Free Republic

Several years ago, I worked with some fellow propellerheads to launch a nanotechnology initiative in my state. That is, engineering devices at the atomic and molecular level. There were several local companies already working peripheral technologies like MEMS (Micro-electro-mechanical systems) and plenty of interest in taking machines to their ultimate, small incarnations. A natural component to our new society of industry, economic development groups and chambers of commerce was partnership with higher education. So we teamed up with local universities to encourage their offering related majors, with requirements in physics and chemistry. Industry envisioned expanding revenue, communities saw economic expansion,...

The current politically correct imbroglio over the Washington Redskins and owner Daniel Snyder’s stout refusal to appease the bloodhounds on his trail by surrendering will probably soon pass, regardless of the eventual outcome. The demands of the modern 24-hour news cycle guarantee that this will not last too long. This mini-controversy does, however, serve to illustrate the nature of the manufacturing of public opinion by the standard bearers of cultural liberalism and their allies in the mass media, circa 2013. Simply put, the Left decides that something is “offensive” and uses its media access to declare this object impermissible,...

Well, I have done it! I have read the entire text of proposed House Bill 3200: The Affordable Health Care Choices Act of 2009. I studied it with particular emphasis from my area of expertise, constitutional law. I was frankly concerned that parts of the proposed law that were being discussed might be unconstitutional. What I found was far worse than what I had heard or expected. To begin with, much of what has been said about the law and its implications is in fact true, despite what the Democrats and the media are saying. The law does provide for...

Imagine there's no heaven It's easy if you try No hell below us Above us only sky Imagine all the people living for today Welcome to Washington, DC, where some folks are doing their best John Lennon impressions, asking Americans to imagine “what if” conservatives didn’t mount a legislative fight against Obamacare this fall – a fight that still continues. The folly of this type of political counterfactual thinking is undeniable, but I’ll play along for fun. What if, instead of throwing its political energy into a failing effort to stop President Obama’s stimulus in 2009, the Republican Party spent...

The fact that the ObamaCare website is a complete clusterbungle that is totally inoperative is 100% INTENTIONAL. It was designed to cause denial of service attacks on ITSELF, people. Come on. Wake up. This isn’t difficult. This reminds me exactly of the Ukraine under Stalin in the early 1930s. The Ukraine is the breadbasket of eastern Europe. Tremendous farming and wheat production was centered in the Ukraine. Under Lenin, and then Stalin, all farms and food production were seized and controlled by the state. The Soviets hated the Ukrainians and wanted them all dead. All of them. So here’s what...

From the emotional headlines, you would think America is in dire straights from a government “shutdown.” But as usual the truth is masked by the headlines and can be found in the print of the details. In reality only 18% of the government is “shutdown” and the rest of it is humming along as usual. ... if you look at just one government agency that has a profound effect on the cost of living for all Americans, you can see there is a silver lining. The Environmental Protection Agency has deemed that over 93% of its employees are “non essential”...

Anyone old enough to remember Viet Nam can remember how the country felt toward the man and women who were sent to Southeast Asia to prosecute that war. They were treated like [as this is a family column] garbage. We have discussed before how, in the National Guard during those days, it was suggested that we wear civilian clothes to and from drills. Of all the dumb things the federal government has done during this partial shut down was to have shut down national parks, and national monuments. Some of the national monuments that have been shut down are the...

What kind of leader wants a military more loyal to himself than to the rule of law? And why? These are two questions to ponder when considering the strange happenings in the armed forces since Barack Obama took office. Let's start with a hypothetical. Let's say you were a hard-left-wing commander in chief who wanted the military firmly in your corner. You'd certainly note that our armed forces have been a bastion of conservatism and Christian faith, and you'd know that its members generally weren't very fond of you. So how would you go about changing this? Some years ago...

