Free Republic

France’s campaign in Mali exposes Europe’s unpreparedness for 21st-century war. WITH WELL-ARMED radical Islamist insurgents closing in last winter on Mali’s capital, Bamako, French President François Hollande suddenly decided to defend Western civilization. Plunging in the polls as the most unpopular French president since the Fifth Republic was founded in 1958, he just might have had ulterior motives; diverting hostile public opinion at home with a military escapade abroad is a tried and true tactic for floundering chiefs of state. Be that as it may, French troops, mainly Foreign Legion, began deploying to Mali in Operation Serval on January 11....

How activist misinformation wastes time, money, and harms AmericansDavulcuHealth activists, nutrition nannies, medical paternalists, and just plain old quacks regularly conjure up a variety of menaces that are supposedly damaging the health of Americans. Their scares ranging from the decades-long campaign against fluoridation to worries that saccharin causes cancer to the ongoing hysteria over biotech crops to fears of lead in lipstick. The campaigners’ usual “solution” is to demand that regulators ban the offending substance or practice. Here are five especially egregious examples.5. Americans should consume no more than 1,500 milligrams of sodium per day, in order to reduce everybody's...

Stand Your Ground: A big hypocrite in the IRS scandal targeting Tea Party groups sets his sights on a conservative think tank, asking its suspected supporters: "Are you now or have you ever been a conservative?" Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin is on a witch hunt that threatens anew the free speech rights of Americans who don't hold his views or those of the Obama administration. This time he has targeted the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group of state legislators who promote free markets, limited government and federalism, ahead of a "stand your ground" hearing Durbin announced after George...

For supporters of the repeal of North Carolina’s estate tax, the passage serves as a big neon "come on home" message to ultra-wealthy individuals who have kept a primary residence in another state to avoid the tax. "A tax that affects somewhere between a dozen and 100 families each year in a state with 9 million-plus people is fundamentally unfair," said Dallas Woodhouse, the director of the N.C. chapter of the conservative advocacy group Americans For Prosperity. For opponents, the repeal – retroactive to Jan. 1 – serves as a prime example of conservative legislators favoring the wealthy few over...

Ahmed Moussa, a prominent Egyptian television personality on the Tahrir TV channel as well as a former officer in Egyptian State Security Intelligence (SSI), went public on July 30 with a remarkable piece of information. Moussa said, addressing U.S. ambassador Anne Patterson (in absentia) on his show: Ambassador Stevens was killed in Benghazi, and you know who killed him, the U.S. administration knows who killed him, and you know how he was killed and it was a major strike against the U.S. administration, and all of you. The assassin is now present at Rabia Al-Adawiya [mosque protest] His name is,...

The Third American Revolution has begun. Mark Levin’s The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic is the revolutionary blueprint millions of Americans have been waiting for. Released today, Levin leads the charge for “restoring constitutional republicanism and preserving the civil society from the growing authoritarianism of a federal Leviathan.” Carefully and powerfully written, the book uses the Constitution itself to illustrate how to reform the Constitution itself. To finally turn the tables on progressives and liberals — Statists, to use the term Levin has brought back to life — who have spent the last century slowly and not so slowly...

Two recent events — one on the east coast and one on the west coast — raise painful questions about whether we are really serious when we say that we want better education for minority children. One of these events was an announcement by Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., that it plans on August 19th to begin "an entire week of activities to celebrate the grand opening of our new $160 million state-of-the-art school building." The painful irony in all this is that the original Dunbar High School building, which opened in 1916, housed a school with a record...

I was out in the desert this weekend at our second home, where, borrowing the words from an old song "nothing is heard of a discouraging word" except if someone is discussing their round of golf. While waking my dogs for their morning ride in my golf cart I got to 'thinking of what's going on in this country and all I could think of was What Happened? And when did it happen? Let me start in the middle of this discussion to try to illustrate my point. This part of my essay should be subtitled: “me and the Presidents”...

