you really think that there are enough intelligent people to have this kind of freedom?" This is a sentiment that I've heard many times from seemingly goodhearted people on the left. It's a very telling window into a very troubling belief system. Most arguments for the expansion of government power boil down to distrust -- distrust that poor people will be taken care of; distrust that businesses will run without corruption and abuse; distrust that people will take care of their own retirement, health care,...

In July of 1798, Congress passed – and President John Adams signed -“An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen.” The law authorized the creation of a government operated marine hospital service and mandated that privately employed sailors be required to purchase health care insurance. Keep in mind that the 5th Congress did not really need to struggle over the intentions of the drafters of the Constitutions in creating this Act as many of its members were the drafters of the Constitution. And when the Bill came to the desk of President John Adams for signature, I think...

“The trouble with socialism,” Margaret Thatcher once famously said, “is that sooner or later you run out of other peoples’ money. This observation is the key to understanding the wave of government bankruptcies that has already begun to break over us. The state of California was a leading indicator in the U.S., so broke that it has started issuing IOUs to its suppliers in lieu of cash. The state governments of Illinois, New York and New Jersey are in straits almost as dire. Before I checked, I thought 39 of 50 states were running deficits, but according to this visualization...

Manmade global warming, like so many other social and economic issues, has become hopelessly politicized. Each side has dug in its heels and has accused the other of acting irresponsibly and dishonestly. For the believers, the other side has become the equivalent of Holocaust deniers; and for the doubters, the other side has become a cult intent on manipulating mankind to remake the world in some sort of natural Utopian image. The divide has become so great, it seems virtually impossible to bridge the gap. However, I’m not writing for Ricochet merely to outline problems; I’m here to offer real...

YouTube video: Hide The Decline

...federal spending went from a drag on the economy to a true albatross by the 1970s. After former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker and Ronald Reagan courageously bought our currency a new lease on life, Alan Greenspan was given the helm at the central bank. Colluding with Presidents Clinton and Bush II to simulate economic growth for political gain, Greenspan, and his chosen successor Ben Bernanke, unleashed a torrent of new dollars into the banking system, where they were leveraged to finance the largest asset boom in history. We are now in the process of deleveraging from this boom. It is...

In a study sure to ruffle the feathers of the Global Warming cabal, Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT has published a paper which proves that IPCC models are overstating by 6 times, the relevance of CO2 in Earth’s Atmosphere. Dr. Lindzen has found that heat is radiated out in to space at a far higher rate than any modeling system to date can account for.

Physicists at the University of Rochester have combed through data from satellites and ocean buoys and found evidence that in the last 50 years, the net flow of heat into and out of the oceans has changed direction three times. These shifts in the balance of heat absorbed from the sun and radiated from the oceans correlate well with past anomalies that have been associated with abrupt shifts in the earth's climate, say the researchers. These anomalies include changes in normal storm intensities, unusual land temperatures, and a large drop in salmon populations along the western United States. The physicists...

My purpose today is to make just two main points: (1) To show why Nazi Germany was a socialist state, not a capitalist one. And (2) to show why socialism, understood as an economic system based on government ownership of the means of production, positively requires a totalitarian dictatorship. The identification of Nazi Germany as a socialist state was one of the many great contributions of Ludwig von Mises. When one remembers that the word "Nazi" was an abbreviation for "der Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiters Partei — in English translation: the National Socialist German Workers' Party — Mises's identification might not...

(PhysOrg.com) -- A new study challenges the traditional view that patents foster innovation, suggesting instead that they may hinder technological progress, economic activity and societal wealth. These results could have important policy implications, because many countries count on patent systems to spur new technology and promote economic growth.

Excerpt: The earth's climate really is strongly affected by the greenhouse effect, although the physics is not the same as that which makes real, glassed-in greenhouses work. Without greenhouse warming, the earth would be much too cold to sustain its current abundance of life. However, at least 90% of greenhouse warming is due to water vapor and clouds. Carbon dioxide is a bit player. There is little argument in the scientific community that a direct effect of doubling the CO2 concentration will be a small increase of the earth's temperature—on the order of one degree. Additional increments of CO2 will...

Two researchers spent months scouring through old expedition logs and reports, and reviewing 70-year-old maps and photos before making a surprising discovery. They found that the effects of the current warming and melting of Greenland 's glaciers that has alarmed the world's climate scientists occurred in the decades following an abrupt warming in the 1920s. Their evidence reinforces the belief that glaciers and other bodies of ice are exquisitely hyper-sensitive to climate change and bolsters the concern that rising temperatures will speed the demise of that island's ice fields, hastening sea level rise. The work, reported at this week's annual...