Free Republic

Kansas City councilman Jermaine Reed wanted to have an “honest” discussion on race. But like Attorney General Eric Holder and former CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien, who made similar pleas before him, he did not really say more than that. Green’s call for honest talk came after three years and dozens of episodes of black mob violence at the Plaza in Kansas City. He wanted an explanation as to why police only cited black people. I could not tell if he was unhappy with the black people for frequent and large-scale episodes of mob violence – or with the police for...

Given last week's revelation that the IRS targeted conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, it's worth recalling President Obama's Ohio State University commencement address. The president decried "voices" warning "that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner." It's no longer lurking. It's here. Testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee by the outgoing acting IRS commissioner, Steve Miller, as well as numerous statements by individuals claiming they have been harassed and intimidated by IRS agents, reveal a government agency out of control, or more precisely, under the control of political hacks. It's doubtful this was a freelance operation. J....

Count me as irritable on the subject, but President Obama's imperious habit of suggesting that American diplomats work for him is offensive to democratic sensibilities. In the second presidential debate last fall, when the Benghazi matter came up, the president responded: "Well, let me ... talk about our diplomats, because they serve all around the world and do an incredible job in a very dangerous situation [sic]. And these aren't just representatives of the United States; they're my representatives. I send them there, oftentimes into harm's way. I know these folks, and I know their families. So nobody's more concerned...

No one saw the sign that said, “No White People Allowed After Dark.” Maybe because it was dark. Or maybe it did not exist. So when a white family pulled into a Baton Rouge gas station in a black neighborhood 10 p.m. Sunday night after a Mother’s Day celebration, they had no idea they were in danger. But they were. Donald Dickerson, a black man, told them so, right before the assault began that would leave the father with a broken face, the mother unconscious, and the daughter badly bruised. All because they were the wrong color in the wrong...

"Progressivism, liberalism, or whatever you want to call it has become an ideology of power. So long as liberals hold it, principles don’t matter." -- Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning “We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.” -- Ayn Rand One of the most disturbing things about...

Scandal Watch: Despite White House attempts to brush the IRS scandal aside as "irrelevant" or the work of rogue miscreants, huge questions remain about who ordered IRS agents to harass Tea Party groups, and why. Every day, in fact, raises new and more disturbing questions that congressional investigators must get answers to. Among them:

Over the weekend the New York Times carried a story on the front page about the IRS scandal. The subhead of the story proclaims: “Scrutiny went beyond conservative groups.� Want proof? “Overseen by a revolving cast of midlevel managers,� writes the Times, “stalled by miscommunication with I.R.S. lawyers and executives in Washington and confused about the rules they were enforcing, the Cincinnati specialists flagged virtually every application with Tea Party in its name. But their review went beyond conservative groups: more than 400 organizations came under scrutiny, including at least two dozen liberal-leaning ones and some that were seemingly apolitical.�...

America has the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) and the UCP (ultimate clutch players). One is mixed martial artists, and the other is quarterbacks of the NFL. They all are athletic warriors who are extremely determined to win. My favorite in the UFC is Georges St-Pierre. My favorite in the UCP is Tim Tebow. I know what you are thinking: Tebow has been in the NFL for only three years. True, but Tim's 2011 season with the Denver Broncos was one of the most remarkable in football history. What sportsman ever could forget how that amazing second-year QB came back from...

President Obama believes in the public sector. He thinks it should be made ever more expansive and entrusted with ever more complicated tasks. Its unions should be powerful. It should be hailed by all the great and good, and attract the nation’s best and brightest. This is how the president portrays the public sector at a level of glittering generality. Then there’s the reality of all that government that is too big for him to monitor, the workings of which he learns about only when he reads the newspapers and watches TV. There’s the incompetence, the dishonesty and the self-justification....

