Free Republic

If the Obamanation is elected and further corrupts our entire system of government, the number of those who actually pay income taxes will become the minority; subject to the increasing tyranny of the parasitic non-taxed. Tape-worm city...

The downside of appealing to Joe Six-Pack.She killed. She had him at "Nice to meet you. Hey, can I call you Joe?" She was the star. He was the second male lead, the good-natured best friend of the leading man. She was not petrified but peppy. The whole debate was about Sarah Palin. She is not a person of thought but of action. Interviews are about thinking, about reflecting, marshaling data and integrating it into an answer. Debates are more active, more propelled—they are thrust and parry. They are for campaigners. She is a campaigner. Her syntax did not hold,...

I confess that from the beginning I didn't get the Sarah Palin nomination. Everything about it seemed wrong, from her chirpy Matanuska Valley girl accent, to the MTV morals of her family life, to her complete lack of any experience or even of any stated views on national or international affairs. But now I get it. It represents the last gasp of the effort to turn the Republican Party of 2008 into the Democratic Party of 1896. Or at least I hope it does. The 1896 presidential race represented the high point of populism in America. The Democratic candidate, William...

Observing the Sarah Palin phenomenon, does anyone feel like they're trapped in a singularly creepy remake of "Night of the Living Dead"? George W. Bush has been a political corpse for years. But Palin resembles a female version of Bush, brought back from the grave to win the election. You wouldn't think that the Republicans would want to exhume Bush. After all, his presidency has been a historic disaster, and the American people know it. But Bush was successful at one thing: winning elections. With its policies and ideology in ruins, Bush's political game plan is all that the GOP...

News & Opinion Monday, September 8, 2008 ROBERT SHRUM: The Republicans’ Lipstick Populism It was appropriate that the Republicans convened in the city named for Saint Paul. For on the road to the convention, John McCain had a conversion experience worthy of the saint, transforming his lobbyist-run, insider campaign into a full-throated appeal to cultural populism. The combination of purple anti-Washington rhetoric and blue-collar melodrama will henceforth be known as “Palinesque.” The question now is whether this hit show has enough gas to run until November. -snip- Will Americans take seriously a pledge to stand for “the people, not the...

WASHINGTON -- Last August, John McCain's campaign was a guttering candle, out of money but flush with half-baked ideas that were unlikely to be improved by further baking. Anyway, to have many ideas is to have too many for a campaign's concluding sprint, and McCain's revival has not been robust enough to bring him even with Barack Obama. Now McCain's rejuvenated hopes rest on his ability to recast this election, focusing it on who should lead America in a world suddenly darkened by Russia's war of European conquest. To begin the recasting, he should weed from the unkempt garden of...

To CNN's "Lou Dobbs Tonight" host, we live in a world of absolutes - because the potential of a government bailout of two publicly traded government-sponsored enterprises condemns the entire concept of free market capitalism. On the July 22 broadcast of Dobbs' show, he attacked proponents of free-market capitalism because of the potential trouble of the two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae (NYSE:FNM) and Freddie Mac (NYSE:FRE). "Well the - it's a, it's quite a mess, quite a mess indeed," Dobbs said. "And I love the idea that all these free traders, free marketeers now got to have the government...

I did not hear till now about an analysis of OBAMA's stance , created mediatic image and above all his voice and way of speaking. Probably it has been done somewhere but AS AN EUROPEAN i was struck by the way he speaks like some kind of preachers or populist political leaders reminding us very bad memories. It reminds me some leaders hypnotizing crowds and leading them to real nightmares. The rythm,the loudness,the tone of his voice beside the repetition of mantras("change","yes we can"...)give a scary impression... But this it not surprising if he learned from J.WRIGHT

Hightower’s New World by: Bethany Stotts, May 07, 2008 As reported in an earlier Accuracy in Academia article, the famous populist Jim Hightower is attempting to inflame college students against the evil American corporations and restrictive consumerist expectations. Promoted by the progressive Campus Progress (a program of the Center for American Progress), Hightower’s new book Swim Against the Current encourages readers to break with corporate and “right-wing politico” traditions and adopt more values-oriented positions including • opposing the Iraq War; • mass organization against evil corporations and the Powers That Be; • government-subsidized elections; • fighting climate change in the...

Campus Populist by: Bethany Stotts, April 11, 2008 Campus Progress (CP), a program of the Center for American Progress, argues that “30 years of heavily-funded conservative organizing has made its mark” on universities and it’s time to push back. To that end, CP recently promoted a new book highlighting the successes of countercultural “uncorporations” and political activists. “I come to you as a Democrat, by the way, but I get very disgusted with my party leaders sometimes. You know, like gratifying Bush’s illegal domestic spying program by making it legal. I got an email from a guy saying he hoped...

