Free Republic

Many Americans disdain Rush Limbaugh, some of them high-placed and influential. The author of Rush Limbaugh Is a Big, Fat Idiot is now a US senator from Minnesota. The incumbent president of the United States publicly picked a fight with the broadcaster less than a week after being inaugurated. "You can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh," Barack Obama admonished attendees at a White House summit in January 2009. But tens of millions of fans do listen to Limbaugh – fans whose years of loyalty have made him the most important talk-show host in America. Those fans deserved better than Limbaugh's...

(snip)I oppose federal funding of public radio and TV on First Amendment grounds: In my view, Congress has no legitimate authority or reason to control, influence, or subsidize any domestic media. But even those who think Congress does have such power should be able to recognize that public broadcasting would be healthier and happier if it broke its addiction to taxpayer dollars. MoveOn.org, the left-wing pressure group, is promoting a petition that urges Congress to “protect NPR and PBS and guarantee them permanent funding, free from political meddling.’’ Yet political “meddling’’ is the inescapable price of taking political dollars. Conservatives...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Here's Robert in Los Angeles. Robert, welcome, sir, to the EIB Network, great to have you with us. Hello. CALLER: Thank you, Rush. It's a pleasure to talk to you. I just want to take a minute of your time and I want to ask your opinion on something. I constantly keep hearing the president and government officials saying that we need jobs, jobs, and jobs. I have the solution, and I'd like your opinion on this. Domestic manufacturing. We've lost it to China. We have a trade imbalance of about 200 to $300 billion a year....

... Most of the stuff we throw out — aluminum cans are an exception — is cheaper to replace from scratch than to recycle. “Cheaper’’ is another way of saying “requires fewer resources.’’ Green evangelists believe that recycling our trash is “good for the planet’’ — that it conserves resources and is more environmentally friendly. But recycling household waste consumes resources, too. Extra trucks are required to pick up recyclables, and extra gas to fuel those trucks, and extra drivers to operate them. Collected recyclables have to be sorted, cleaned, and stored in facilities that consume still more fuel and...

A fervent supporter of Earl Sholley’s Primary opponent, Sean Bielat, who blogs on behalf of Bielat using the screen name, demolisher, posted a thread at a Massachusetts progressive-republican website, Red Mass Group, entitled "Outstanding Jacoby article on Sean Bielat". The Boston Globe article which was essentially a puff piece by Jeff Jacoby on Bielat entitled "The man out to topple Barney Frank" was seen as an endorsement of Bielat in the Sholley camp by the influential conservative journalist and his ultra liberal Globe editors just days before the two candidates run in the Republican primary on Tuesday.Demolisher conveniently overlooked the...

SPIRIT AIRLINES put a few noses out of joint when it announced this month that it will begin charging passengers between $20 and $45 for carry-on luggage too big to fit under their seats. One of those dislocated schnozzes belongs to US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who pronounced Spirit’s new carry-on fee “outrageous,’’ and growled: “We’re gonna hold the airline’s feet to the fire on this. Because we have an obligation to do it and we have the ability to do it.’’ Asked to characterize the airline’s change of policy, LaHood asserted: “I don’t think they care about their customers.’’

Not all tidings are of great joy by Jeff Jacoby The Boston Globe December 23, 2009 Print Send RSS ShareThis As far back as the 5th century, the Monastery of Abu Fana in Upper Egypt was renowned, in the words of one travel guide, for its "exceptional splendor and prestige." In the 21st century, that grandeur is gone and the monastery has become instead a symbol of the abuse and degradation to which Egypt's ancient Coptic Christian community is regularly subjected. In a room badly damaged during an attack on the monastery in Abu Fana, a Coptic monk wears a...

AS IF the recession hasn’t been rough enough on those near the bottom of the economic food chain, fresh bad news is on the way. Beginning July 24, the federal government will be making it more difficult for employers to hire low-skilled and unskilled American workers. Thanks to an ill-advised law enacted with bipartisan support in 2007, the cost of providing an entry-level job to individuals with few skills or minimal experience will be going up by more than 10 percent. Those who cannot find a job paying at least $7.25 an hour will not be permitted to work. Welcome...

