Free Republic

How can we tell that the conclave made a good decision in elevating Jorge Mario Bergoglio to the papacy? Exhibit A (through at least D): liberals are annoyed. But leftists' problems with Pope Francis, well-emblazoned as they were within hours of the announcement, reveal some crucial truths about the Church that even many Catholics are loath to confront. When it came to Benedict XVI, the willfully uninformed chattering class had a field day -- rather, a field eight years -- with the thoroughly discredited "Nazi pope" meme. (We might call noted luminary and theologian Susan Sarandon the "Nazi ambassadrix" in...

Last week, Conservative pundit Ann Coulter told me and a thousand young libertarians that we libertarians are puss- -- well, she used slang for a female body part. We were in Washington, D.C., at the Students for Liberty conference, taping my TV show, and she didn't like my questions about her opposition to gay marriage and drug legalization. "We're living in a country that is 70 percent socialist," she says. "The government takes 60 percent of your money. They take care of your health care, your pensions ... who you can hire ... and you (libertarians) want to suck up...

I keep thinking, “Christie can’t possibly come back from this.” And then I think, “Wait, did we actually just nominate John McCain and the guy responsible for RomneyCare?” Never underestimate the Republican capacity to forgive, my friends: But behind the scenes, the intensity of the reaction from those in Mr. Christie’s party caught him by surprise, interviews show, requiring a rising Republican star to try to contain a tempest that left him feeling deeply misunderstood and wounded...The tensions followed Mr. Christie to the annual meeting of the Republican Governors Association in Las Vegas last week. At a gathering where he...

Every person who talks and writes about politics gets stuff wrong. I’ve gotten my fair share wrong. But what I think I got most wrong in Campaign 2012 was the damage Mitt Romney’s “47%” remark would do to him. It may seem obvious, but bear with me. Mitt Romney was talking off the cuff to a supposedly off the record group of donors and muddled several data points together, ultimately telling the tale of the 47% who won’t vote for him for any reason. He was referencing the 47% who don’t pay taxes and interwove it with a 47% of...

In a New York magazine piece this week, Benjamin Wallace-Wells eulogizes Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. The headline pretty much sums it up: “So long, Mitt: In love with America, terrified for its future, relegated to its past.” But in the final paragraph, Wallace-Wells made a good observation about Romney’s lasting legacy as the GOP nominee. “[J]ust a week after Romney seemed poised to become president,” he writes, “there is no segment of the Republican Party that could be called Romneyist.” That’s part of the reason why he lost. Many times during the campaign, I slammed Romney for his ideological promiscuity....

Missouri Republican Senate candidate Rep. Todd Akin was arrested at least eight times in the 1980s at anti-abortion protests, according to newly obtained records. That is four arrests in addition to four the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported last month based on a review of its contemporaneous coverage of protests. The four additional arrests each appear to have occurred outside a women's health clinic in Ballwin, Missouri in St. Louis County between 1985 and 1987. "Right Wing Watch," a project of People For the American Way, a nonprofit group critical of Akin's ties to what it calls radical elements of the...

The Abraham Lincoln of popular perception is a mythological figure. He has little to do with the actual 16th president.

Mitt Romney has failed to win over many of the prominent Republicans and conservatives who publicly backed Barack Obama in 2008. Charles Fried, Douglas Kmiec, and others tell John Avlon why they’re sticking with the president. Back in 2008, Barack Obama boasted the support of more than 40 prominent Republicans and conservatives, including Colin Powell, Bush press secretary Scott McClellan, and Reagan solicitor general Charles Fried. These “ObamaCons” were offered as a barometer of Obama’s crossover appeal, evidence of his ability to unite the nation. And surprisingly, Obama won 20 percent of conservatives that fall. But four years later, how...

The price of corn is at all all-time high because of extreme drought conditions in the US coupled with the hottest July temperatures since records began 117 years ago. Inane Policies US policy mandates production of ethanol for blending in gasoline. That ethanol comes mostly from corn. Diverting corn crops to inefficient ethanol production has members of the Group of 20 leading economies – including France, India and China – concerned about the US ethanol policy. In response, the UN urges US to cut ethanol production The US is poised to divert around 40 per cent of its corn into...

BALTIMORE - One of Maryland's most recognizable yet seldom-seen politicians publicly entered the same-sex marriage debate Tuesday. Former Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend made a rare public appearance to rally Catholics to uphold Maryland's same-sex marriage law at the polls. She urged Catholics, who are a major voting block, to buck church policy. "I learned from the nuns to love one another and that that was the most important commandment," she said, finding a way to reconcile her Catholic faith with her support of the idea. The daughter of civil rights stalwart Robert Kennedy said the law does gel...