Whether it was finding the solid ground in writing the Declaration of Independence that would justify and drive a revolution or defining the core rights that would guide the crafting for our Constitution, our Founding Fathers held firmly to core principles that would help them navigate through unchartered waters. Every improvement is the result of change, but not every change is an improvement. Our Founding Fathers had to find a compass to give them a true north as they sorted through the choices and changes our emerging country faced. After more than two centuries, it is understandable that our citizens...

What's the real story for the overall trend in new jobless claims in the U.S.? It has been several months since we last featured an update of our statistical analysis of the trends in new jobless claims in the U.S., which is mostly by design on our part. When we last left off, the overall trend, which we identified as Trend L, was largely flat, but characterized by extreme volatility, with unusual outliers in the data popping up with an alarming frequency. Some of that was understandable. We saw the state of California mishandle its processing of new jobless claims,...

President Obama promised he would unite the world…and he’s right.Representatives from dozens of nations have bitterly complained about an awful piece of legislation, called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), that was enacted back in 2010.They despise this unjust law because it extends the power of the IRS into the domestic affairs of other nations. That’s an understandable source of conflict, which should be easy to understand. Wouldn’t all of us get upset, after all, if the French government or Russian government wanted to impose their laws on things that take place within our borders?But it’s not just foreign...

Via Email, Michael Pettis at China Financial Markets quantifies various growth and investment scenarios. Pettis maintains 6% or higher growth is not plausible and that even 3-4% growth may be optimistic. What follows is from Pettis ... Consumption and Investment Growth Under Rebalancing Under specified rebalancing assumptions for China it is possible to calculate arithmetically the annual growth rate for consumption and investment under different GDP growth scenarios. This allows us to decide whether these scenarios are plausible or not. Table: GDP, consumption, and investment growth in a rebalancing China To read the table, let us start by assuming, as...

Speaking to a group of Veterans, President Barack Obama tried to make his case for ending the sequester. “We’ve got these reckless, across-the-board budget cuts called the sequester that are hitting a lot of folks hard,” Obama said. One can only assume these are the same “across the board” and “reckless” cuts that he proposed as part of the 2011 Budget Control Act, and let go into place by refusing to compromise on entitlement spending early this year. The President went on to say that without the repeal of these “reckless” cuts (which were passed with bi-partisan approval, and signed...

Lovers of Big Government and apologists for debt like Paul Krugman have tried to paint Milton Friedman as a contradiction. They say that Friedman’s insight that more Fed intervention might have mitigated the Great Depression is inconsistent with his view that the Depression would have been less severe without the Fed. Krugman can typically be discounted because his partisanship diminishes his perceptiveness. It is, however, disappointing when National Review joins the fray and publishes opinion claiming that Friedman “would likely have supported a much more aggressive monetary response to our economic downturn.” Professor Ivan Pongracic of Hillsdale College explains that...

President Obama is officially on vacation with his family in Martha's Vineyard but apparently, there just wasn't enough room on 4,000 square feet of Air Force One for their dog Bo. Naturally, the dog was put on a separate flight. Rooms have to be found for dozens of Secret Service agents, someone has to carry a selection of presidential basketballs, and of course the family dog needs his own state-of-the-art aircraft. Arriving in the idyllic coastal retreat of Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, Mr Obama left behind him in Washington DC high profile debates over the budget, government surveillance and his...

Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, sent shockwaves throughout the media and both political parties last week by threatening to pull the rights of NBC and CNN to broadcast the 2016 Republican presidential primary debates. If the networks don’t cancel their pro-Hillary Clinton TV specials, which are little more than free political ads for her, Priebus will have the RNC vote on August 15th to “neither partner with you in 2016 primary debates nor sanction primary debates which you sponsor.” Priebus said on Bloomberg TV’s Street Smart, “I just want their presidents and their chairmen to know...

Ah, Hillary Clinton. Let me count the ways she doth love to be feminine. 1. She will not bake cookies. She will put down other mothers who stay home and bake cookies. Hillary once said: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.” 2. She will not wear a skirt. She will happily stand by her skirt-chaser. The media drew comparisons between Hillary standing by Bill in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal...