While liberals are deploying behavioral science with stunning results, conservatives have failed to follow up on their success three decades ago with the psychology of ‘broken windows.’ Here are several policy initiatives with which to begin.In 1982, social scientist James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling published their “Broken Windows” article in The Atlantic, an idea that launched a savvy assault on crime. One unrepaired broken window, they posited, signals a community’s indifference and leads to many broken windows. “Vandalism can occur anywhere once communal barriers — the sense of mutual regard and the obligations of civility — are lowered...

Although there's still a great deal to be learned about the scandals and controversies swirling around the White House like so many ominous dorsal fins in the surf, the nature of President Obama's bind is becoming clear. The best defenses of his administration require undermining the rationale for his presidency. "We're portrayed by Republicans as either being lying or idiots. It's actually closer to us being idiots." So far, this is the administration's best defense. It was offered to CBS' Sharyl Attkisson by an anonymous aide involved in the White House's disastrous response to the attacks in Benghazi, Libya. Well-intentioned...

It went largely unnoticed at the end of last week due to the Obama scandalpalooza, but the Congressional Budget Office's score of President Obama's budget was released on Friday afternoon. The short summary is that a combination of tax hikes and spending cuts would decrease the budget deficit over the next four years, but the Obama budget does very little on entitlement reform and the coming tsunami of entitlement spending pushes the government ever more into the red. The Associated Press' summary led with "Obama budget cuts deficits by $1.1 trillion" but, as Nick Gillespie points out, delving down into...

The usually-cocksure Jay Carney has rarely appeared so uncomfortable. “What I can tell you is that this president believes strongly in the First Amendment and is a strong defender of the First Amendment,” Carney insisted to a packed house of angry reporters last Tuesday afternoon.The White House had just been freshly stung by news that the Department of Justice had secretly raided the phone records of up to 100 Associated Press reporters, looking to identify the news organization’s private sources.“He believes strongly in the need for the press to be unfettered in its pursuit of investigative journalism,” Carney continued, contorting...

Benghazigate: The lack of a timeline for what the commander-in-chief was doing the night terrorists murdered our ambassador to Libya and three others is an "irrelevant fact," according to a key White House aide. Playing the role Sunday of former U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, who last Sept. 16 went on all five talk shows to parrot the administration line that Benghazi was provoked by a video, was White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer. Following in Rice's footsteps, he announced that the details of where President Obama was and what he was doing that fateful night were an "irrelevant fact." "Fox...

On Sunday, President Obama gave a commencement address at Morehouse College in Atlanta. “Keep setting an example for what it means to be a man,” he told the graduates. “Be the best husband to your wife, or boyfriend to your partner, or father to your children that you can be.” That’s what Obama said, according to the New York Times, USA Today, Politico, and dozens of other news organizations. But Obama never uttered those words. Here’s what he actually said: “Be the best husband to your wife, or your boyfriend, or your partner.” That’s not a small difference in wording....

You know things are getting rough for President Barack Obama when even The New Yorker, that bastion of liberal thought, starts ridiculing him. Reacting to how the president is distancing himself from his administration’s three emerging scandals — the mishandling of the embassy attack at Benghazi, the targeting of a right-wing group by the IRS and press snooping by the Department of Justice — the magazine’s resident humorist, Andy Borowitz, wrote a post on its Web site titled, “Obama Denies Role in Government.” To milk his point, as humorists are wont to do, Borowitz put words in Obama’s mouth: “Right...

A few weeks back, the Tea Party was little more than a relic of political history, and its former superstars such as Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann were lost in a sea of irrelevance. Now the Obama administration has gotten the Tea Party started again. The trio of scandals that are rocking Washington smack of the exact kind of government overreach and abuse of power that fueled the movement in the beginning. Suddenly, Tea Party darling and likely presidential hopeful Rand Paul is selling out speaking events from Iowa to New Hampshire, and PalinÂ’s tweets are making headlines again. The...