We may have been too optimistic last month in noting the end of a year-long period of microrecession in the U.S. economy. Here, we've been tracking the number of public U.S. companies that have been announcing decreases in their dividends each month. August 2013 had seen the number of U.S. companies acting to cut their dividends drop below the key level of 10 per month, which we've previously observed marks the boundary between a growing U.S. economy and a U.S. economy that is experiencing recessionary conditions. The data for September 2013 is now out, and the early suggestion is that...

Economists expected a 6% rise in Chinese exports. Instead, exports fell 0.3%. Please consider China's September export growth in surprise slide. China's export growth fizzled in September to post a surprise fall as sales to Southeast Asia tumbled, data showed, a disappointing break to a recent run of indicators that had signaled its economy gaining strength. China's exports dropped 0.3 percent in September from a year earlier, the Customs Administration said on Saturday, sharply confounding market expectations for a rise of 6 percent, and marking the worst performance in three months. Imports fared better, rising 7.4 percent in September from...

The Moral Maze on Radio 4 on Saturday night was unsatisfactory as always. This is because morality is treated as merely subjective, without regard to objective laws, and listeners who have not already sorted out what they believe, are left in the same “maze” as before. On the regular panel Claire Fox is generally bleakly pragmatic and Melanie Phillips generally angry and hectoring. It is a very British programme: serious moral concerns are aired, more or less politely, and then left when they began – up in the air.This week’s subject was on the rights and wrongs of gender-specific abortions...

A question for the American Medical Association: What were you thinking? Despite the national news media’s near-complete refusal to report it, the news was no less real. United Healthcare, a managed care health services company based in Minnesota, is underway with laying-off “thousands” of physicians in Connecticut. The reason? The company won’t dare say this, but they had to do something to stave-off their decline in revenues, a phenomenon brought about by – you guessed it – the new federal healthcare law, AKA “Obamacare.” President Obama once famously promised “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” but...

I realize Obama is quite busy playing fetch with Bo and Sunny. However, I hope he has a few moments to consider turning on the fountain at the WWII Memorial and un-barricading the remaining war memorials on the National Mall. Our veterans of WWII, the Korean War and the Vietnam War are aging. Many of them are severely disabled, because of their heroism. It is immoral and embarrassing that our President would allow amnesty advocates to prance about on the sacred ground where taxpayers erected memorials to honor our veterans, rather than the actual veterans. The National Mall is a...

We ought to think about the cultural roots of the budget crisis in Washington. The political left says the shut down is all about an ideological tantrum of a handful of Republicans. Certainly Tea Partiers have an ideology and vision about what ground rules would produce a more prosperous, freer, and fairer America. But let’s be honest. The gentleman in the White House, our president, is as hard-core in his ideological dispositions as any Tea Partier. Each side believes America would be better off if it were run according to their vision. What’s the crucial difference? As a Tea Partier,...

....The most important thing the Republicans have to do is make any default Obama’s responsibility. The way to do that is for them to pass today—a “clean” debt ceiling increase to cover a period of two or three months and keep the government shut down. Forget passing anything else, including any conditions attached to the debt ceiling increase. Obama and Reid will use whatever appendages a bill has attached to it as an excuse to turn it down.If the Republicans do that,there’s still a chance to turn the tables on Obama......The key is to keep the government shut down while...

Here’s some free market advice to GOP legislators at all levels thinking about introducing bills supporting the state health exchanges under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA): Be prepared to wear the “Care” moniker around your name. You know? As in HillaryCare, RomneyCare or ObamaCare. Colorado’s Amy Stephens, a Republican state representative from El Paso County, was once considered a future Lt. Governor, or member of Congress. Instead, she may have flamed out her career by sponsoring a bill that would opt Colorado out of ObamaCare by implementing a so-called “health exchange” under PPACA. Yet that didn’t stop...