I've got my tongue so far into my cheek on this one, they may have to operate. Edwards is so easy to ridicule.

...PROVIDENCE, R.I., Feb. 24 -- Blasting "companies shamelessly turning their backs on Americans" by shipping jobs overseas and railing that "it is wrong that somebody who makes $50 million on Wall Street pays a lower tax rate than somebody who makes $50,000 a year," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton increasingly sounds like one of her old Democratic rivals, former senator John Edwards of North Carolina. Eager to recapture the white, working-class voters who favored her in some of the early primaries but who have since shifted to Sen. Barack Obama, Clinton traded her usual wonky style this weekend for a fiery,...

The rhetoric of Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton about the sad state of America is reminiscent of the suspect populism of John Edwards, the millionaire lawyer who recently dropped out of the Democratic presidential race. Barack Obama may have gone to exclusive private schools. He and his wife may both be lawyers who between them have earned four expensive Ivy League degrees. They may make about a million dollars a year, live in an expensive home and send their kids to prep school. But they are still apparently first-hand witnesses to how the American dream has gone sour. Two...

Barack Obama hits the nail on the head when he says, "there is one United States of America". There are no "blue states", or "red states", rich, poor, conservative or liberal Americas. Super Tuesday showed that Americans are less divided than many thought. In fact, America showed on tuesday that it has become one big bucket of mindless crabs. Huckabee, McCain, Hillary, and Obama have brilliantly realized that America is engulfed in fear. Fear has stripped America of its human qualities leaving a husk of primal survival instinct. Like crabs in a bucket- Americans are in a mindless frenzy willing...

By far, the most significant story of the 2008 Republican primaries has been the unlikely candidacy of Mike Huckabee and his_single-handed_resuscitation of Christian conservatives as a force to be reckoned with in the Republican_Party. Yet, regardless of how he fares on Super_Tuesday_and_beyond, Mr. Huckabee will perhaps be best remembered as the man who, however unintentionally, helped persuade evangelicals to vote a Democrat into the White House in 2008 – and possibly in future races, as well. Since the 1970s, conventional_wisdom has held that evangelicals are driven by a single-minded_concern with defending "moral values," while mainline Protestants focus on issues of...

Washington, D.C. - Mike Huckabee's populist rhetoric may work in the private sector, but it has no place in politics, says the Libertarian Party. "Huckabee's continual call for populism in American policy is making it clear that he will not be a President that is committed to limiting government, lowering taxes and increasing personal freedom," says Libertarian Party Executive Director Shane Cory. "Huckabee would make a great charity director or chairman of a nonprofit agency," says Cory, "but, as President, he would completely undermine the liberty movement in the United States that seeks to decrease the role of government in...

Hugo Chavez offered us his opinion on innovation and entrepreneurial drive. "Anyone who is distributing food ... and is speculating, we must intervene and we must expropriate (the business) and put it in the hands of the state and the communities," Chavez said during the inauguration of a new state-run market in Caracas. – Reuters 24 Jan 2008. If all of this sounds familiar and reminds us of someone else who seems to be single-handedly wrecking a once-prosperous economy, it’s because it is. Hugo Chavez is copying a page of Econ 101 notes off of Zimbabwean Dictator/Idiot Robert Mugabe. Hugo...

Anxious lower middle class families are shaping up to be the crucial political constituency of this year's election. Polls show that financial security is their biggest concern. They worry about health and education costs, about retirement, and about their prospects for getting ahead. Their insecurity has markedly reduced public support for free trade and contributed to public concerns about immigration. They also appear to be behind a great deal of the generally uneasy mood of the electorate. The Democratic candidates have noticed and are championing an old-fashioned economic populism that stokes voters' fears and seeks to direct them toward welfare...

THE ISSUE Republicans have three different winners POINTS OF DEBATE None of the Republican candidates save for Ron Paul and Fred Thompson offer anything resembling freemarket conservatism THE STAR’S VIEW It’s no wonder Republicans are having a hard time settling on a candidate Republican voters are having a hard time settling on presidential candidates, now that the party has three separate winners after its first three major primaries. In Michigan on Tuesday, Republican Mitt Romney salvaged his political campaign, which had been withering following losses in New Hampshire and Iowa. Arizona Sen. John McCain failed to attract the significant numbers...

