Free Republic

This morning in Washington, the Supreme Court will begin its deliberation of gay marriage. In some three months time, this august body will tell us what the Constitution does or does not say about a supposed right of homosexual people to marry one another. In one regard, it will be a momentous decision. In another, it will be completely meaningless. It all depends on your definition of truth. And about what America’s current fascination with gay marriage says about its ancestors and roots. Because this change in fundamental human definition plays havoc with any concept of absolute truth, and it...

The Tea Party was just for show. It was a demonstration. A dust up driven by the anger of people unhappy with arbitrary and vexing taxes. It made the news, it has passed into our heritage, but it didn’t mean that much. The Tea Party was only a milestone on the path to freedom. The rubber met the road at the Lexington green and the Concord bridge. In Lexington and Concord, it all got real. Pushed and pushed and pushed some more, at Lexington and Concord, the cause of American freedom stood up on its feet and fought. This was...

A radio talk host who asked a woman whose brother had been acquitted of criminally negligent homicide how it felt to have a "cold-blooded murderer" as a sibling is immune from a defamation suit because his remarks were "obviously intended to be caustic and confrontational, rather than factual," the Appellate Division, Fourth Department, has held in Gisel v. Clear Channel Communications, 11-01968. The panel concluded that Rochester-area talk show host Robert Lonsberry's statements were "nonactionable expressions of pure opinion." The dispute involved a conversation that Lonsberry had on air with a woman whose brother was found not guilty of a...

The president went to the Pentagon yesterday to announce that we have a new defense posture. Essentially, we are to bend over and grab our ankles. The ship of state is being scuttled. The dramatic decline in America’s security which has taken place through the three years of the Obama Administration is being capped with the gutting of the Armed Forces. First he broke the Army through over-extension in Afghanistan. Then he stood by as stable governments across north Africa fell to essentially Islamist revolutions. Now he says that we need to cut the troops. The Army – which has...

I swear at the TV. Not when anyone’s around, and not to be obnoxious, but as a vocal outlet for the private conversation in my head. I’m nuts that way. In my head, I’m doing running commentary on life all the time. Usually, it’s no more substantive than the observation that, no ma’am, you shouldn’t be wearing stretch pants, or that, yes sir, you are the biggest moron God ever made. That’s going on in my head all the time. And sometimes it comes out. Like when I’m watching a sitcom and I will let loose a hyena laugh. Or,...

The news is good at “what.” It isn’t very good at “why.” Like this story yesterday, about the growing disparity in net worth between whites and non-whites in America. Specifically, while the average white person in America has a net worth of about $113,000, the average black person has a net worth of about $5,000 and the average Latino person comes in at around $6,000. That was the news. Whites are financially worth more than blacks, and that gap is growing significantly, to its greatest point in 25 years, in fact. That was all that was said. That was the...

Poverty rose significantly in America last year. That’s what the government says. Common sense, however, says something different. Common sense says that, compared to the standard of history and the rest of the world, there is no poverty in America. Don’t shoot me yet. I’m not saying people don’t have it hard. I’m not saying people don’t have financial catastrophes. I’m not saying there isn’t an economic underclass. I’m not saying people don’t go to bed wondering where they’re going to find the money they need. I know about financial hard times. And I know about doing without. But I...

The light bulb is dead. The incandescent bulb which has pushed back the night since an American named Thomas Edison invented it, will soon be no more. It was killed, like the innovation it symbolizes, by the federal government. In one more demonstration of the we-know-better-than-you arrogance which has come to define Washington, the switch has been flipped on the light bulb’s last chance at life. In a vote earlier this week, 233 voted to keep the bulb and 193 voted to get rid of it, but in the new-math world of parliamentary procedure, the bulb still lost. Actually, the...

My little boy wants to be an astronaut. Or a beekeeper. He wants to go to space, but he likes honey, so, in the summer between kindergarten and the first-grade, he’s facing a dilemma. Realistically, of course, he will never be an astronaut. He wasn’t born in Russia or China. And for the foreseeable future, that’s where all the spacefarers will come from. As of today, America is out of the space business. We don’t make the Right Stuff anymore. I was born in 1959, and America landed on the moon for my 10th birthday. For all of my life,...

Saudi Arabia bans Jews. Really. That came to light recently with public disclosure that Delta Airlines had, as part of an agreement with the government of Saudi Arabia, agreed not to fly any Jews to the Muslim kingdom. Nor can the American air carrier transport any items forbidden by Muslim law, to include alcohol and non-Muslim religious items. Translation: Leave your Bible at home. No item of non-Muslim religious apparel or worship is allowed in the kingdom and Delta has specifically promised not to carry them. In defending itself, Delta says that it is merely observing the culture and law...