Hamas has finally admitted that it is the Egyptians, and not Israel, who have turned the Gaza Strip into a “big prison.” … Why haven’t the “pro-Palestine” activists been sent to the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing to voice solidarity with the residents of the “big prison”? The answer is obvious: First, the activists’ main goal is to condemn Israel and hold it solely responsible for the miseries of Palestinians. The activists do not care about the Palestinians’ suffering as much as they are interested in advancing their anti-Israel agenda. They devote most of their energies and efforts...

- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com - The Death of the U.S.-Egypt AlliancePosted By Joseph Klein On August 12, 2013 @ 12:41 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 5 Comments President Obama’s misguided attempt to bend Egyptian political affairs in the Muslim Brotherhood’s favor is unravelling the carefully nurtured military and economic alliance between the United States and Egypt, which has served for decades to stabilize that vital part of the Middle East.First, after throwing former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak under the bus, the Obama administration did everything it could to portray the Muslim Brotherhood as a worthy organization committed to democratic...

There is no connection, of course, between the prosecution of notorious gangster James "Whitey" Bulger and the recent spate of scandals and revelations roiling the Obama administration. Or is there? Law enforcement and criminal justice are essential functions of government. No civilized society could survive for long if it lacked tools to combat lawlessness or make dangerous villains answer for their crimes. And Bulger was certainly dangerous — "one of the most vicious, violent criminals ever to walk the streets of Boston," as Assistant US Attorney Fred Wyshak called him in summing up for the prosecution last week. But Bulger...

Vitriol has gone beyond partisan give-and-take in the nation’s politics. It is now seeping into and poisoning the ranks of the Republican Party. Mainstream Republican politicians are cringing at the proposal of tea party Senators -– Ted Cruz (R-TX), Mike Lee (R-UT), Marco Rubio (R-FL) -– to hold federal appropriations legislation hostage in their quest to defund Obamacare. Republicans opposing this strategy see it as lose-lose. They don’t believe this tactic will work. And at the same time, they see it producing more antipathy toward Republicans and branding them as zealots and obstructionists. I think the tea partiers are on...

It wouldn’t be summer really if America didn’t get to witness another lavish Martha’s Vineyard vacation by Barack Obama and his posse. Maybe we should just be thankful that he didn’t first ruin American credit like he did in 2011 before departing for the island off of the Massachusetts’ Horn of Plenty. Hotel rates in the summertime on the island range from $250 to $2100 per night. That’s more even than good seats at an NFL football game cost. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not against a president going on vacation. But when Americans face one of the worst job...

Does President Barack Obama think we’re stupid? That’s the only conclusion possible after watching Friday’s bravura performance in which the president announced a set of proposals meant to bring more transparency to the National Security Agency — and claimed he would have done it anyway, even if Edward Snowden had never decided to leak thousands of highly sensitive documents to The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald. But even as he grudgingly admitted that the timing, at least, of his suggestions was a consequence of Snowden’s actions, the president declared, “I don’t think Mr. Snowden was a patriot.” When you look at what...

To campaign against the bullying of LGBT people as if disagreement with the gay lifestyle were an evil is itself a form of bullying.On June 19, the US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan ruled in favor of a high school student named Daniel Glowacki, who had charged that his high school teacher, Jay McDowell, had violated his constitutional right to freedom of speech. He was granted one dollar in compensation. The court’s verdict, in vulgar terms, was that the pig had the right to say what he said. The facts, according to the court’s judgment, are these....

Friday, Barack “Reach Across the Aisle� Obama had an amped-up message for low-information voters: It is the “holy grail� of Republicans to make sure that 30 million Americans don’t have health insurance. As reported by The Hill, in addition to saying that blocking ObamaCare has become the GOP’s “holy grail,� Obama called Republican opposition to his troubled healthcare plan (which is opposed by ever-increasing percentage of Americans) an “ideological fixation� as well.Not only is this guy absolutely horrendous with a terrible record of reaching across the aisle outstanding at “reaching across the aisle,� he’s also pretty good at ridiculing, too....