LEGISLATION pending before Congress would dramatically expand the federal hate-crimes law, and a number of critics are concerned that the bill goes too far. Perhaps the real problem is that it doesn't go far enough. Under current law, crimes motivated by bias against a victim's race, color, religion, or national origin can be prosecuted by the federal government, so long as the victim had been engaged in a "federally-protected activity" - attending a public school, for example, or being in a place of public accommodation or entertainment. The proposed Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which passed the House last...

A PROMINENT supporter of Barack Obama told a Washington audience last week that "the Republican Party is in deep trouble" and "getting smaller and smaller" because its views are not in sync with those of mainstream Americans. Republicans would do better without the "nastiness" of Rush Limbaugh or the "very polarizing" Sarah Palin, the speaker said, and they should realize that their philosophy of lower taxes and limited government has put them out of step with their fellow citizens. "Americans do want to pay taxes for services," he told his audience. "Americans are looking for more government in their life,...

JUDICIAL dispassion - the ability to decide cases without being influenced by personal feelings or political preferences - is indispensable to the rule of law. So indispensable, in fact, that the one-sentence judicial oath required of every federal judge and justice contains no fewer than three expressions of it: "I . . . do solemnly swear that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me . . . under the Constitution and laws...

'I SURE HOPE you'll be out of a job soon," e-mails a friend, alluding to The Boston Globe's current excruciations. He really is a friend - he has shown me and my family much warmth and kindness over the years - and should I find myself without a job, I'm sure he would want to help in any way he could. But such is his antipathy to the Globe that he regards my potential unemployment as a price well worth paying for what he calls the "greater good" of the newspaper's demise. My friend is a conservative, and he is...

ANTI-SEMITISM is an ancient derangement, the oldest of hatreds, so it is strange that it lacks a more meaningful name. The misnomer "anti-Semitism" - a term coined in 1879 by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr, who wanted a scientific-sounding euphemism for Judenhass, or Jew-hatred - is particularly inane, since hostility to Jews has never had anything to do with Semites or being Semitic. Perhaps there is no good name for a virus as mutable as anti-Semitism. "The Jews have been objects of hatred in pagan, religious, and secular societies," write Joseph Telushkin and Dennis Prager in "Why the Jews?," their...

PETER SINGER has written a new book. The prominent Australian philosopher, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, argues in "The Life You Can Save" that residents of the affluent West have it within their power to eradicate extreme Third World poverty and its attendant suffering. By donating money to charity instead of spending it on things we don't really need, he writes, everyone can save lives - and when you fail to do so, he suggests, "you are leaving a child to die, a child you could have saved." Singer told the Wall Street Journal last week that he...

SOMETHING to ponder during Black History Month: In the long night that followed Reconstruction, what was the engine that drove Jim Crow? Did segregationist laws codify existing social practice, or was it the laws themselves that segregated the South? Many people might intuitively assume that Southern racism had led to entrenched public segregation long before Southern legislatures made it mandatory. Not so. Separate facilities for blacks and whites were not routine in the South until the early 20th century. Racism there surely was, but as C. Vann Woodward observed in "The Strange Career of Jim Crow," the idea of separating...

Choosing octuplets By Jeff Jacoby Jeff Jacoby Printer Friendly Version Email this article http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The backlash against against Nadya Suleman, the 33-year-old single mother of six who gave birth to octuplets on January 26th, has been fierce. The reactions have ranged from reproach to ridicule to anger. On newspaper editorial pages, radio talk shows, and internet comment boards, Suleman has been derided as a mental case or a mercenary or worse. There has been no outpouring of gifts from corporate America — nothing like the lifetime supply of Pampers that Procter & Gamble provided when the McCaughey septuplets were...