On six packs of beer they will put pictures of gosh-awful ugly women who you will be tempted to sleep with if you drink the contents. Ice cream containers and packages of steaks will have photographs of cottage-cheese thighs and clogged arteries. Table saws will have pictures of severed fingers and New Year's champaigne will have images of crippled livers. The possibilities are endless. The government has decided that it has the power to put images on the packaging of consumer products in order to protect the public health and the public good. So, it seems natural to speculate a...

For a week now they’ve been scolding us. The liberals who hate America, the ones who dominate the media and the pulpit. They’ve been telling us that the spontaneous and jubilant gatherings in the wake of the death of Osama Bin Laden were somehow savage and undignified, that they were frightful and unchristian, and that we are “better than that.” They are full of crap. And let’s not be confused about what they are doing. Their intent is to beat down patriotism and nationalism. They want to bring the full weight of political correctness to bear to silence the young...

Obama’s not going to cough up the pictures. He’s killed Osama Bin Laden, he says, and we have to take his word for it. This is the same guy who, a week ago, had some 40 percent of the people believing he was born outside the country. Clearly, there are some trust issues. The check is in the mail, I’ll respect you in the morning, and we killed Bin Laden. Trust us, we’ve got proof. But you can’t see it. Which raises the question: If you have proof, and won’t produce it, is it really proof? The problem, the president...

Breathe deep. That’s what defeat smells like. Get used to it. Boehner and the freshmen sold us out.In the first test of the new speaker, in the first demonstration of what the tea party Republicans are made of, they got nothing. They caved. They sold out. And we got screwed. Do this math with me. The deficit is $1.4 trillion. They cut $38 billion. That’s less than 3 percent. And that’s failure. You write a check for $100 more than you have in your account. The bank tells you it’s rubber. So you rip it up and write a check...

They’ve dropped the Glenn Beck TV show. By the end of the year, it will peter off into the sunset. This leaves me torn. To be honest, I’ve become confused and troubled by Glenn Beck. After years of listening and even meeting him a few times, I honestly don’t have him figured out. I don’t know if he’s a prophet or a psycho, an oracle or a charlatan. Sometimes I think he’s a modern Elmer Gantry. But he didn’t deserve this. Honestly speaking, he’s good on TV. He’s very good on TV. I personally think he’s better on TV than...

Let’s talk collective bargaining. Let’s set the record straight about what is happening in Ohio and Wisconsin and Indiana and in a few other vestiges of what used to be America. We have to because the evening news isn’t. As a national controversy seems to rage between government-employee unions and the states that employ them, it’s interesting that the evening news has never actually told us what the fight is about. So let’s do it right now. The news says “collective bargaining.” But collective bargaining about what? Ripping you off. Let’s take Ohio as the most recent example. In that...

There is only one way Jon Huntsman Jr. ends up on a national ballot in 2012. As Barack Obama’s running mate. Democrat vice president, maybe. Republican president, you’ve got to be out of your mind. Silver Spoon Jonny’s dad has bought him a lot of things, but the White House won’t be one of them. Never heard of him? You’re not alone. He’s a pretty boy with nice hair and a fake tan and all the substance of a rice cake. He’s a former governor of Utah and the current ambassador to China and after two years of sitting on...

First they came for our bicycles. Now they’ve come for our guns. One day after word leaked of a New York State plan to require license plates and annual fees for bicycles, information has gotten out about pending legislation that would register and attach a fee to every firearm in the state. Already one of the most anti-gun states in the country, New York’s move would all but nullify the Second Amendment. At issue is Senate Bill 2994, which is linked in its entirety at the bottom of this column. It would require every gun owner in the state to...

Drug test welfare recipients. Seriously. The line forms in the bathroom. If you want the working people of America to support you, then produce a sample, and it better be clean. Because America’s welfare system has turned into the cash cow of the drug economy and some of us have gotten sick and tired of it. Some of us look at people unwilling or unable to provide for themselves and we wonder how they can afford to be continually drunk or stoned. We are bankrolling destructive, illegal conduct and our tax dollar are being used not to relieve suffering in...

I don’t know why people self-destruct. But they often do. I don’t know why politicians fall. But they often do. I don’t know why one small corner of our country – the Rochester region of upstate New York – has been the scene of two humiliating congressional sex scandals in as many years. First it was Eric “Tickle Party” Massa, now it is Chris “Congressman Beefcake” Lee. And after a while it reeks of ancient Rome, and a political class that, by its debauchery and venality, loses the faith and confidence of the people. Regular folks become dispirited, they become...