The marginal economic strength that was described in the most recent GDP release from Washington has caused many to double down on their belief that the Federal Reserve will begin tapering Quantitative Easing sometime later this year. While I believe that is a fantasy given our economy's extreme dependence on QE, market observers should have learned long ago that the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) initial GDP estimates can't be trusted. A perusal of their subsequent GDP revisions in the last five years reveals a clear trend: They are almost twice as likely to revise initial estimates down rather than...

Gov. Nathan Deal complains there has been much “misinformation” spread about the new Common Core national standards that Georgia adopted in exchange for a federal Race to the Top grant. Indeed, he’s right, but not in the way he believes. One critical piece of misinformation is the claim that the Common Core math standards are more “rigorous” than our previous Georgia Performance Standards. Research shows the truth is quite the opposite. ... Common Core national standards will set our children back one to two years. The math standards specifically are markedly inferior to all three sets of standards used for...

On July 18, President Obama held an event at the White House to promote Obamacare. It was Calculated Deception writ large, which is Obama’s rhetorical style of taking advantage of what he shrewdly calculates the great majority of average Americans will not know, and what he is certain the so-called mainstream media will not tell them. That smacks of third world style, authoritarian propaganda. Obama falsely claimed, “In states like California, Oregon, Washington, new competition, new choices, market forces are pushing costs down.” I have already discussed in prior posts the misrepresentation regarding proposed premiums for 2014 on the California...

George E. Leake turns 93 years old today, August 11, 2013. The two contributions of George’s life that are most significant to me personally are his daughter, my wife of 35 years, and the freedoms that I share with three-hundred-million fellow Americans. George served in the United States Air Force during World War II. He worked ground operations in the Pacific theater in support of General MacArthur’s island march toward the Empire of Japan. The train ride to San Francisco from his home farm in Delaware segued to ships that transported George to bombed out airfields in the Philippines. The...

The Reason Foundation’s Adam Millsap and Anthony Randazzo have an op-ed up at RealClearPolicy.com that cites examples of how federal job training programs are used to favor particular commercial interests. A snippet: Crony capitalism is when private interests collude with government to acquire subsidies or economic benefits that give them an advantage in the marketplace. Many job-training programs, such as the “On the Job Training Program” (OJT), serve just this purpose.In many cases, the OJT program provides subsidized job training for specific jobs in specific areas—because the funds are limited, only certain employers will get the money. For example, in...

In the just-released Spring 2013 issue of Harvard Health Policy Review, I have an article titled “ObamaCare: The Plot Thickens.” The article examines the IRS rule that purportedly implements ObamaCare’s tax credits, but actually violates that statute by taxing, borrowing, and spending hundreds of billions of dollars contrary to Congress’ explicit instructions. The article is a less-technical version of my Health Matrix article (coauthored with Jonathan Adler, “Taxation Without Representation: The Illegal IRS Rule to Expand Tax Credits Under the PPACA.”) Here’s an excerpt: In broad daylight, the Internal Revenue Service is attempting to tax, borrow, and spend [roughly] $800 billion—contrary to...

It's like 1980 all over again. There's a war in Afghanistan, the economy is lousy, Paul McCartney has a new record coming out, and some people are calling for the United States to stay away from the upcoming Olympics in Russia. When the first talk of another Olympic boycott arose, no one took it very seriously. It came from Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who enjoys far more face time on Sunday morning talk shows than influence over U.S. policy, and who is upset about Edward Snowden. But the idea could be gaining traction. Some gay rights advocates, from both the...

Eric Holder, America's first African-American attorney general, and his boss, Barack Obama, the first black president, haven't been shy about pointing out racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Racial profiling? It's real, they say. State "stand your ground" laws? Obama says they don't work for minorities. Yet both have been conspicuously absent when it comes to redressing racial disparities in their own home turf, the federal government's ill-conceived war on drugs. That could change when Holder addresses the American Bar Association in San Francisco on Monday. The war on drugs has presented "a lot of unintended consequences," Holder recently...