RedState’s Erick Erickson tweeted this could be the moment when Mitt Romney lost the election. In an interview of Fox News, Romney Press Secretary Andrea Saul decided to invoke Romneycare as a counterpoint to the despicable narrative being pushed by Priorities USA. I’m sure you’ve seen the infamous ‘cancer ad.’ Business Insider reported on August 8th that: …In defending Romney, she [Saul] veered way off message, explaining that if the steelworker, Joe Soptic, had lived in Massachusetts, he and his wife would have been able to get health insurance under Romney’s health-care reform legislation.Here’s what she told Fox anchor Bill...

I’m getting sick of the rewriting of 2008 presidential campaign history as K Street Republicans continue to assault Sarah Palin in the fear that a similarly conservative Republican will rise to the top of the VP sweepstakes. It has been so fashionable in D.C. Republican circles to bash the Palin nomination as a mistake, ill-conceived or even disastrous, that even Dick Cheney has gotten into the act. These self-serving attempts to change history are nothing more than a smear campaign designed to influence the Romney VP pick by obscuring the truth that the choice of Sarah Palin to be the...

It appears that the GOP convention will feature a lot of Republican governors as speakers. This is in keeping with Romney's campaign which is selling the candidate as a competent, experienced leader willing to deal with the other side to solve our problems. But I will guarantee you it won't sell with a lot of the conservative base. Tampa Bay Times: _________________________ Florida Gov. Rick Scott, Sen. John McCain and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are among seven headline speakers announced today for the Republican National Convention in Tampa. The first look at featured speakers also includes South Carolina...

The first reason is easy: Barack Obama. It is shocking to think that a Marxist could ever be president of the United States. But it happened. People always ask, “How could those people have sat back while ________________ came to power. That could never happen here.” Well, it did happen here. As a nation, we sat back and let Barack Obama win in 2008, and look at what we got. Granted, John McCain was not much of an alternative. Some people might argue that the reason I don’t like Barack Obama is because he’s black. There’s no truth it. There...

[picture from "Queering the Church"] Around 200 Christians marched as a group in the Pride procession in London yesterday (7 July) to show their support for the dignity and equality of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people. Many wore T-shirts declaring "Christian and proud". Many other Christians joined other parts of the parade. A small number of Christians stood at the side of the march with placards expressing their sorrow for Christian homophobia. Later, a Christian service for Pride participants was hosted at Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church. There were also participants of other faiths at the event, including Jews...

Consider this Wall Street Journal editorial your must read of the day. It highlights why adding conservatives to the United States Senate is so important. This past week, Republican in the Senate, including Mitch McConnell’s leadership picks, sat idly by saying nothing while the Senate Democrats pushed forward the nomination of Andrew Hurwitz, who helped formulate the reasoning behind Roe v. Wade while a law clerk. Hurwitz is quite fond of that bit of his legacy. Andrew Hurwitz’s nomination could have been blocked from consideration had just one more Republican voted no. John McCain, Jon Kyl, and Lamar Alexander all...

Ever since Rick Santilli’s “rant heard ‘round the world” spawned the Tea Party rebellion, establishment Republican leaders have been loath to admit that what motivates Tea Partiers is distaste for them and how they ran Congress, as much as it is distaste for Obama and the Democrats. Or maybe Republican leaders, particularly in the House of Representatives, are just too dumb to understand what brought them back to power after the 2010 Tea Party wave election – and it wasn’t that voters thirsted for a return to the failed policies of the Bush – Hastert – Frist axis that voters...

Former Democratic congresswoman Kathy Dahlkemper, a Catholic from Erie, Pennsylvania, cast a crucial vote in favor of Obamacare in 2010. She lost her seat that November in part because of her controversial support of Obamacare. But Dahlkemper said recently that she would have never voted for the health care bill had she known that the Department of Health and Human Services would require all private insurers, including Catholic charities and hospitals, to provide free coverage of contraception, sterilization procedures, and the "week-after" pill "ella" that can induce early abortions.

It’s a very strange experience to have your friends think you’ve gone crazy. Some will tell you so. Others will indulgently humor you. Still others will avoid you. More than a few will demand that the authorities do something to get you off the streets. During one unpleasant moment after I was fired from the think tank where I’d worked for the previous seven years, I tried to reassure my wife with an old cliché: “The great thing about an experience like this is that you learn who your friends really are.” She answered, “I was happier when I didn’t...

Fellow Conservatives: Despite bipartisan promises to cut spending after the 2010 elections, Washington politicians are still voting to make the government even bigger and more expensive than ever. Don't believe me? Even though the federal government is nearly $15 trillion in debt, it's spending at record-high levels. Federal spending has gone up 5 percent in the first nine months of this year alone. Just two weeks ago, Democrats and Republicans in the Senate passed three new spending bills to increase 2012 funding above 2011 funding levels. The bills will increase spending for the Department of Agriculture by $6.4 billion; for...