Free Republic

Much noise has been made about the growing student loan bubble and what kind of impact it will have on the economy when it goes “boom.” It is a reasonable question, but if you are thinking this is just like the housing bubble, or the tech/Internet- stock market bubble, you are wrong. There is no doubt that the rapid spike in student loans over the past five-years has been alarming, especially since the funding and now the risk comes at the expense of taxpayers. However, being accustomed to getting the short end of the stick when the world is turned...

American Thinker received a phone call from an irate Arizona rancher, Kelly, who emphatically stated that she is direct proof that Harry Reid is wrong: the border is not secure. Her story is heartwrenching, scary, and eye opening. Americans need to understand that the statements of the Democrats and the Obama administration regarding the border are completely false. It is bad enough that, because of the president’s direct comments and executive actions, thousands of Central American children have been sent to this country, traveling through a porous border. But after reading Kelly’s harrowing encounter below, Americans should be aware that...

Liberal megadonor Tom Steyer, failing to raise any significant outside money for his global warming Super PAC, turned to one of his San Francisco neighbors for a million dollar check. It was Herb Sandler, the subprime mortgage lender at the heart of the housing crisis, and like Steyer a huge hypocrite. Tom Steyer made his fortune as an international coal financier while enticing investors with a tax-avoidance strategy featuring offshore shelters in the Caymans, Mauritius, and Singapore. Now he's using that fortune to support liberal Democrats who want to hike taxes and deny hardworking Americans access to the same...

Its friends in the media would have us think that Dinesh D’ Souza’s latest cinematic work, America: Imagine a World Without Her, is worth seeing because of the effectiveness with which D’ Souza demolishes the standard leftist charges leveled against the United States. I come away from this film with a dramatically different response. While D’ Souza is to be commended for establishing, by way of quite a few tidbits that promise to be news to most viewers, America hardly has a monopoly on “oppression,” what he gives with one hand D’ Souza takes with the other: D’ Souza not...

"I say it's high time we update the wording of the presidential oath of office, which is specified in Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution." "Update it?" "That's right. Our current president isn't following it much anyhow, so why don't you recite it from the top so we can get to work?" "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." "'I,' you say? Since some want our country to be more...

Dear Mr. President, I write to you today as a concerned citizen of our great nation, standing as a witness against your historic actions on the morning of July 21, 2014, actions which I hope you will one day repudiate with deep remorse and regret. I am referring, of course, to your signing an executive order Monday banning “discrimination” by federal contractors against LGBT people, allowing for no religious exemptions of any kind. This was an outrageous act of discrimination against religion in the name of anti-discrimination, an act of bullying people of faith in the name of the prevention...

The shocking announcement that Microsoft is cutting 18,000 jobs is still sinking in. Most of those employees do not have a realistic chance of obtaining as good a job as the one they are losing. In the United States, the number of engineering jobs has been sharply declining. In 2002 the number of electrical engineering jobs in the United States was 385,000, but despite increased demand for technology, the job total dropped to only 300,000 last year. And that number is not even for American workers, because thousands of these jobs are soaked up by the H-1B visa racket,...

I recently received an email from a reporter asking me to comment on questions of the “when did you stop beating your wife” variety. I receive these near daily from anti-Israel and anti-Semitic publications who accuse me of everything from supporting genocide against Palestinians, to lending my name to African regimes that slaughter their people (they’re referring to my friend President Paul Kagame, who actually stopped the genocide in Rwanda in 1994), to abandoning Michael Jackson. But this one came from a Jewish publication and included these gems: Do I disappear for days, sometimes weeks, into a room where I...

In most such cases, the US does not even acknowledge its responsibility for its own lethal drone attacks, let alone issue an apology. With a predictability that is rapidly becoming mind-numbing monotony, various US officials from the president on down have been stressing the need for Israel to exercise restraint in its counter- terror operation in Gaza so as to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties. In addition to President Barack Obama, this concern has been voiced in recent days in one form or another by none other than US Secretary of State John Kerry, US Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro, as...

Did you know Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was full of corpses when it took off from Amsterdam? Did you know that, for some darkly inexplicable reason, on July 17, MH17 moved off the standard flight path that it had taken every time before, and moved north, toward rebel-held areas outside Donetsk? Or that the dispatchers summoned the plane lower just before the crash? Or that the plane had been recently reinsured? Or that the Ukrainian army has air defense systems in the area? Or that it was the result of the Ukrainian military mistaking MH17 for Putin’s presidential plane, which...