You may be walking around thinking that you are just a small person with no say regarding what your government should be doing. You vote every chance you get, but it seems like the government grows more distant and less responsive. You feel this anguish of hopelessness that the government you grew up with is slipping away. All those feelings are justified because the monolith of Washington, DC, is swallowing up all levels of government -- thereby further distancing you from having any say over your life. Certainly, it was not always this way. David Brinkley, one of our greatest...

On Friday, president Obama announced a plan to reform NSA surveillance. Don't expect much of anything to come out of it. It's a dog and pony show designed to make people feel better as opposed to any solid measures as to how much data government collects on everyone. Here are excerpts from the above article with my comments interspersed. Independent: President Obama told a packed room of journalists at the White House Friday afternoon that he will work to reform Section 215 of the Patriot Act - the provision which currently allows the federal government’s intelligence agencies to collect domestic...

Republicans relish the idea of impoverished people across the nation dying slow agonizing deaths without access to healthcare. At least, that’s what our President believes. Holding a press conference right before his luxurious vacation in Martha’s Vineyard (which I hear is fantastic this time of year) the President said that “the one unifying principle the Republican Party has, is making sure that 30 million people don’t have health-care.” The comment was absurd, disingenuous, and indicative of Liberal’s inability to defend their ideas. The comment was made in regards to three conservative Republicans who are leading an effort to essentially defund...

Just 31 percent of the state’s students in grades 3 to 8 were deemed proficient in math and in English language arts (ELA) on the new tests, compared with about 65 percent in math and 55 percent in ELA on last year’s tests. Kentucky, another leading-edge state implementing its own common core tests, experienced similar declines in scores last year. Most of the 45 states that have signed on to the Common Core are waiting until at least 2014-15 to implement common tests that are still in development. For those who support the Common Core, a set of standards for...

The Gulfport, Florida Police released a video a couple of weeks ago from a school bus surveillance camera that shows three, weed-dealing black teenaged thugs beating the shitake out of one, thirteen-year-old white kid. It was an unholy smack down of demonic proportions. If you haven’t seen it you can watch the gruesome video here. Satan must be so proud. The kid got his clocked cleaned because he told his school officials that the three, black teens tried to sell him a dime bag of weed. After they pummeled him, breaking his arm and blackening his eyes, they stole his...

PRESIDENT OBAMA proved himself a great segue artist Friday, as he smoothly glided from his previously unassailable position on the matter of surveillance to his new unassailable position on the matter of surveillance. There is no moral high ground that he does not seek to occupy. As with drones and gay marriage, he seems peeved that we were insufficiently patient with his own private study of the matter. Why won’t the country agree to entrust itself to his fine mind? Yet while Barry is in the thick of it, the air is thick with Hillary. From the sidelines, she is...

The day started with an American CEO ringing the opening bell at the NASDAQ in New York. And it ended with that same CEO announcing plans to cut his company’s American workforce. It was Friday, August 9th. Mark Durcan, CEO of the global Micron Technology, Inc. had traveled from the company’s headquarters in Boise, Idaho to visit the NASDAQ trading epicenter in Times Square. The company has been enjoying good news over the past several months, including a rise in its’ stock value, additional contracts to sell its’ computer memory systems to additional tablet manufacturers, and its’ recent acquisition of...

According to Team Obama’s “phony scandal” narrative, when the Internal Revenue Service processed 501(c)(3) tax-exemption applications, it equally tormented liberals and conservatives. No big deal, the argument goes. The IRS suffers from even-handed inefficiency rather than an un-American habit of slamming critics of the president of the United States. Unfortunately for the Obamites, actual facts annihilate their institutional-incompetence defense. New data deepen the suspicion that the IRS is the latest and most worrisome weapon in the left’s arsenal. Using his authority under Internal Revenue Code Section 6103, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) requested and received data...