>It’s clear that liberals like David Plouffe and David Sirota have a moral duty to kill me. And to kill you too. Plouffe says I’m a traitor, since I support “economic treason.” David Sirota says I’m a “secessionist,” that I support a “coup” leading to the destruction of the Union. This is the kind of mature, carefully-considered insight I’d expect to be tweeted by the “Senior Advisor to the President.” I expect nothing less from a writer at Salon.com, a website that has nearly achieved its goal of tying the page view rankings of its main competitor, NaughtyElderlyCheerleaderAction.org. These trendsetters...

Will the initiative remain with aggressive Southern reactionaries, as their fellow Americans try to appease them or react on a case-by-case basis against a feint here or a diversion there? Or will an aroused national majority, tired of being pushed around by a selfish Southern minority of the shrinking American white majority, finally fight back?When I have described the well-considered, coherent political and economic strategies of the conservative white South, as I have done here, here and here, I am sometimes been accused of being a “conspiracy theorist.” But one need not believe that white-hooded Dragons and Wizards are secretly...

After Republicans drifted for years without a pilot, Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee have taken the helm of the GOP, steering their party and its grassroots into a much-needed, head-on battle with the Democrats. On the campaign trail on the way to his win in November 2012, President Barack Obama promised to finish the work he’d gone to Washington to do: “fundamentally transforming the United States.” Things look tough for the right in Washington today, but the reality is these three conservative Republicans, aided by friends in the Senate and the House, have dragged the president’s ambitious agenda to...

With all the talk about debt ceilings,budgets, and partisan bickering,it seems the story of Sarah Hall Ingram is taking a back seat. She's the IRS official who, according to a Watchdog.Org analysis of White House visitor records,made 165 visits to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to meet with an Obama White House Official--with whom she had already shared confidential taxpayer information via email.According to 2012 emails obtained by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Ingram was email buddies with Jeanne Lambrew,deputy assistant to the president for health policy, and White House health policy advisor Ellen Montz. So,in addition to possibly sharing...

The dance we are watching this weekend is a very important moment in modern American history with big implications for how the executive and the legislative branches interact in the future. The House Republicans have staked out a position that they can use their constitutional power of the purse to force the President to negotiate over key issues. President Obama and Senate Democratic Leader Reid believe they can break the House Republicans and force them to reopen the government and pass a debt ceiling hike with no negotiations and no conditions. Senate Republicans are split between a majority who want...

It was only a matter of time before the clash of ideologies between Constitutional conservatives and statist progressives manifested itself in a call for a ‘benevolent dictator’ to resolve the differences in authoritarian fashion. The hyper-educated Chris Hayes of MSNBC echoed such calls, which have occurred under the Obama administration before in various guises. Hayes appeals to “astute” analysts of American politics at The Washington Post, Slate, and New York magazine, and spoke with one of them — Jonathan Chait.Hayes says that there is a “growing consensus� that the nation’s law of the land is “fatally flawed,� and therefore we...

WASHINGTON — Next year was supposed to be a prime opportunity for Republicans to retake the Senate. And for a while, everything seemed to be breaking their way: a wave of Democratic retirements, a fluke in the electoral map that put a large number of races in states that President Obama lost, a strong farm team of conservative Senate hopefuls from the House. Then the government shut down. Now, instead of sharpening their attacks on Democrats, Republicans on Capitol Hill are being forced to explain why they are not to blame and why Americans should trust them to govern both...

Neanderthals and Narcissists in the age of incoherence. ”Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people, in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an incorrect or deviant decision-making outcome. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative ideas or viewpoints, and by isolating themselves from outside influences.” (Source: Wikipedia) One of the stark ironies in this age of incoherence is the clash between post-modern presuppositions, and reality. For example, the prevailing presupposition appears to be: we can print money endlessly, spend this...

As our divided government attempts to resolve the partial shutdown and debt ceiling fights, there is renewed talk of some type of “grand bargain” that could involve significant cuts to federal spending and entitlements. Resolving America’s fiscal crisis requires hard choices, but any “grand bargain” must ensure that we continue to fulfill our promises to the men and women who served. During the worst days of World War II, Winston Churchill famously said, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” Don’t these same words apply today to the “few” who...