Republican presidential hopeful Fred Thompson continued his full-court press in South Carolina Saturday morning by meeting with about 100 supporters in North Charleston and continuing to take jabs at a rival. While Thompson didn’t name names, his comments at Perkins Family Restaurant echoed what he said in Thursday night’s debate about former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee being too liberal for the Republican base. “A lot of people nowadays think that we have to be moving away from our traditions of the Republican party,” he said. “Most of the populist rhetoric you hear winds up in bigger government and more government...

MANCHESTER, N.H. – It is the historic mission of the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary to give us the establishment candidate in each party, and then the insurgent candidate. The two pairs then battle it out in South Carolina to give us the probable nominees for November. Year 2008 looks no different, with this exception: The insurgents, Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee, swept the first contests and now have the momentum. And both establishments are reeling. Twenty-four hours before New Hampshire, the GOP establishment has not even settled upon a champion. If Mitt Romney wins the Granite State, he...

Move over, Bill Clinton. There's a new king when it comes to looking into the camera and not telling the truth to the American people . . . and his name is John Edwards. To his credit, George Stephanopoulos caught Edwards out on a central tenet of Silky's candidacy . . . but then let things slide. Edwards was a guest today on This Week, and it didn't take him long to don his scourge-of-greedy-corporations mantle. Central to Edwards' pitch is the claim that you don't sit down with corporate interests, you fight them. View video here.

Many have discussed whether certain candidates have "fire in the belly." What I'm wondering is whether, at this point in our national history, conservatives in general have fire in their bellies. Given Gov. Mike Huckabee's remarkable performance so far in the GOP presidential contest in the name of conservatism, and especially after seeing his interview on the "Tonight Show," I question how brightly that flame is flickering. When Ronald Reagan was running for president in 1980, conservatives had more reasons to be discontent. We had been conditioned to believe that inviolable economic principles dictated that there was a necessary trade-off...

Yes, corporate profits are slowing and jobs are softening. Despite 52 months of ongoing jobs gains and 1.3 million new payrolls in the past year, December jobs registered only 18,000 and the unemployment rate ticked back up to (a still historically low) 5 percent. Despite years of gains from a booming business sector, corporate profits are in fact falling at about a 6 percent clip. But the last thing we need now is root-canal economic populism from the campaign trail and the mainstream media telling us that Americans are unhappy. Unhappy? According to a Gallup Poll released last week, “Most...

Despite his current standing in the polls, Mike Huckabee remains an under-funded and chronically disorganized long-shot when it comes to actually winning the GOP Presidential nomination. While easily the most gifted TV communicator in the field, the former Arkansas governor displays some serious vulnerabilities as a candidate for the White House and his innumerable critics and rivals have attacked these weaknesses with gleeful ferocity. Even if he fails to win a place on the national ticket, however, Huckabee’s startlingly strong campaign provides potent benefits for both his party and his country. In the two weeks remaining before the Iowa Caucuses...

Since the 1960s, conservatives have chafed and seethed against liberal elitism. Liberals have used their influence in the courts and government bureaucracies to win political victories they never could have won at the ballot box. Conservatives have reacted by turning to populism -- to a defence of the commonsense wisdom of ordinary voters against the pretensions of know-it-alls. Conservatives have drawn strength from populism. But you can overdo any good thing --and I am beginning to think that on this one, we've zoomed the car into the red zone. For me, the lights started flashing in 2005, during the battle...

As regular VC readers know, I am one of several conspirators who is supporting Fred Thompson's campaign for President. I cannot speak for the others, but my reasons for supporting Thompson include his commitment to federalism, his candor on important issues other candidates would prefer to avoid (e.g. entitlements), and his record on regulatory reform and government oversight over the past thirty years. For National Review's pentultimate issue (the one before they endorsed Mitt Romney), I authored an article making the conservative case for Thompson. For those without subscriptions to the print magazine, here is an excerpt: Sen. Fred Thompson...

When they debated economic issues in Dearborn, Mich., most of the Republican presidential candidates talked about how good the economic statistics look. Mike Huckabee was the candidate who offered sympathy for the public’s anxieties. So it has been throughout the campaign. Huckabee, more than the other Republican candidates, understands that even in a time of economic growth Americans are worried about their health care, their wages, and their country’s future. He seems to understand his party’s strategic options better than his Republican rivals, too. Since conservative positions on controversial moral issues have helped Republicans, there is no reason to abandon...

Abstract: "The Irony of Populism: The Republican Shift and the Inevitability of American Aristocracy" analyzes the shift in the role of the Supreme Court following the movement towards a democratic Senate which culminated in the Seventeenth Amendment. The Supreme Court's shift is presented as the inevitable result of the system of mixed government that underlies the constitutional order, which orders American Government into democratic, aristocratic, and monarchical parts. While in the original conception of the constitution the Senate was the aristocratic part, the Senate would become part of the democratic part with the Seventeenth Amendment and prior procedural changes. Into...

