Free Republic

Julian Castro is a smiling bundle of energy whose past includes being mayor of San Antonio and whose future may include a spot on a national Democratic ticket -- say, as a nicely balanced running mate for a presidential nominee who is a white female from New York. Right now, though, he is secretary of Housing and Urban Development, or what he calls "the Department of Opportunity." As that label suggests, Castro is a staunch believer in the value of government involvement in the housing market. He came to Chicago recently to tout the many ways in which Washington can...

CHICAGO — Mayor Rahm Emanuel had just finished the quintessential municipal politics photo op, briefly inspecting a dusty street-paving project on a block of the South Side lined with tidy brick bungalows. As his opponent, Jesus G. Garcia, along with supporters in labor and the left, tried to paint Mr. Emanuel as the candidate of the “1 percent,” the mayor made sure to banter with hard-hatted city workers on this Tuesday afternoon before making his way to a waiting sport utility vehicle. But when a reporter asked him about a labor leader’s accusation that he is too sympathetic to corporations,...

“How can you call yourself a Christian, let alone a minister?!” I get asked that question frequently and the questioner is hostile more often than not. Still, I like to answer it if I believe the questioner is sincere. Though I self-identify as a Christian and I am an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), I raised eyebrows a few years ago when I posted an article on my website about how my personal beliefs don’t align with those of most Presbyterians. For example, I believe that: - Religion is a human construct - The symbols of faith are...

resident Obama’s concern about “middle class economics” is justified. But as I pointed out in a previous post, his prescriptions would do almost nothing to solve the problems. According to a private sector estimate, the benefit for families in the middle from all of the Obama proposals would be a paltry $12 a year. According to the Treasury Department, the benefit would be closer to $150. Either way, it’s small potatoes. If you don’t understand the problem – or won’t acknowledge it even if you do understand it – you are unlikely to find a solution that works. Here is...

Everywhere we turn the Democrats are sounding more like Benito Mussolini every day. They’ve become the fascist party. Fascism is a system of government where the party in power forcibly suppresses opposition and criticism. We’re seeing over the issue of same-sex sexuality, ‘gay rights,’ homosexuality, whatever you want to call it. Any opposition will be shut down, fined, and put out of business. The call for toleration is the foot in the door to political, economic, and social repression, and once the objective has been achieved, toleration discarded. The ideological door is now shut. No more debates, and you will...

Perhaps the decisive factors in combating poverty and enabling upward mobility were not economic but cultural — the habits, mores and dispositions that equip individuals to take advantage of opportunities. This was dismaying because governments know how to alter incentives and remove barriers but not how to manipulate culture. The assumption that the condition of the poor must improve as macroeconomic conditions improve was to be refuted by a deepened understanding of the crucial role of the family as the primary transmitter of the social capital essential for self-reliance and betterment. Family structure is the primary predictor of social outcomes,...

In opposing the godless and bloody French Revolution, Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, concluded that, “I should therefore suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France, until I was informed how it had been combined with government; with public force; with the discipline and obedience of armies;…with morality and religion;…with peace and order; with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things too; and, without them, liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue long. The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what...

The Presbyterian Church (USA) is the Radio Shack of church denominations. It’s been in free fall for so long that it’s sometimes difficult to believe the church is still around. It makes news only when it makes bad news. This is a church that has long embraced a culture of death by accepting abortion on demand. Indeed, church materials have declared that abortion can even be “an act of faithfulness before God,” and church policy states: “The considered decision of a woman to terminate a pregnancy can be a morally acceptable, though certainly not the only or required, decision.”...

A 2008 ban on new fast-food restaurants in South L.A. has failed to cut the obesity rate, a Rand study saysSeven years ago, Los Angeles made national headlines with a novel attempt to reduce obesity in South L.A. by banning new fast-food restaurants. But a new study found the effort has not achieved its intended goal. A Rand Corp. report released Thursday says that from 2007 to 2012, the percentage of people who were overweight or obese increased everywhere in L.A., but the increase was significantly greater in areas covered by the fast-food ordinance, including Baldwin Hills and Leimert Park.The...

An associate sociology professor at Penn State University faces disorderly conduct charges.... .... 52-year-old Karen Halnon started a rant about U.S-Venezuela relations about half way through a Saturday flight from Nicaragua to Miami. A passenger on the plane caught the rant on video, which was posted on local television websites. It also showed her lighting a cigarette and blaming it on another passenger.