Money for nothing won't grow the economy By Jeff Jacoby Jeff Jacoby Printer Friendly Version Email this article http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Commenting on my recent column about the bloated "stimulus" package making its way through Congress, one reader insisted that what matters most right now is getting money into people's hands. "In the face of rapidly rising unemployment and idle productive capacity, any kind of federal spending will have a stimulus in the short run," he wrote. "Digging holes and filling them in would help to create jobs and consumer demand because those wielding the shovels would earn a paycheck that...

Jewish World Review Jan. 29, 2009 / 4 Shevat 5769 An over-optimistic stimulus plan By Jeff Jacoby Jeff Jacoby Printer Friendly Version Email this article http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Ronald Reagan loved to tell the story of the unfailingly cheerful little boy who wakes up on Christmas morning to find, instead of presents, an immense pile of manure. Undaunted, he grabs a shovel and starts digging. "With all this manure," he says excitedly, "there must be a pony in here someplace!" Is there a pony somewhere in the $825 billion "stimulus" plan that Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives hope to...

Roe and Doe, 36 years on By Jeff Jacoby Jeff Jacoby Printer Friendly Version Email this article http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | A NEW antiabortion TV ad appeared last week, just in time for the inauguration of a president whose support for abortion rights is unqualified. The ad shows the ultrasound image of a fetus in the womb. As the camera slowly moves in, a message gradually appears onscreen:

IN NOMINATING John Holdren to be director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy - the position known informally as White House science adviser - President-elect Barack Obama has enlisted an undisputed Big Name among academic environmentalists. Holdren is a physicist, a professor of environmental policy at Harvard, a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, director of the Woods Hole Research Center, and author or coauthor of many papers and books.

Unemployment is at its highest level in 15 years. Housing prices won't stop falling. The stock market has suffered its most punishing collapse since 1931, and shareholders have lost $7 trillion in wealth. Millions of workers have lost their jobs; millions more are worried about losing theirs. IRAs and 401k accounts have been decimated, and companies are halting their contributions to retirement plans. Retail sales are dragging, the credit markets have seized up, and worse is expected in 2009. The government has gone to unprecedented lengths to improve the economy, yet the economy keeps getting worse. The federal budget deficit...

ISRAEL'S 2006 war against Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist army based in Lebanon, was a disaster - an ill-planned operation that did more damage to Israel's military reputation than to Hezbollah's resolve and influence. Now, as it fights Hamas in Gaza, Israel seems determined not to repeat the mistakes of two years ago

Better than a bailout By Jeff Jacoby Jeff Jacoby Printer Friendly Version Email this article http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | During last week's battle over a federal rescue for Detroit's automakers - after a deal had passed the House but before it collapsed in the Senate - the Gallup Organization summarized its latest findings: "Bailouts Aren't Increasing Consumer Confidence." To put it mildly. More than 60 percent of Americans now rate the economy "poor"; a whopping 82 percent expect economic conditions to get even worse. "Americans seem to be suffering from so-called 'bailout fatigue,' " Gallup observed, "opposing not only the auto bailout,...

PRIDE IS THE first of the deadly sins, and it sometimes seems to be the first prerequisite of a career in public life. Not surprising, really. It takes a certain degree of hubris to think yourself qualified to govern others - and not just to think it privately, but to spend great quantities of money, time, and energy proclaiming it publicly to anyone who will listen. To remain modest and unpretentious while urging voters to elevate you to high office and entrust you with power is a challenge not many elected officials meet. It's a rare politician who is motivated...

Jewish World Review Dec. 10, 2008 / 13 Kislev 5769 Skepticism on climate change By Jeff Jacoby Jeff Jacoby Printer Friendly Version Email this article http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | THE MAIL brings an invitation to register for the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change, which convenes on March 8 in New York City. Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank, the conference will host an international lineup of climate scientists and researchers who will focus on four broad areas: climatology, paleoclimatology, the impact of climate change, and climate-change politics and economics. But if last year's gathering is any indication, the...

