Free Republic

The Romney campaign has been accused of deliberately getting the Republican presidential candidate booed by black people during his NAACP speech to attract votes 'in certain racist precincts', by MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell. Romney was booed for 15 seconds at the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People conference in Houston on Wednesday when he stated he would 'eliminate' unnecessary programmes like the Obamacare health reform. Democrats united in saying that Romney planned to get booed to appeal to his conservative base. But O'Donnell and his guests went a step further by saying that Romney was making a play...

Hypocrisy is a marvelous lubricant for politics and government. But sometimes hypocritical situations can’t help but provide us with a truer insight into the future that a leader may wish to reveal. Such is the case with President Bush and the current Erich Von Stroheim-style leader of Israel: Ehud Olmert. Foreign policy will obviously be the defining legacy of the second Bush Presidency. I believe historians will ask: Who Lost Israel? The answer: George Bush. Earlier this year Bush himself raised the "Israel issue" when he condemned efforts to link the invasion of Iraq to Israeli pressure. But in his...

As coincidence would have it, Mark Crispin Miller's new book, "Fooled Again" (Basic Books), documenting the Republican theft of the 2004 presidential election, arrived in the same mail delivery with the Jan. 12 edition of the Defuniak Springs Herald, the locally owned weekly newspaper in a Florida panhandle county seat. The Florida panhandle is thoroughgoing Republican. Even Democrats run as Republicans. Nevertheless, the newspaper's editor, Ron Kelley, believes that American political life is measured by something larger than party affiliation. In his editorial, "The Shepherds and the Sheep," Kelley reports that two Florida counties have banned any further use of...

While enjoying the Christmas season in the comfort of your home, take a minute to say a prayer for the wrongfully convicted. American prisons are full of wrongfully convicted persons. Many were coerced into admitting to crimes they did not commit by prosecutors’ threats to pile on more charges. Others were convicted by false testimony from criminals bribed by prosecutors, who exchanged dropped charges or reduced sentences for false testimony against defendants. Not all the wrongfully convicted are poor. Some are wealthy and prominent people targeted by corrupt prosecutors seeking a celebrity case in order to boost their careers. Until...

Free trade has necessary conditions. Today these conditions are not met. This point has escaped Joe Salerno and George Reisman (both writing on Mises.org), as it has a vast number of other people. The case for free trade is based on David Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage. Ricardo addressed the question how trade could take place between country A and country B (England and Portugal in his example) if country B was more efficient in the production of tradable goods (cloth and wine in his example) than A. In other words, if Portugal could produce both cloth and wine at lower cost than...

Is there a person anywhere in the world who still thinks there is an ounce of sanity in the Bush administration? If so, let that person read John Bolton’s orders to Syria in the January 24 online edition of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. [UN Security Council calls on Syria to comply with Lebanon By The Associated Press] Bolton is Bush’s unconfirmed ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton, a neoconservative warmonger, has managed to get the UN Security Council on January 23 to instruct Syria to disband and disarm the Lebanese militias. Bolton says, "I hope in Damascus they read it...

<p>The man who was arrested with his wife at the San Jose airport last week for putting notes in the couple's luggage deriding security screeners said in an interview Monday that authorities overreacted when they jailed the pair for three days.</p>