Earlier this month, the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act was celebrated. During the act’s legislative debate, then-Sen. Hubert Humphrey, responding to predictions, promised, “I’ll eat my hat if this leads to racial quotas.” I don’t know whether Humphrey got around to keeping his promise, but here’s my question: Is it within the capacity of black Americans to make it in this society without the special favors variously called racial preferences, quotas, affirmative action and race-sensitive policies? What might a “yes” answer to that question assume and imply about blacks? Likewise, what would a “no” answer assume and imply?...

For the first time this entire election cycle The New York Times Senate forecast at The Upshot predicts Udall has a greater chance of losing reelection than winning (53%-47%). This is a huge deal, as The Upshot tries to go beyond just the polls and factor in other intangibles about a race, such as, incumbency, fundraising, a state’s past election history among others, who the liberals at the NYT want to win. All those factors in The Upshot model lean heavily Udall’s way. Yet, despite this inherent, built-in advantage, Udall can’t overcome one thing: the people of Colorado feel he...

Are the Gazans Who Voted for Hamas Ever Responsible for their Actions?Posted By Daniel Greenfield On July 21, 2014 @ 8:14 pm In The Point | 13 Comments Hamas didn’t just take power. It won an election. There was never any doubt then or before what its favorite tactics involved.The media acts as if the Muslims in Gaza are in a category apart from Hamas, but they’re no more separate than the Japanese were from their government or the Germans were from their government. Less so since Hamas did win an election.That’s the question that Thane Rosenbaum raises. The...

Immigration ‘Reform’: Engineered Destruction of the Middle ClassPosted By Michael Cutler On July 22, 2014 @ 12:45 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 3 Comments Periodically so-called “buzz words” and “buzz phrases” become fashionable.  Of late, the concept of “wage equality” has been bandied about by members of the administration, politicians and some media personalities.In point of fact, on July 15, 2014, the publication “Mail Online” published a report with a self- explanatory title:  “America’s 1 percenters are even richer than we thought: Richest actually control 37 percent of U.S. Wealth”It has been said that “beauty is in the eye of...

Texas to Take Action on Obama’s Border CrisisPosted By Arnold Ahlert On July 22, 2014 @ 12:53 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 5 Comments Texas Governor Rick Perry announced Monday afternoon that he is sending 1,000 members of the Texas National Guard to the U.S.-Mexican border. “Over the years I have repeatedly called on the federal government to live up to its responsibility of protecting this great nation by securing the border,” said Perry, who added that he will “not stand idly by while our citizens are under assault and little children from Central America are detained in squalor.”Under assault might be...

Efforts to proclaim moral equivalence are not always misguided; sometimes each side is equally at fault or close enough. But these efforts are often misguided and unhelpful -- and sometimes harmful. Throughout my life, there has been an increasing trend to attach moral equivalence to all kinds of disputes and conflicts, such as Israel vs. Hamas, which is the subject of a future column. I assume this is mostly an outgrowth of our culture's descent into moral relativism, but it's also a product of our intellectual laziness. We see it everywhere. It is a common practice in describing marriages gone...

"Why do you think President Obama's job rating is falling, even though the economy is recovering?" the interviewer asked. It's a fair question, even though the economy declined 2.9 percent in the first quarter, even though most jobs created in June were part-time, and even though labor force participation remains low. The fact is that the economy is growing, however slowly; jobs are being created, and the unemployment rate is heading down toward what economists consider full employment. And still the president's job rating languishes. What's wrong with the question is an assumption embedded within it, that what voters seek...

Forty-five years ago, there was a day like few others that rallied Americans and changed America forever. Yet I could find but one or two news stories about that momentous occasion and triumph. Do you remember what it was? It's the type of event that America needs now, maybe more than ever before. If you're old enough, you remember July 20, 1969, when 123 million of roughly 200 million Americans were riveted to their televisions, watching astronaut Neil Armstrong 240,000 miles from Earth. As he stepped off the Eagle -- the lunar landing module -- to become the first human...

So, then, what are we supposed to think when the governor of Texas dispatches National Guardsmen to the state border with Mexico in order to deflect the onrush of illegal border-crossers? What are we supposed to do? Do? A strange concept these days. Do something about the Russians and their depraved allies for shooting down a passenger plane? Do something about the depraved crowd of terrorists who provoked Israel into assaulting the tunnels in which they skulk? Do something about those equally depraved Iraqi terrorists now rounding up and expelling Christians from their midst? Do something about the kidnappers of...

Just days after the tragic crash of a Malaysian Airlines flight over eastern Ukraine, Western politicians and media joined together to gain the maximum propaganda value from the disaster. It had to be Russia; it had to be Putin, they said. President Obama held a press conference to claim - even before an investigation - that it was pro-Russian rebels in the region who were responsible. His ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, did the same at the UN Security Council - just one day after the crash! While western media outlets rush to repeat government propaganda on the event,...