Since the Beltway occupants are mostly taking a day off from the Shutdownpalooza, perhaps we can do likewise, at least for a little while. Tomorrow is one of the more frequently debated of the federal holidays – Columbus Day – and Christopher Wanjek assembled some of the most common misconceptions about Christopher Columbus himself. I thought I might open these up for discussion – as well as the “controversy� over the holiday itself – because I wasn’t even familiar with a couple of them. His first myth is that “Columbus set out to prove the world was round.� After scratching...

The headline of the full-page ad asks, "What Would Jesus Cut?—A budget is a moral document." The text continues, "Our faith tells us that the moral test of a society is how it treats the poor." The ad was produced by Sojourners, a self-described "evangelical" organization whose slogan is "Faith in Action for Social Justice." The ad was signed by Sojourners president Jim Wallis and more than two dozen Religious Left pastors, theologians, and activists. They urge our legislators to ask themselves, "What would Jesus cut?" from the federal budget. How would you answer that question? My answer would...

President Obama has now officially announced his intention to nominate Janet Yellen, current vice chair of the Federal Reserve, to succeed current chair Ben Bernanke. And while Yellen is likely to receive a frosty reception from Republicans, she has a very good chance of garnering the necessary 60 votes needed to achieve Senate confirmation. She will of course break new ground as the first female head of the Fed, but will also sadly represent a continuation of the Fed’s current policies and long history of repeated failures. If you’ve made a fortune riding the various Fed-induced asset bubbles, Yellen...

In 2009, President Obama told Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA), “Elections have consequences, and I won.” As with his healthcare law, amid this year’s impasse, he said “there will be no negotiations on the debt ceiling” and “I shouldn’t have to offer anything” in dealing with Republicans. To ensure that Americans got the message, the National Park Service was told “to make life as difficult for people as we can,” one frustrated ranger informed reporters. As the White House, Democrats and Republicans remain at an impasse over debt limits, the budget and the growing disaster that is Obamacare, the situation...

The First Amendment protects assembly, speech and the resources that make speech possible. Yet the rules governing political speech in the United States are fraught with limits, red tape and restrictions so complex that the average person is deterred or unable to engage in the process. The Supreme Court has long recognized that limits on campaign contributions infringe on First Amendment rights. This week, the court is considering whether there is a compelling government interest in limiting the size of political contributions that justifies those intrusions on the right to free speech. On Oct. 8, the Supreme Court heard oral...

Depressed? Nearly suicidal after struggling for 72 hours straight to follow the federal decree commanding you to purchase an Obamacare policy online? Scared? Unable to sleep, needing desperately to reconcile a nearly $17 trillion (and growing) national debt with the massive increases in the number of your fellow citizens on food stamps and federal disability programs amid the economy beginning to tailspin recently at even the hint that the Federal Reserve might stop pumping easy money into the system each month? Relax. Don’t worry. Help is on the way. (Pssst. It starts with earmarks.) Even with the federal government shutdown...

You would have had to be under a rock to miss our President stating that recently. He mouthed that repeatedly during the budget debate and the government shutdown. It became his mantra leading up to the impending vote for raising the debt ceiling. The constitutional lawyer was apparently absent the day they taught that we have three co-equal branches of government. More than anything else, Mr. Obama apparently does not understand how the debt ceiling works. President Obama has regularly repeated “I will not negotiate over the full faith and credit of the United States.” Certainly he may mean that,...

The Republican Party is at war with itself. It's divided over how best to shrink the federal budget and how to undo President Obama's healthcare law. Behind the GOP crackup over the government shutdown lies a much bigger battle for control of the party. And the most important actors aren't Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and the tea party members of the House who brought us the government shutdown. The party rift's chief driver is a constellation of hard-line conservative fundraising groups, led in part by a former senator most Americans couldn't pick out of a lineup, Jim DeMint of South...