A subprime lender with ties to Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards has moved to foreclose on more than 130 homes in South Carolina since the S.C. native went to work for its parent company, an analysis of courthouse records shows. The lender, Green Tree Financial, also was once the subject of a $30 million class-action verdict involving thousands of South Carolinians. Edwards’ ties to the company are disquieting to some supporters of the North Carolinian. On the campaign trail, Edwards has insisted he is the champion of lower-income families. Edwards’ ties to Green Tree also could hurt him with voters...

A spectre is apparently haunting America – the spectre of “populism”. “New populism spurs Democrats on the economy,” cried the front page headline in The New York Times the other day. Republicans rail against unseemly “class warfare”, while centrist Democrats fret that hard-edged populist appeals will spook suburban voters. “It is not unusual,” The New York Times explained, “for candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination to move left in the primary season.” However, rhetoric aside, there is little reason to view today’s supposedly wild-eyed Democrats as “populist” or “leftwing” at all. Consider John Edwards, who the press and Republicans have...

John Edwards may be running for the White House as a populist concerned about "the other America," but that doesn't mean he has to sit in the cheap seats. The ex-North Carolina senator attended Thursday night's NBA finals in Cleveland, watching from the courtside "Platinum Suites" VIP seats costing thousands of dollars. "He should sue himself . . . for political malpractice," said Dan Ronayne, deputy communications director of the Republican National Committee. Countered Edwards spokesman Eric Schultz: "Breaking news - a candidate from North Carolina likes basketball. Wait till they find out he had a hot dog."

The European Union continues to inch closer to the dystopia foreseen by George Orwell in his novel ''1984.'' In Orwell's novel the main character is a party member in a socialist, totalitarian government that perpetuates its power through omnipresent surveillance and perpetually seeking out ''thoughtcrime,'' such as holding views that were contrary to what the party wishes individuals to think. In the main character's diary, he explains it thusly: ''Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime is death,'' and ''Thoughtcrime is the only crime that matters.'' After six years of work, the European Union announced in Luxembourg last week that they...

MOSCOW - To Western eyes, it was the new, democratic Russia. Boris Yeltsin, the man who had wrested the country from the grip of communism two years earlier, was facing what he described as an armed "mutiny" by communist holdovers in the country's elected parliament. So when Mr. Yeltsin sent troops and tanks to disperse the Supreme Soviet legislature and arrest its leaders, Western leaders cheered his actions. But many Russians were appalled. "When I heard [then US President Bill] Clinton describing Yeltsin's actions as 'a triumph for democracy,' I was horrified," says Viktor Kremeniuk, deputy director of the official...

President Bush yesterday said there is a growing "income inequality" gap between rich and poor Americans, and told companies they should rethink the giant compensation packages they offer top executives. The markedly populist message, a divergence from the past, in which Mr. Bush has accused critics of practicing class warfare, was all the more noteworthy given his venue -- a speech at Federal Hall in New York, in the middle of Wall Street, the capital of capitalism. But the president called for conservative market-based answers, including demanding that Congress renew trade-promotion authority, which allows him to negotiate trade agreements then...

If there really are two Americas, one of the two probably lacks available space for more mansions like the one just purchased by Mr. Populism himself, John Edwards. Don Carrington of The Carolina Journal dishes on King John's new palace.If it were any other human being alive, it probably wouldn't grate much to watch this chapion of the lawsuit lists erect a pleasure dome that Kubla Kahn would get lost in without a GPS and a digital map. It grates particularly, because of his scathing denunciations of the wealth and social conscience of so many others. It galls when one...

Right after a year in which four million more jobs were created by Americans than lost, Jim Webb had the following commentary in his response to President Bush’s State of The Union Speech: “The stock market is at an all-time high, and so are corporate profits. But these benefits are not being fairly shared. When I graduated from college, the average corporate CEO made 20 times what the average worker did; today, it's nearly 400 times. In other words, it takes the average worker more than a year to make the money that his or her boss makes in one...

Rosen: Populists equalize poverty January 19, 2007 With the Democrats back in power in Congress and with the 2008 election campaign already upon us, you'll be hearing much more about "income inequality." This is a major issue for "progressives" (when you hear that word, think "socialists") like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Populism is back in fashion. By populism, I mean the exploitation of the uninformed, angry impulses and unfiltered passions of the masses. That anger and resentment has historically been directed at the usual villains and cardboard stereotypes: bankers, insurance companies, "big pharma" (that means drug companies), agri-business,...