Don’t let anyone fool you: Everyone in politics is tempted to believe that their noble ends could justify unethical and illegal means. Those who had hoped that President Obama would usher in a new era of higher standards in Washington must be shell-shocked by last week’s revelations: -The Internal Revenue Service admitted to delaying conservative organizations’ tax-exempt status while quickly approving groups that had liberal or progressive orientations. The IRS asked these groups all sorts of invasive questions, including what kind of books they read, and leaked some information to the media. -The Department of Justice secretly obtained two months...

Think the battle over “same sex marriage” isn’t already over? Check out this web site and think again.The Department of Justice (yes, THE U.S. Department of Justice) has an LGBT organization called DOJ Pride. Has had it since 1994. The organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered DOJ employees and, of course, their now-obligatory “allies,” works to “identify and address key areas affecting its LGBT employees.” Its activities include brown-bag lunch lectures “featuring experts in the LGBT community discussing issues of importance to DOJ Pride members, such as marriage equality” and a yearly Pride Month Celebration and Award Ceremony.Its goals...

Barbara Hewson, a London barrister, has made the call for lowering the age of sexual consent in the United Kingdom from 16 to 13. Her reasoning (if one may call it that) is that the current age of consent leads to the harassment and “persecution of old men.” She also believes that underage victims should have no right to anonymity, and that law based on the best interests of the child should not trump the “rights” of men who like to kiss a 13-year-old, or put one’s hand up a 16-year-old’s skirt. time to end this prurient charade, which has...

The federal Affordable Care Act, better known as “ObamaCare,” may provide activists and government a little-known wedge to advance their obesity agendas through regulated health-care providers — specifically America’s nearly 3,000 non-profit hospitals. One organization, The STOP Obesity Alliance, recently identified this wedge as a way to have such hospitals embrace its core convictions, including one principle which questions the role of personal responsibility as a cause and a solution to obesity.Community Health Needs Assessments. Section 9007 of the Act requires non-profit hospitals, as a condition of maintaining their tax-exempt status, to conduct Community Health Needs Assessments (CHNAs). These documents, which...

He’s compared himself to Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, evoked nostalgia for John F. Kennedy, sought to emulate Ronald Reagan, (belatedly) praised George W. Bush, and enlisted the assistance of Bill Clinton in his 2012 re-election effort, but as his second term stumbles along, the president with whom Barack Obama finds himself being compared is Richard M. Nixon. My father, Lou Cannon, covered the White House with distinction for the Washington Post for many years, beginning in the Nixon administration. He employed an easy rule of thumb when fielding phone calls from anonymous tipsters: If the caller said, “I have...

As gratifying as it was to see the “news” media actually do its job last week when the IRS scandal broke, it was also odd that the coverage focused exclusively on abuses of power relating to various Tea Party and anti-abortion groups. A much scarier IRS story has been virtually ignored by the establishment press. On Wednesday, it was reported that a class-action lawsuit had been filed against a group of IRS agents who, according to the complaint filed by “John Doe Company” in the Southern District of California, “stole more than 60,000,000 medical records of more than 10,000,000 Americans,...

Statism: Pope Francis seemed to have an economic blind spot, to say the least, when he urged more "state control" to cut global poverty Thursday. On the contrary — the biggest poverty-killer in history is free enterprise.Before we go further, let us say that we know that the pope does seem to have the best intentions and his devotion to the poor is indisputable. But it appears he has been infected by the local economic pathologies of his homeland, Argentina, and its liberation theology among the Jesuits, at least when he warned ambassadors about "the tyranny of money" and called...

This time of year, as college students return home for the summer, many parents may notice how many politically correct ideas they have acquired on campus. Some of those parents may wonder how they can undo some of the brainwashing that has become so common in what are supposed to be institutions of higher learning. The strategy used by General Douglas MacArthur so successfully in the Pacific during World War II can be useful in this very different kind of battle. General MacArthur won his victories while minimizing his casualties — something that is also desirable in clashes of ideas...

As Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto of the Imperial Japanese Navy emerged from the IRS hearings in Congress on Friday, he was overheard to say, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." OK, so I am mixing metaphors.  But, that famous statement from the architect of the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack is the most descriptive quote I can think of for what happened in the Longworth Building in Washington, D.C. this past week.  The Democratic Party, and especially the outgoing Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, must be wondering if...

The White House may invoke it in its peculiar way, but its occupants only show contempt for the rule of law. Last Thursday, Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) started a Twitter prairie fire with his call for people to describe #ObamacareInThreeWords. (My contribution was “Sorry, Doctor retired.”) Other gems included “Max Baucus regrets,” “A massive failure,” “Rammed down throats” and the extremely uncomfortable proof of Godwin’s Law, “Arbeit. Macht. Frei.” Liberal participation brought “Win for kids,” “Republicans suck balls,” “Republicans hate me”... --snip-- House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) hit the nail on the head in his opening...

An all too familiar scene was enacted on the campus of Swarthmore College during a meeting on May 4th to discuss demands by student activists for the college to divest itself of its investments in companies that dealt in fossil fuels. As a speaker was beginning a presentation to show how many millions of dollars such a disinvestment would cost the college, student activists invaded the meeting, seized the microphone and shouted down a student who rose in the audience to object. Although there were professors and administrators in the room — including the college president — apparently nobody had...

According to recent polls, younger Americans are increasingly disillusioned with government and cynical about the political process. Maybe they will finally realize that they are being played for patsies by the Obama administration. After all, on issue after issue, President Obama has fed younger voters a steady diet of high-minded rhetoric and then delivered policies that leave them holding the bag. The most recent example is Obamacare. For one, in order for the president’s health-care law to work properly, large numbers of young people will have to buy insurance. Those young and healthy individuals, with their low claims costs, are...

According to the latest Reason-Rupe poll: The president’s health care law is losing public support… Only 32 percent of Americans say they liked the health care law when it was passed and still like it today. Seven percent liked the law when it was passed, but like it less now. Meanwhile, 45 percent disliked the health care law when it was passed and still dislike it. Four percent of Americans say they disliked the law when it passed, but like it more now. These results are consistent with the Kaiser Family Foundation Health Tracking Poll, which has always reported a...

Mr. President, every month since you've been in office, I've sent you a personal letter, as I have with every president since Bill Clinton. Since I respect the office of the President, I've always felt that it was my responsibility to exercise my citizenship by voicing both my concerns and my support. I've never expected my comments to change your mind, but I held on to the belief that I could be one of many who might. As my great Uncle Harvey used to say, "When one person calls you a horse's (behind), don't worry about it. When three people...

How many thousands of Americans unknowingly carry an internal death sentence, maybe an aneurysm or cancer that is beyond treating? Only the tragic time and circumstances of demise await recording. Is our nation in the same sick bed? Is Benjamin Franklin’s proud but precarious Republic, Madame, beyond saving? Grave concern is justified. If our popular, reelected president thinks—and says out loud—that the Founders’ framework of divided powers, checks and balances, and limited, decentralized control is just a big drag on “progress,” and then, the nation doesn’t toss him out forthwith, is that a critical vital sign? If our populace forgets--or...

I was very pleased to report the other day that the people of France overwhelmingly favor spending cuts, even when they were asked a biased question that presupposed that Keynesian-style spending increases would “stimulate� the economy. Now I have some polling data about British voters, though I confess I’m not sure whether to be pleased or worried. You’ll see below two slides that were presented earlier today at the Bucharest stop on the Free Market Road Show. They’re not from my presentation, but rather from the speech by Matthew Sinclair of the UK-based Taxpayers Alliance. As you can see from...