THE PRESIDENT of the UN General Assembly, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann of Nicaragua, has denounced the policies of a certain Middle Eastern nation. They are "so similar to the apartheid of an earlier era," he said, "that the world must unite against them, demanding an "end to this massive abuse of human rights" and isolating the offending nation as it once isolated South Africa: with a punishing "campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions." Of which country was he speaking?

WE'VE heard it again and again: The financial crisis was caused by the Bush administration's reckless deregulation. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blames the mess on "the Bush administration's eight long years of failed deregulation policies." Billionaire investor George Soros declares that "excessive deregulation is at the root of the current crisis." Economist Nouriel Roubini pins it on "these Bush hypocrites, who spewed for years the glory of unfettered Wild West laissez-faire jungle capitalism." President Jimmy Carter attributes it to the "atrocious economic policies of the Bush administration," particularly "deregulation and . . . a withdrawal of supervision of Wall Street."...

The 2008 presidential campaign may be over, but Sarah Palin's moment in the spotlight has yet to run its course. In a media marathon last week, the Republican Party's vice presidential nominee sat down for interviews with CNN's Larry King and Wolf Blitzer; had Matt Lauer of the "Today" show up to Wasilla for a family dinner; and told Fox News's Greta Van Susteren about getting the call from John McCain on her cellphone while she was admiring the local produce at the Alaska State Fair. She disdained the Republican "jerks" who spread anonymous rumors painting her as geographically illiterate,...

Playing the race card on gay marriage By Jeff Jacoby http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | It has been widely noted that black voters put California's Proposition 8 over the top last week, with nearly 7 out of 10 voting in favor of the constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. As the magnitude of black opposition to same-sex marriage became clear on Election Day, blogger Andrew Sullivan, a prominent gay-marriage champion, reacted bitterly: "Every ethnic group supported marriage equality," he wrote, "except African-Americans, who voted overwhelmingly against extending to gay people the civil rights once denied them."...

TRACY LaGONDINO is pregnant, and that news has drawn a fair amount of attention. It's been in People magazine, on "Oprah," all over the Internet. Tracy's baby, due in July, is doing well. But Tracy has a serious problem, and the rest of us do, too. A 34-year-old who grew up in Hawaii and used to compete in beauty contests - she was once a finalist in the Miss Hawaii Teen USA pageant - Tracy, who now calls herself Thomas Beatie, apparently suffers from Gender Identity Disorder, syndrome 302.85 in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association....

As a lifelong conservative, I wish McCain evinced a greater understanding that limited government is indispensable to individual liberty. Yet there is no candidate in either party who so thoroughly embodies the conservatism of American honor and tradition as McCain, nor any with greater moral authority to invoke it. For all his transgressions and backsliding, McCain radiates integrity and steadfastness, and if his heterodox stands have at times been infuriating, they also attest to his resolve. Time and again he has taken an unpopular stand and stuck with it, putting his career on the line when it would have been...

Is liberalism contagious? For some years, Jeff Jacoby has been a brave and lonely conservative voice on the op-ed pages of the Boston Globe, one whose voice I have admired. All the more disappointing, then, to read his column this morning, The demonizing of illegal immigrants, could just have as easily been written by colleague Thomas Oliphant, the quintessential effete East Coast liberal. Consider these excerpts: Illegal immigrants don't steal across the Mexican border because they lack the patience to wait their turn in line. They do it because there is no line for them to wait in. The great...

THE 110TH Congress convened under new management last week, and in the House of Representatives, Democrats got ready to plow through an ambitious pile of legislation . Among the items on their punch list: increasing the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, expanding publicly funded embryonic stem cell research, cutting the interest rate on student loans, and imposing price controls on Medicare prescription drugs. A more liberal policy agenda isn't all that will be moving into the spotlight. There will be a heightened focus on liberal arguments as well -- which means we'll be hearing more about good intentions and...