FOR years, the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, exercising a lock on the party’s economic policies, argued that the economy could achieve sustained growth only if markets were allowed to operate unfettered and globally. Overcoming protests from labor unions, a traditional constituency, the Clinton administration vigorously supported free trade agreements like Nafta and agreed to China’s admission into the World Trade Organization. If there was damage to workers, then the Clinton camp proposed dealing with it after it occurred — through wage insurance, for example, or worker retraining and other safety-net measures. This approach coincided with a period of...

It's hard to recall now, but Democrats were once America's free trade party. Reed Smoot, Willis Hawley and Herbert Hoover--the President who signed their infamous 1930 tariff--were all Republicans. This history is worth recalling as resurgent Democrats in Congress debate whether to set off in a protectionist direction that repudiates much of their heritage. Amid the breakdown of the international trading system in the 1930s, the man who began to rebuild it was a Democratic Secretary of State, Cordell Hull. With FDR's support, he negotiated a series of bilateral trade deals that Harry Truman used as the basis for the...

The newly elected Democratic class of 2006, which is set to descend on the Capitol next week, will hardly be the first freshmen to arrive in Washington promising to make a difference. The last time Congress changed hands, the Republican freshman class of 1994 roared into town under the leadership of Newt Gingrich as speaker and quickly advanced a conservative agenda of exceptional ambition.Many in the class of 2006, especially those who delivered the new Democratic majorities by winning Republican seats, show little appetite for that kind of ideological crusade. But in interviews with nearly half of them this week,...

by Mark Finkelstein September 1, 2006 - 07:01 I kept waiting. Dutifully wading through Paul Krugman's prolonged subscription-required kvetch over the economy, The Big Disconnect, I figured I'd eventually be rewarded for my perseverence with his proposed solutions - if only to be able to critique them. But the New York Times columnist's economic nostrums never came. Krugman's basic complaint is that workers haven't shared in the fruits of the extended economic expansion. This is Krugman being late to the MSM party noted here, here, and here. Even so, he chooses to ignore the reporting in his own paper that...

Let's face it: the vast majority of the offerings on cable news networks aren't very good. This article analyzes some common traps cable news networks often fall in. From partisan politics to populism to media bias, cable news networks should be viewed more as entertainment rather than legitimate news commentary sources.

In the 1980s, the historian and social critic Christopher Lasch pronounced dead the conventional political categories of right and left and argued for a revitalization of politics through a redefinition of terms. "The idea of a 'left' has outlived its historical time and needs to be decently buried, along with the false conservatism that merely clothes an older liberal tradition in conservative rhetoric."

LA PAZ, Bolivia - Students attending a conflict resolution course in this politically tumultuous Andean nation got some unexpected extracurricular experience when Bolivia's leftist government accused the program's sponsor of being a front for U.S. spies.

See for example this thread first. And now some good news from Iran Mid-East si, se puede (they can!) Let's hope that it works to stop theocrat jerks lest nuclear sh*t hit the fan!

Too many conservative intellectuals, and political leaders, are uncomfortable with “the common man” and with the kind of grassroots politics that not only wins elections but sways public opinion and propels government action.

Politics has a math of its own. Whereas a scientifically minded person might see things this way: One person who says 2+2=5 is an idiot; two people who think 2+2=5 are two idiots; and a million people who think 2+2=5 are a whole lot of idiots—political math works differently. Let’s work backwards: if a million people think 2+2=5, then they are not a million idiots, but a “constituency.” If they are growing in number, they are also a “movement.” And, if you were not only the first person to proclaim 2+2=5, but you were the first to persuade others, then...

LIMA, PERU - Venezuelans have a president who supports peasant land grabs, gives Cuba free oil, and makes dirty jokes about the US secretary of State on national TV. Bolivia recently elected a former llama herder who wears a woolly sweater to formal diplomatic functions and is dedicated to stopping the US eradication of coca, the leaf from which cocaine is made. But if Peru's presidential front-runner Ollanta Humala - a retired Army officer with no governing experience - emerges victorious after Sunday's vote, he soon may give Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and Bolivia's Evo Morales a run for their money...

PENCE: Well, it wouldn't be the first time that House conservatives disagreed with this administration, Chris. Many of us broke with the president on the expansion of the Education Department and No Child Left Behind, and a few dozen of us broke with the president when he advanced the creation of the first new entitlement in the Medicare prescription drug bill. What we put out this week we actually call the Contract With America Renewed, because it was based on the budget that the brand new Republican majority passed out of the House of Representatives in 1995. We balanced the...