Government Overreach: The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of tax-exempt organizations when the unit targeted Tea Party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for enforcing ObamaCare. As bad as the IRS scandal was, with the taxing body of government using its unequaled authority to intimidate and harass the president's political opposition to aid his re-election, it got worse with the news that the IRS official, Sarah Hall Ingram, who served as commissioner of the Tax-Exempt and Government Entities Division from 2009 to 2012, is now serving as director of the IRS' Affordable Care Act division. Ingram was so...

“For me, it’s about collaboration.” — National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen Kelley on the relationship between the anti-Tea Party IRS union and the Obama White House Is President Obama directly implicated in the IRS scandal? Is the White House Visitors Log the trail to the smoking gun? The stunning questions are raised by the following set of new facts. March 31, 2010. According to the White House Visitors Log, provided here in searchable form by U.S. News and World Report, the president of the anti-Tea Party National Treasury Employees Union, Colleen Kelley, visited the White House at 12:30pm that...

The Local, a website with German news in English reports Economists warn against German euro exit. “Even a believable rumour that Germany would exit the euro would result in a massive capital flight from the countries of southern Europe to Germany.� The southern European banking system would then collapse, bringing down entire economies with them, Schmieding said. The consequences for Germany would be severe. The crisis countries could no longer pay back their debt and Germany’s important export markets would drop off. On top of that German taxpayers would be burdened with immense costs, he said. On the other hand...

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post. Nakoula Basseley Nakoula has been sitting in a US federal prison in Texas since his photographed midnight arrest by half a dozen deputy sheriffs at his home in California for violating the terms of his parole. As many reporters have noted, the parole violation in question would not generally lead to anything more than a court hearing. But in Nakoula’s case, it led to a year in a federal penitentiary. Because he wasn’t really arrested for violating the terms of his parole. Nakoula was arrested for producing an anti-Islam film that the Obama administration...

At his Arizona State University commencement speech last Wednesday, Mr. Obama noted that ASU had refused to grant him an honorary degree, citing his lack of experience, and the controversy this had caused. He then demonstrated ASU's point by remarking, "I really thought this was much ado about nothing, but I do think we all learned an important lesson. I learned never again to pick another team over the Sun Devils in my NCAA brackets. . . . President [Michael] Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS." Just a joke about...

American comedians are making a pile of cash with clean humor centered on guns, God and family. As scandals from Benghazigate to the IRS-targeting of conservative groups shake our country, I think it’s important for us to periodically re-focus on the beauty of America; the beauty of humanity and the beauty of life. I know. It sounds so cliché; so Hallmark card-ish. But it’s true. It is easy to become cynical and to think that everyone in the world has an agenda. It is easy to get down when we hear stories about our leaders lying and cheating. But not...

My University, UNC-Wilmington, needs to change its name to The University of No Competition Whatsoever. We could still use the UNCW logo but our full name would more accurately reflect our educational priorities. We already undermine economic competition by promoting Marxism. But now we are considering cutting athletic competition in order to preserve diversity spending in the midst of state budget cuts. The local Wilmington (North Carolina) McTimes recently reported on a proposal floating through the ranks of the university administration. The following sentence summarizes the gist of the spending cuts, which are expected to save $800,000 annually: "UNCW would...

With the convictions in the case against abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell – three counts of murdering live babies and one count of involuntary manslaughter – abortion is back in the national discussion. It’s pretty clear from the Grand Jury report that, during Gosnell’s thirty plus year career, he likely murdered hundreds, if not thousands of babies. But because of the difficulty in documenting it all, he was just convicted of three. Reports now are coming in from around the nation indicating that more Gosnells are out there. The abortion lobby claims that as long as we have tight regulations on...

Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men.- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man In Greece and Italy two unelected prime ministers, with banking backgrounds similar to members of our own government, swore to rescue their countries for the Euro. Yeah, that worked out great, didn’t it? Liberty, Fraternity and Currency! And they "saved" their countries by bringing to bear the expertise of every “non elected pipe smoking and tweed wearing university don,� in the Daily Mail’s derisive phrase, to tackle the problem of the Great...