The Mexican law student was surprised by how easy it was to get into Iran two years ago. By merely asking questions about Islam at a party, he managed to pique the interest of Iran’s top diplomat in Mexico. Months later, he had a plane ticket and a scholarship to a mysterious school in Iran as a guest of the Islamic Republic. Next came the start of classes and a second surprise: There were dozens of others just like him.

A lot has changed in the 12 years since I graduated college. I’m no longer roofing for $8 an hour. I’ve gone from listening to talk radio all day to hosting a daily radio show and the national debt has climbed from less than $6 trillion to more than $16 trillion. One thing that hasn’t changed is my love of news. Absorbing and discussing news was a hobby since I was a kid; now it’s a career. What used to annoy my parents and their friends now annoys anyone within the 50,000-watt range of WBAL from noon till 3 p.m....

Not wanting to go the way of its former print rival, Newsweek, it is no surprise that Time magazine is looking for ways to generate buzz. Thus the provocative current cover story: “The Child Free Life: When Having It All Means Not Having Children." I read the article while on vacation. Vacation with my family—including seven grandchildren, ironic, huh?I immediately remembered reading something Theodore Roosevelt said, directly on point, in a famous speech Not wanting to go the way of its former print rival, Newsweek, it is no surprise that Time magazine is looking for ways to generate buzz. Thus...

President Obama took his case for ending the sequester to hundreds of disabled veterans Saturday, saying he protected their benefits from the “reckless” cuts to the federal budget but suggesting next year might be different. “It’s hurting our military. I made it clear that your veteran’s benefits are exempt from this year’s sequester,” the president said to the applause of hundreds at the Disabled American Veterans' convention in Orlando, Fla. “But I want to tell you going forward the best way to protect the VA care you have earned is to get rid of this sequester altogether.” The president...

Having declared an end to the War on Terror, the US president no longer has any clear idea of his country's global role The West can no longer rely on American leadership in the world. For the remaining duration of the Obama administration, Washington’s judgment and effectiveness in foreign policy cannot be trusted. It is quite an achievement for the one remaining superpower to appear as ineffectual and wrong-footed as the United States has managed to do in the past week. But there it is. The president’s global strategy in his second term was based on two resounding premises. First,...

So Tim Allen has decided to publicly defuse that most egregious of English words: the six-letter one that starts with n and ends with r. Allen is not the first you'd guess would attempt such a thing. But today in the new millennium, things are different. As the Zimmerman trial has revealed, the race card has become frayed and tattered from continual overuse. Whites don't feel very guilty anymore, a full century and a half after the demise of slavery and fifty years after the collapse of legal segregation. A solution to the racial impasse of the past half-century, in...

When President Obama said during his press conference Friday, "The one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don't have health care," the liberal media predictably echoed his sentiments. Yet if they did a little research, such folks would find that almost half of that 30 million are those being forced to buy health insurance against their will. One such clueless individual is the Washington Post's Nia-Malika Henderson who said on MSNBC's Politics Nation Friday, "I think that Obama framed it very nicely today when he said that they want to...

I just heard another Republican politico, a state senator here in Georgia, at a meeting, claim that Common Core is not a federalized education curriculum, but a “state-led” education reform initiative. He could have been reading from a press release sent by the Obama Department of Education. In reality, Common Core was attached to millions of dollars in stimulus funds that were dangled by the feds before the states in a contest called “Race to the Top” during the 2009 economic crisis. The attached Common Core standards were not even written when states signed up. Writing the standards and attached...

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau performed a genuine public service this week by alerting taxpayers to the tidal wave of student loan defaults coming their way. Too bad the intention was also to alert student borrowers to ways they can avoid repaying those loans. A new analysis by the bureau shows federal-backed student loan debt surpassing $1 trillion, which is nearly double what it was at the start of the Obama Presidency. As college costs have continued to balloon in tandem with federal loan and grant subsidies, students have assumed more debt. Many jobless Americans have also sought asylum from...