Free Republic

Actually the Democrats have been race baiting for decades. And it’s not going away. Using fear and race-polarizing agitation to drive minority voters to the polls is going to be the increasingly overt face of the Democratic Party. They can’t win any other way. What’s new is that the mainstream media has suddenly discovered all of this.Through the years, these same news outlets have wasted no time at all in spotting anything that even hints of Republican race baiting. Take the presidential campaign of 1988.Willie Horton was a black murder convict who raped a white woman and stabbed her boyfriend...

The Times columnist suggests a government crackdown for selling conservative books too quickly. Big-government aficionado Paul Krugman is calling for “public action to curb the power” of an entity he can’t quite bring himself to call a monopoly, even as he nonetheless compares its “abuses” to those of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil company. The subject of his ire? “Amazon.com, the giant online retailer, has too much power, and it uses that power in ways that hurt America,” Krugman whines. “Does Amazon really have robber-baron-type market power? When it comes to books, definitely,” Krugman insists. “Amazon overwhelmingly dominates online book...

Big-government aficionado Paul Krugman is calling for “public action to curb the power” of an entity he can’t quite bring himself to call a monopoly, even as he nonetheless compares its “abuses” to those of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil company. The subject of his ire? “Amazon.com, the giant online retailer, has too much power, and it uses that power in ways that hurt America,” Krugman whines. “Does Amazon really have robber-baron-type market power? When it comes to books, definitely,” Krugman insists. “Amazon overwhelmingly dominates online book sales, with a market share comparable to Standard Oil’s share of the refined...

Knowing the way our political press works, it's easy to predict that Barack Obama's presidency is just about over. Journalists will soon treat him as the lamest of lame ducks, and suggest nothing consequential will happen in the last two years of his presidency. Instead, they'll obsess over who will come next. So the timing is perfect for Rolling Stone magazine to reassert itself as Obama's most shameless house organ. They've published a 4,000-word tribute by liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman insisting that "Obama has emerged as one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American...

Don't know what Dorian Warren's been smoking, but we can guess what he's been reading: Rolling Stone, and in particular a recent column in which Paul Krugman claims that Barack Obama is one of the most "successful presidents in American history" [ed.: not a typo]. On today's Morning Joe, MSNBC contributor Warren said he'd be happy to call his Vegas buddies to bet that "history will be very, very good to Barack Obama." Warren was responding to Joe Scarborough's suggestion that history will lump Obama and George W. Bush together for their lack of effective leadership. View the video here.

When it comes to Barack Obama, I've always been out of sync. Back in 2008, when many liberals were wildly enthusiastic about his candidacy and his press was strongly favorable, I was skeptical. I worried that he was naive, that his talk about transcending the political divide was a dangerous illusion given the unyielding extremism of the modern American right. Furthermore, it seemed clear to me that, far from being the transformational figure his supporters imagined, he was rather conventional-minded: Even before taking office, he showed signs of paying far too much attention to what some of us would later...

Paul Krugman sees America as a stratified society, with the top tiny layer controlling a staggering amount of wealth, and the rest of us consigned to a life of Sisyphean struggle.  He rails against Our Invisible Rich, who he believes prosper at the expense of all of us, and waxes about how the golden sunbeam of knowledge of these rich parasites on our nation could kindle the proletariat to action. I can’t compete with Krugman in academic honors, or experience in the hallowed halls of the Ivy League, or in the busy newsrooms at flagship newspapers.  When I read such...

“What I love most about FreedomFest are the debates!”– John Mackey (CEO, Whole Foods Market)Many of my free-market friends have attacked Paul Krugman, the inflammatory New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner, for deliberately distorting the facts about the economic recovery, austerity programs in Europe, the federal deficit, taxes, school choice, etc. Krugman has been especially critical of the “Austrians” for predicting double-digit inflation and another recession.In response, Steve Moore, Peter Schiff and Robert Murphy, among others, have challenged Krugman to a formal debate. But Krugman has adamantly refused…Until now!I have just confirmed the Dream Debate of the Century...

If you ever have the strange desire to watch a couple of liberals devolve into an intellectual wasteland of platitudes and hypocrisy, just mention “Hobby Lobby”. During a recent TV special with Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-People’s Republic of Massachusetts), Paul Krugman waded into the realm of idiocy (it was a short trip for him) while discussing corporate personhood, and the GOP’s desire to “push us back to 1894”. Of course, this raises a few questions: If corporations aren’t people, then why should we expect businesses to exercise “economic patriotism” in their tax dealings? I mean heck, I guess we shouldn’t...

Paul Krugman has once again decided to call a few “fools and knaves” who disagree with him by some nasty names. In fact, the Nobel Laureate’s habit of lashing out with vitriolic playground language is pretty well documented; and, quite frankly, it demonstrates an astounding lack of self-awareness when it comes from a Keynesian who has turned being wrong into a career option. But in this rare case, I might actually let his painfully ironic comments slide without condemnation.

