Free Republic

(Theodore) Roosevelt: An AutopsyONE thinks of Dr. Woodrow Wilson's biography of George Washington as of one of the strangest of all the world's books. Washington: the first, and perhaps also the last American gentleman. Wilson: the self-bamboozled Presbyterian, the right-thinker, the great moral statesman, the perfect model of the Christian cad. It is as if the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday should do a biography of Charles Darwin - almost as if Dr. Wilson himself should dedicate his senility to a life of the Chevalier Bayard, or the Cid, or Christ. . . . But such phenomena, of course, are not...

Xcel Energy-Colorado has filed a request for a new electric rate increase, which follows a recently approved natural gas rate hike and a $182.2 million jump in revenue for electric service that took effect in April. The request submitted to regulators Wednesday proposed a $312.2 million revenue increase. ... Critics of Xcel’s recent rate cases have accused the utility of “a pancaking” of increases. The PUC approved a $64.2 million rise in the utility’s natural gas rates in October. Regulators slashed the utility’s original proposal by $138 million. ... If the increase is approved, the typical residential bill would rise...

As all government, in its essence, is organized exploitation, and in virtually all existing forms it is an implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man.In theory, it invades his liberty and collars his money only in order to protect him, but in truth it always makes a stiff profit on the exchange. That profit represents the income of the professional politicians, nine-tenths of whom are simply professional rogues. They employ a great many technicians to carry on the ostensible functions of government, and some of those technicians are honorable and competent men, but the politicians themselves are seldom either....

  At last week's Republican convention, Trump proclaimed to the working people of America: "I am your voice".  It was an admission of something Trump supporters have known all along: Trump is the champion of WE THE PEOPLE. Yet thirteen months and 10,000 media stories later, the journalist class is still in denial about what Trump is about.  Plus he's been called "vulgar" and "not Presidential" by elite pundits like Bill Kristol, George Will, and countless others. Well, as usual, my good FRiend HarleyLady27 clears away smoke in order, as she explain in a recent comment: The man can...

Harken back four years ago and recall how the media confidently predicted a Hillary Clinton landslide electoral victory over Donald Trump. They held firm to this prediction even when the election was all but over. At 10:20 PM ET on November 8, 2016, election night, the New York Times confidently proclaimed, in the manner of Baghdad Bob, that Hillary Clinton had an 85 percent chance of winning the election. Long faces and tears graced cable news election night coverage shows by then and Hillary probably was on her second bottle of chardonnay, drowning her sorrows over a coronation that was...

Today's Quotefall Puzzle features a quote by H. L. Mencken. Click puzzle (or click here) for full size rendition, then use your browser's print command to print puzzle. H. L. Mencken was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic and scholar of American English. He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians and contemporary movements, mainly for the Baltimore Sun back when it was part of America. All hints, along with the answer, are provided in the first reply comment below, using filtered font to prevent accidental spoilers. Please refrain from disclosing the full answer in comments to prevent...

Today's Quotefall Puzzle features a quote by H.L. Mencken. Click puzzle (or click here) for full size rendition, then use your browser's print command to print puzzle. H.L. Mencken was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic whose distrust of government was tempered only by his wit regarding cigar haters. All hints, along with the answer, are provided in the first reply comment below, using filtered font to prevent accidental spoilers. Please refrain from disclosing the full answer in comments to prevent spoilers.To solve the puzzle: Enter the letters in the top half (letter columns) of the puzzle into the white squares...

H.L. Mencken once suggested that legislative seats be filled at random instead of by election. Admittedly, Mencken wrote that doing so might result in the selection of idiots. But, he said, “No matter how stupid they were, they could not be more stupid than the average legislator under the present system. Certainly, they’d be measurably more honest, taking one with another.” Here are some random musings from the last several days of Idaho lawmaking that makes Mencken’s proposal seem brilliant. On education: The Senate passed a bill to require elected school board trustees undergo mandatory training, conducted by the State...