There have been many articles lately about attempts by those on the left to silence their opponents. Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe, Peggy Noonan at the Opinion Journal and Victor Davis Hanson at Real Clear Politics, to name three such journalists, claim that the problem that exists is that liberals have been out of office for so long that they have become increasingly angry and frustrated – and that it is this anger and frustration that leads them to try to shut down or shout down any opposing viewpoints than their own. I disagree. I think the whole history...

A rollback of the Massachusetts income tax rate to 5 percent -- something voters mandated in 2000 by decisively approving Question 4 on the state ballot -- is said to be a key issue in the Bay State's campaign for governor. But that's not quite accurate. To be sure, the candidates have had plenty to say on the subject, especially since an August poll showed that a solid majority of likely Democratic voters want the tax reduced from the current 5.3 percent. The real question at the heart of the candidates' differing positions, though, is not "Should the income tax...

I have many friends who are Democrats. I believe most of them are more moderate than those whose rantings are off the wall, but their silence has been deafening in the face of such episodes as the trashing of Justice Roberts and his family, calling the President a Hitler, equating Guantanamo to Soviet gulags and Nazi concentration camps, exposing secret programs that protect us, the Plame-Wilson cabal, etc., etc., etc. When you stand silently by when something is done in your name, you lend support to that something. Are you going to stand silently by as this film is shown...

SIX YEARS into the Bush administration, are there any new lows to which the Bush-haters can sink? George W. Bush has been smeared by the left with every insult imaginable. He has been called a segregationist who yearns to revive Jim Crow and compared ad nauseam to Adolf Hitler. His detractors have accused him of being financially entwined with Osama bin Laden. Of presiding over an American gulag. Of being a latter-day Mussolini. Howard Dean has proffered the ``interesting theory" that the Saudis tipped off Bush in advance about 9/11. One US senator (Ted Kennedy) has called the war in...

Two anti-Semitic incidents occurred on July 28. Both took place on the West Coast; both involved an American venting his hostility to Jews. But only one of them became in the days that followed a big national story about anti-Semitism. The other was treated as a serious but local matter, and drew only modest coverage around the country. Incident A involved nothing more dangerous than a guy spewing crude anti-Semitic slurs when he was arrested for drunk driving; once sober, he publicly and profusely apologized. Incident B involved a Muslim gunman’s premeditated assault on a prominent Jewish institution; his attack...

TWO INCIDENTS occurred on July 28. Both took place on the West Coast; both involved an American venting his hostility to Jews. But only one of them became, in the days that followed, the big national story about anti-Semitism. The other was treated as a serious but local matter, and drew only modest coverage around the country.

``It's touching that you're so concerned about the military in Iraq," a reader in Wyoming e-mails in response to one of my columns on the war. ``But I have a suspicion you're a phony. So tell me, what's your combat record? Ever serve?" You hear a fair amount of that from the antiwar crowd if, like me, you support a war but have never seen combat yourself. That makes you a ``chicken hawk" -- one of those, as Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, defending John Kerry from his critics, put it during the 2004 presidential campaign, who ``shriek like...

ALL POLITICS is local, Tip O'Neill famously said, and it surely doesn't get any more local than when a 6,000-pound slab from a project championed by the late House speaker falls on a 38-year-old newlywed from Jamaica Plain, crushing her to death as her husband drives her to the airport. O'Neill died in 1994, but the political culture he epitomized is alive and well and enshrined in the Big Dig, a slough of corruption, callousness, and cover-ups that had become a synonym for government mismanagement long before it killed Milena Del Valle on July 10. It would be going too...

"Where was God in those days?" asked Pope Benedict XVI as he stood in Auschwitz last week. "Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?" It is the inevitable question in Auschwitz, that vast factory of death where the Nazis tortured, starved, shot, and gassed to death as many as a million and a half innocent human beings, most of them Jews. "In a place like this, words fail," Benedict said. "In the end, there can be only a dread silence, a silence which itself is a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord,...