Sometimes polls state the obvious. Sometimes they surprise. The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal and Gallup surveys, which landed late last week during the government shutdown, did both. Republican pollster Bill McInturff and Democratic pollsters Peter Hart and Fred Yang conducted the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. All are longtime practitioners, but even they seemed startled by the findings. McInturff wrote in an analysis, “Overall, this is among the handful of surveys that stand out in my career as being significant and consequential.” Hart called the findings “jaw-dropping.”

Skeptics warned from the start that it was a suicide mission for Republicans to shut down the federal government in a long-shot attempt to defund Obamacare. Now that such dire predictions have come to pass, the lawmakers who engineered the shutdown are getting the conflagration — and the martyrdom — they sought. Call it the Cruzifiction of the GOP. At least so far, the standoff has been a political bloodbath for Republicans. And maybe that’s exactly what was needed to right the political system: The effort to gut Obamacare had to crash like this so that Republican leaders and lawmakers...

To some outside California, Gov. Jerry Brown always will be kooky Gov. Moonbeam, no matter what he does. To California Democrats, however, Brown is the political mastermind who persuaded voters to approve a ballot measure to increase taxes -- no small feat, considering that 65 percent of voters rejected a similar measure by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2009. The increased revenue and an improving economy lifted Sacramento out of its habitual shortfalls. To some Sacramento Republicans who fought Brown's efforts to put the tax increases before the voters, Dao Gov has become an object of worship. They call Brown...

Since the single topic of the press conference that President Obama staged with his party's media collaborators on Tuesday, 8 October 2013 revolved around the topic of what could happen if the U.S. government chooses to default on its debt obligations, or as will more likely be the case, doesn't default on those obligations and instead doesn't spend as much as U.S. politicians would like it to spend, we thought we would go straight to the bottom line and find out how much the U.S. economy would be affected. But first, we'll need some numbers, which CNBC tracked down for...

Our question for today is: What does next Wednesday’s Senate election in New Jersey mean to those of us who don’t live in New Jersey? Lonegan says that if he wins, President Obama will instantly “fold” on health care reform. Actually if Lonegan wins, President Obama will probably faint. Along with a lot of other people, including every Republican senator who has not been yearning for a new friend who’s even crazier than Ted Cruz. White men of New Jersey, we understand that you’re irked about the way the world is going and that it makes you feel better to...

For most congressional Republicans, opposition to the Affordable Care Act is a simple matter of political math. Democrats represent most districts where the greatest numbers of uninsured residents reside. Republicans, in turn, need not rely on the votes of the people who lack health insurance and would gain most from Obamacare.

Moments ago, I responded to a reader James from the UK regarding automation on farms. James commented that he only need one laborer where decades ago it took 25 men to do the same job. James asked "If we displace 90% of the workforce in the next 100 years - and we could well exceed this, given rapidly increasing levels of automation (with humanoid robots becoming commonplace in this time-frame) - how will the aggregate consumer afford to consume the average product? The level of work loss seems likely to exceed the level of new product development." My Reply...

I’m a very straight-laced guy. Some would even say boring. I’ve never done drugs, for instance. But not because they’re illegal. I’ve never done drugs for the reason that I’ve never smoked cigarettes. Just doesn’t seem like a smart thing to do. And I encourage friends and family to have the same approach. "Why Are So Many Violent Criminals Walking Free?" | LearnLibertyBut this isn’t about cost-benefit analysis. Watch this powerful video from Reason TV about how one family has been victimized by drug prohibition. Riverside Cop Tricks Autistic Teen into Buying PotNow ask yourself what purpose it served...

I know way too many folks on the Right that are fighting for “our country” and for “family values”, and yet they don’t “value” their own family. Heck, I know several people that are more well known in Tea Party circles than they are at their own kitchen tables. It’s gross. I know that’s harsh but … someone’s got to say it. Over the last few years my wife and I have spent more time than we’d like listening to haggard tales of marriages that are on the rocks and kids that are jacked up simply because mom or dad...