Florida Congressman Carlos Curbelo is getting ready to introduce a bill repealing the gas tax in exchange for a carbon tax. It seems rather odd the Miami Republican wants to chart this path, especially after the House GOP overwhelmingly denounced the notion of a carbon tax last week, but Curbelo isn’t backing down from his proposal. He told Miami Herald his proposal is just a “first step” in the discussion. When you ask this question in a vacuum, is any tax detrimental to economic growth? It’s usually going to be yes…But when you put it in context and you...

A 98 year-old prophecy is fulfilled. H.L. Mencken (born 1880 - died 1956) was a journalist, satirist, critic and registered Democrat. Mencken wrote the editorial below while working for the Baltimore Evening Sun, which appeared in the July 26,1920 edition. "As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron." - H.L. Mencken, the Baltimore Evening...

Anybody remember John Anderson? Let’s not always see the same hands. John Anderson was a Congressman from Illinois who ran as an independent for President in 1980. I remember him well, because I was involved in his campaign from the beginning. Yes, all my life I’ve had a penchant for lost causes. Call it the Rhett Butler syndrome – Rhett joined the Confederacy only after the burning of Atlanta. I wrote a key memorandum to John Anderson urging him to drop out of the Republican Party and out of a debate in Dallas on 22 March as I recall, declare...

Ann Coulter shocked nobody last week by calling presidential candidate John Edwards a "faggot" during her appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Here's the YouTube video, as well as the quotation captured by the Associated Press: "I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I—so kind of an impasse, can't really talk about Edwards." It's true that the Democratic Party leaders displayed outrage. The Edwards campaign e-mailed the Coulter news to its supporters, calling...

A Bum's Christmas By H.L. Mencken Despite all the snorting against them in works of divinity, it has always been my experience that infidels--or freethinkers, as they usually prefer to call themselves--are a generally estimable class of men, with strong overtones of the benevolent and even of the sentimental. This was certainly true, for example, of Leopold Bortsch, Totsaufer [customers' man] for the Scharnhorst Brewery, in Baltimore, forty-five years ago. . . . He was a sincere friend to the orphans, the aged, all blind and one-legged men, ruined girls, opium fiends, Chinamen, oyster dredgers, ex-convicts, the more respectable sort...

I’ll be brief this time about Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans. Due to stupidity and incompetence, he did not carry out the evacuation plan for his city. As a result, more than a thousand of his constituents died, and tens of thousands suffered personal disaster, and had to be rescued by the Coast Guard and the National Guard. There was an established evacuation plan for Southern Louisiana, dated 1 January, 2004. Local and national media were incompetent in not reporting this plan and its details. The salient point was that the mandatory evacuation had to be called early, to...

<p>Last week, the powers-that-be installed a new stoplight in Highlands, NC. It’s on Carolina Way at the intersection with US 64, just east of Main Street. That makes four stoplights we have now. And it raises the question of why the 99.44% of my readers who live in a town larger than 1,000 people should care in the least bit about this major civic improvement.</p>

Given that the teaching of black studies is today dominated by privileged incompetents and political hacks who teach – in one of Schuyler’s favorite words -- hokum, I suppose it is fitting that they either disparage or ignore George S. Schuyler. After all, they hold the greatest of all black Americans, Booker T. Washington, in contempt, so why should Schuyler fare any better?George Samuel Schuyler was born in 1895 in Providence, Rhode Island, the son of a chef, and grew up in Syracuse, New York. He served six years in the U.S. Army (1912-1918), eventually attaining the rank of First...

Well, it's Black History Month, and I'll bet you haven't heard one thing about George S. Schuyler (1895-1977). George S. Schuyler was, simply, the greatest black journalist this country has ever produced. (Normally, I eschew qualifiers like "greatest black," as opposed to "greatest," period, but this is journalism we're talking about. I will never, in five lifetimes of sitting in newspaper morgues, looking at microfilms of ancient newsprint, be able to read enough to determine who America's greatest journalist was.) From 1924-1966, he bestrode the black press like a colossus. Working for Robert Lee Vann's (1879-1940) Pittsburgh Courier weekly newspaper,...