I’ve had some fun over the years by pointing out that Paul Krugman has butchered numbers when writing about fiscal policy in nations such as France, Estonia, Germany, and the United Kingdom. So I shouldn’t be surprised that he wants to catch me making an error. But I’m not sure his “gotcha” moment is very persuasive. Here’s some of what he wrote for today’s New York Times. Gov. Jerry Brown was able to push through a modestly liberal agenda of higher taxes, spending increases and a rise in the minimum wage. California also moved enthusiastically to implement Obamacare. …Needless to...

Professor Paul Krugman is leaving Princeton. Is he leaving in disgrace? Not long, as these things go, before his departure was announced Krugman thoroughly was indicted and publicly eviscerated for intellectual dishonesty by Harvard’s Niall Ferguson in a hard-hitting three-part series in the Huffington Post, beginning here, and with a coda in Project Syndicate, all summarized at Forbes.com. Ferguson, on Krugman: Where I come from … we do not fear bullies. We despise them. And we do so because we understand that what motivates their bullying is a deep sense of insecurity. Unfortunately for Krugtron the Invincible, his ultimate nightmare...

Have you been following the news about Obamacare? The Affordable Care Act has receded from the front page, but information about how it’s going keeps coming in — and almost all the news is good. Indeed, health reform has been on a roll ever since March, when it became clear that enrollment would surpass expectations despite the teething problems of the federal website. What’s interesting about this success story is that it has been accompanied at every step by cries of impending disaster. At this point, by my reckoning, the enemies of health reform are 0 for 6. That is,...

... Think of it this way: Once upon a time it was possible to take climate change seriously while remaining a Republican in good standing. Today, listening to climate scientists gets you excommunicated - hence Rubio's statement, which was effectively a partisan pledge of allegiance. And truly crazy positions are becoming the norm. A decade ago, only the GOP's extremist fringe asserted that global warming was a hoax concocted by a vast global conspiracy of scientists (although even then that fringe included some powerful politicians). Today, such conspiracy theorizing is mainstream within the party, and rapidly becoming mandatory; witch hunts...

I am outraged. The City University of New York recently announced that it is going to pay Paul Krugman $225,000 for part-time work studying income inequality. If you add in his sundry speaking fees, Professor Krugman is solidly ensconced among the hated 1 percent. I too write about inequality, yet I am not being paid nearly as much. Of course, Professor Krugman does have that Nobel Prize thing going for him, but that hardly seems to justify such blatant inequality. So I have been waiting patiently for Professor Krugman to mail me a check to correct this unfair situation. Or...

It is, in a way, too bad that Cliven Bundy — the rancher who became a right-wing hero after refusing to pay fees for grazing his animals on federal land, and bringing in armed men to support his defiance — has turned out to be a crude racist. Why? Because his ranting has given conservatives an easy out, a way to dissociate themselves from his actions without facing up to the terrible wrong turn their movement has taken. For at the heart of the standoff was a perversion of the concept of freedom, which for too much of the right...

An honest debate with a progressive is almost as rare as a verified sighting of Bigfoot. You’d have better luck getting a devout Scientologist to say L. Ron Hubbard was a horrible writer than you would to get a progressive to admit the “science” behind climate change is not all it’s cracked up to be. For one thing, it is based on models of what could happen in 100 years, even though those models are mostly unreliable when you use them to map what happened in the last 30. That’s right, the vast majority of “climate models” predicting doom and...

When it comes to Krugman's views on any particular topic, he may be right and he may be wrong, but whatever his opinion he always has a much to say about it (even if the factual backing is of secondary importance or outright missing). Today, his chosen topic is inequality, and in an interview with Bloomberg's Tom Keene, shown and transcribed below, he certainly says much, encapsulated perhaps by the following gem: "There's zero evidence that the kind of extreme inequality that we have is good for economic growth. In fact, there's a lot of evidence that it is actually...

Paul Krugman is a distinguished economist, Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University, a NY Times columnist, and a Nobel Laureate. As a frequent commentator on cable news shows, he speaks passionately about income inequality and politics. From his book, The Conscience of a Liberal, he notes that, “Impersonal forces such as technological change and globalization caused America’s income distribution to become increasingly unequal, with an elite minority pulling away from the rest of the population.”How ironic that Dr. Krugman will provide a first hand as a member of this “elite minority” benefiting from income inequality. The City...

"If all you have is a hammer," the old saying goes, "everything looks like a nail." Left unsaid is the fact that the real problem isn't the possession of a hammer, but the certitude that all you need is the hammer. In other words, it's a failure of the imagination -- which is a kind of arrogance -- that's really to blame. "I've got my hammer, and that's all I need. Besides, have you ever seen a problem that didn't look like a nail?" This is a version of what academics call "confirmation bias" -- the tendency to accept only...