Recently I got a letter in the mail from the health insurer through which I have coverage as a small business owner. The letter began: "Starting Jan. 1, 2014, we will no longer offer or renew the individual health benefit plan you currently have. We're making this change because of requirements from the new health care reform law, called the Affordable Care Act." After spending a long time with the representative on the phone as he fumbled around trying to figure out how to price a replacement plan, I suggested he call me back when he had the information. He...

Numbers are slowly emerging, and they aren’t good for the president’s “signature piece of legislation.” The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, has been an unmitigated disaster. After three years and $634 million, healthcare.gov has proven itself unable to handle even the traffic a local supermarket website would get. In other words, it’s not a problem of too much traffic crashing servers, the problems lie in the code itself. Just like the problems with the website, the flaws in the program itself are structural. And this fact, provided they don’t screw it up, will be the greatest asset of Republicans going...

.........If Dowd thinks Cruz a radical for taking to the Senate floor with his legitimate grievances about ObamaCare and the underhanded manner in which it was imposed upon the American people,I wonder what she might say about Virginian Patrick Henry's response to the Stamp Act of 1765,which whipped American colonists into an anti-British fervor? Britain,trying to raise tax revenue to pay for the French and Indian War,from which the American colonies benefited,issued an edict requiring a government stamp on newspapers,legal documents,and other items. According to historian H.W. Crocker III, Patrick Henry:... used the Stamp Act to declare that as Caesar...

"...........Since he was first elected in 2008, journalists and pundits have repeatedly exclaimed that Barack Obama is the first president in our history who does not love our country. Being a minister, I always initially refuse a bad report about anyone until there is ample proof; it is the benefit of the doubt. That day has come and gone and I am now among those who believe that Obama actually hates America. He has smashed traditional marriage, exalted homosexual perversion, used the IRS like a battering ram, left border agents, ambassadors, and good soldiers to die without help, raised the...

October 12, 2013 John Boehner: Conservative Hero? Fisher Adams ...But what has happened now?  Which party has been the one asking for negotiations?  The Republicans.  Who have been steadfastly, even proudly proclaiming that they will not negotiate?  The Democrats, led by President Obama. Which party has been passing spending bills, trying to fund vital functions of government so that the "little guy" isn't shut out?  The Republicans.  Which party has refused to vote on any spending bill --  except those that might make them look bad politically?  The Democrats. And now, after Boehner, et al. have made this overture to fund the government for 6 more weeks, who...

The Obama-loving media couldn't wait to report findings from an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll concerning how the public are giving far more blame for the government shutdown to Republicans than the President. What they chose not to report was that 51 percent of respondents in the very same poll said of Barack Obama, "He is putting his own political agenda ahead of what's good for the country": I guess the majority of the nation feeling the President is putting his political agenda ahead of what's good for the country wasn't considered newsworthy by American so-called "journalists." Nor was it...

Trashing the "excessive secrecy" of the Bush administration, Barack Obama came into office pledging open government, but he has fallen far short of that promise. Former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie released their tough report at the Committee to Protect Journalists on the Obama administration’s tight control and aggressive prosecution of leaks. The first sentence: "In the Obama administration's Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press." What sets the Obama administration apart from others, said Downie, is not its attempt to control the media narrative but rather its shameless ability to do so.What’s significant here is...

The only real accountability for the Benghazi scandal will have to come in 2016. **SNIP** Clinton picked four of the five members of the “independent” board, and they were kind enough to show her a draft before they released it to Congress. The ARB assigned all meaningful blame to some mid-level officials. ARB members declined to interview Clinton because, according to testimony by Ambassador Thomas Pickering and Adm. Michael Mullen (the chairman and vice-chairman of the ARB), they determined at the outset that it wouldn’t be necessary. None of the people who were interviewed for the report were under oath....