Chilling effect. That's the term lawyers and judges use to describe the result of government actions that deter people from exercising their right of free speech. There have been plenty of examples in the past 10 days. The Obama administration's Justice Department issued a sweeping demand for two months of office, cellular and home telephone records from multiple Associated Press reporters and editors to investigate an alleged breach of national security. The AP story in question, on a foiled terrorist plot, had been withheld for days at the request of the CIA. It finally went out on the wire on...

Some establishment types are shaking their heads as they warn conservatives that we must not politicize the Administration’s Benghazi bungling, its Obamacare shakedowns, its AP records grab or its IRS abuses. Like hell we mustn’t. We must. Big time. The last couple weeks’ revelations of fresh and compelling examples of the kind of duplicity and petty tyranny we conservatives have been screaming about for five years have presented us with what military folks call a “seam.” A “seam” is the border where two different units meet, and it is generally the kind of weak point you want to drive your...

If there's one foundational lesson for conservatives of various stripes to glean from the recent revelations about the atrocities routinely committed by the IRS, it's that there are reasons the Founders considered property rights among the most sacred of all rights -- and rights that a limited government must protect. Several groups focused on "values voters" and "moral issues" have learned recently just how difficult it is to accomplish anything for their values when the IRS is using the awesome weight of a massive federal government to confiscate resources, perform harassment audits, and withhold non-profit status... --snip-- Of course, it...

Confusion about the IRS scandal is distracting from its importance, so that thinking conservatives should be prepared to debate the issue. Some basics matter. Conservatives may need to share a summary such as this article to help convince moderate friends. Callers to C-SPAN badly misunderstood these details when Jenny Beth Martin, Coordinator of Tea Party Patriots, appeared on C-SPAN television last week. I interviewed Keli Carender of Tea Party Patriots on the radio on May15, who helped clarify some of the pushback and distractions from liberals. First, don't let people forget: the IRS scandal is not about conservative accusations. The...

Those who grew up during the Hungry Thirties, and fought in World War II, were called “the greatest generation” in a 1968 book by U.S. author and broadcaster Tom Brokaw. … Now it’s suggested that Tory David Cameron’s 2010 coalition with Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats won’t last as long. In an interview, the PM mentions the possibility of it ending prematurely, and facing the new circumstances “in whatever way we should”. In 70 years, have we gone from the greatest to the weakest? In 1943, our coalition government was threatened by a Germany dedicated to our destruction. The 2013 coalition...

Sometime near the end of the twelfth century, a wealthy young man named Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone came upon a shepherd driving his flock to market. And apparently for the sheer joy of it — the extravagant pleasure of saving those sheep from slaughter — the young man promptly bought the entire flock, led the sheep out to open meadows, and set them free.This is the man everyone knows as St. Francis of Assisi (ca. 1182–1226) — namesake of the newly elected pope, a saint beloved throughout the world, even by people who have nothing to do with the Catholic...

Benghazi. The IRS targeting the Tea Party. Feds snooping on the Associated Press. These dizzying controversies around the Obama administration all carry the same lesson: Watch what you say. On Benghazi, set aside for a moment the dust-ups over State Department officials changing talking points, White House officials misleading the media, and congressional Republicans misrepresenting administration emails. Go back to what the administration was saying just after the deadly Sept. 11, 2012, attacks on the U.S. diplomatic facility. Many administration officials -- although they may have known better -- blamed the attack, and thus the death of four Americans, on...

President Obama used his weekly radio address on Saturday to reassure the American people that he has “played no role whatsoever” in the U.S. government over the past four years. “Right now, many of you are angry at the government, and no one is angrier than I am,” he said. “Quite frankly, I am glad that I have had no involvement in such an organization.” The President’s outrage only increased, he said, when he “recently became aware of a part of that government called the Department of Justice.” “The more I learn about the activities of these individuals, the more...