Only weeks after leaving office on Jan. 20, 2017, former President Barack Obama discovers a leak under his sink, so he calls Troy the Plumber to come out and fix it. Troy drives to ObamaÂ’s new house, which is located in a very exclusive, gated community near Chicago where all the residents have a net income of way more than $250,000 per year. Troy arrives and takes his tools into the house. He is led to the guest bathroom that contains the leaky pipe under the sink. Troy assesses the problem and tells Obama that itÂ’s an easy repair that...

EVERY talking head in the United States has spent the last week prattling on about Hillary Clinton’s emails.Fair enough. The former Secretary of State violated government rules in an apparent effort to keep her correspondence safe from scrutiny. That’s no small matter. But in the meantime, another politician has come from nowhere to dethrone Jeb Bush as the frontrunner for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. His name’s Scott Walker.A few months ago, Walker was an obscure underdog with little more than an outside chance of becoming the nominee. Now he’s being seriously considered for the most important job on the...

".....It is the telltale sign of what the late Mr. Buckley once called the liberal “mania.” Said Buckley: “Cross a liberal on duty, and he becomes a man of hurtling irrationality.” A point perfectly illustrated by this latest from Eric Burns.How in the world does it make sense that Bill O’Reilly—quite visibly and openly not a “right-winger” — gets to be the head of a cult of right-wingers?... how in the world does Fox News get to be a cult — but not liberalism and the liberal media that marinates in said liberalism?One of the striking factors of modern American...

“Is Liberalism Exhausted?” Jonah Goldberg wondered recently at National Review, surveying a movement that seems to have run out of intellectual gas after six years of dragging Barack Obama uphill. [...] All true, but to quote Obama’s presumptive successor on the Democrat ticket in 2016: “What difference, at this point, does it make?”It’s true that liberalism doesn't have anything exciting and new to offer – even its plans for the Internet are drawn from 1930s telephone legislation – but the only thing the Left is really tired of is selling its ideas to skeptics. It’s largely given up on that effort in exchange for...

It wasn’t enough for the residents of Wingnut Nation to argue in defiance of facts that Barack Obama was not born in America. Some of them even cling to the belief he is an agent of radical Islam sent to destroy our country by, I don’t know, raising the minimum wage. Despite all the preaching, pleading and warnings of doom from Donald Trump, American voters elected this man to the highest office in the free world. Twice. So what’s next? Step right up, Rudy Giuliani, America’s mayor. He charges the president, leader of these United States, with the high crime...

President Barack Obama wants Americans to dig deeper into our pockets to expand college education. Let's update college indoctrination done in the name of education. Cornell University assistant professor Russell Rickford, in a lecture titled "Ferguson: The Next Steps," told a packed auditorium: "Let's be very clear about what's going on. It's one every 28 hours. Dead black bodies in the street is a sacrifice America makes to the gods of white supremacy." He added: "The propertied classes leverage state violence to discipline, repress and contain them. America fears and despises all poor people." Blake Armstrong, a South Texas College...

The good thing about a book like Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America is that it's real reportage about murder in the African American ghetto; it's not just narrative from the usual social justice warriors. Author Leovy's angle is that routine murder in African American ghettos is invisible, in the sense that individual murders don't get a write-up in the paper. So she decided to do something about it, The Homicide Report, a blog that documents each and every murder in LA. Each murder, routine as it is, devastates a family, but the cops only arrest a suspect...

It may not be dead, but it looks mighty worn out. Canaries are not very formidable birds, but they have their uses. For instance, coal miners learned over a century ago that when canaries gag and drop dead at the bottom of the cage, it’s a sign that maybe there’s something wrong with the air in the mine. MSNBC is not a very formidable network, but its wheezing is similarly instructive. MSNBC’s slogan is “Lean Forward,” which has a robust sound to it. But it turns out the phrase is a more apt descriptor of how the Peacock Network’s mini-me...

(CNN)—Talk of American exceptionalism has become headline news, with loud sputtering from Rudy Giuliani, who suggested that President Barack Obama doesn't love America in the same way that the rest of us do. Giuliani wants to dwell on our exceptionalism -- the idea that we're different from other countries, and much better. It's an old idea that Obama took on in the second year of his presidency, when he said: "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."That comment annoyed those who wished him to...

Robert A. McDonald, the secretary of the Veterans Affairs Department, apologized on Monday for falsely claiming last month that he had served in the United States Special Forces. Mr. McDonald, a 1975 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, served in the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, where he completed jungle, arctic, desert warfare and Ranger training, according to his official biography. But his assertion to a homeless veteran in Los Angeles that he was in Special Forces — captured on camera for a CBS News report — was false, he acknowledged on Monday. His initial claim was...