When Sumathi Athuluri met the man she was destined to marry, it was love at first sight. She sensed at once that Jeevan Kumar, a young physician working on a World Health Organization project to eradicate polio in India, was someone special. And the more she learned about his lifestyle and values, she was telling me the other day by phone from Salem, Mass., where she now lives, "the more I felt he was the man I was looking for." Jeevan was equally taken with Sumathi, a software engineer from Hyderabad who had moved to the United States on an...

"I wondered at first whether the women were exaggerating." The writer is Pamela Bone, a noted Australian journalist and self-described "left-leaning, feminist, agnostic, environmentalist internationalist." She is writing about a group of female Iraqi emigrees whom she met in Melbourne in November 2000. "They told me that in Iraq, the country they had fled, women were beheaded with swords and their heads nailed to the front doors of their houses, as a lesson to other women. The executed women had been dishonoring their country with their sexual crimes, and this behavior could not be tolerated, the then-Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein,...

The Flames of Hate in Alabama By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | February 15, 2006 SUPPOSE THAT in 2005 unknown hoodlums had firebombed 10 gay bookstores and bars in San Francisco, reducing several of them to smoking rubble. It takes no effort to imagine the alarm that would have spread through the Bay Area's gay community or the manhunt that would have been launched to find the attackers. The blasts would have been described everywhere as ''hate crimes," editorial pages would have thundered with condemnation, and public officials would have vowed to crack down on crimes against gays with unprecedented...

NOTHING BRINGS OUT RACIST slurs like an ambitious black man who doesn't know his ''place." So when Maryland's lieutenant governor, Michael Steele, announced his candidacy for the US Senate recently, the bigots reared up. On one popular website, The News Blog, Steele's picture was grotesquely doctored, making him look like a minstrel-show caricature. ''I's Simple Sambo and I's Running for the Big House," read the insulting headline accompanying the picture. This wasn't some white supremacist slime from the right-wing fringe. The News Blog is a liberal site, and the reason for its racist attack on Steele, a former chairman of...

Because Chanukah usually occurs in December, it is sometimes thought of as the "Jewish Christmas." It isn't, of course. And yet it is fair to say that the reason for Chanukah's popularity -- especially in America, where it is the most widely observed Jewish holiday after Passover and Yom Kippur -- is precisely its proximity to Christmas. Chanukah used to be regarded as a minor half-holiday, cheerful but low-key. It has become something bigger and brighter in response to Christmas, which transforms each December into a brilliant winter festival of parties, decorations, and music. Attracted by the joy of the...

''One anecdote from Mosul," said General Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the National Defense University earlier this month. ''There was a police recruiting station. Forty young men lined up to sign up to become Iraqi policemen. A vehicle-borne IED explodes -- kills or badly injures 12 of them. The next day, the 28 remaining return to the same spot to sign up to be policemen. ''And that kind of courage," the general told his audience, ''is being shown across Iraq by literally thousands and thousands of Iraqis who want to serve their country." But...

Last month, by a vote of 237-4, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted a pastoral statement calling for an end to the death penalty. The 20-page document -- "A Culture of Life and the Penalty of Death" -- makes a number of claims. Among them: that the execution of murderers "violates respect for human life and dignity," that it fuels a "cycle of violence [that] diminishes us all," and that "we have other ways to punish criminals and protect society." The bishops acknowledge in passing that Catholic teaching has never banned the death penalty outright or declared it "intrinsically...

Stanley "Tookie" Williams is scheduled to die by lethal injection in California's San Quentin prison next Tuesday. His death will occur nearly 27 years after he brutally murdered Albert Owens, a 7-Eleven clerk in Whittier, Calif., and three members of the Yang family -- Yen-I Yang, Tsai-Shai Yang, and their daughter, Yee-Chen Lin -- at the Brookhaven Motel in Los Angeles. Unlike the peaceful, painless demise awaiting Williams, the deaths of his victims were horrific: He shot each of them at close range with a 12-gauge shotgun, shattering their bodies so that they died in agony. Their suffering amused him....