Free Republic

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...

Commerce: An ill wind is blowing through America's stalled trade treaties. New calls for tariffs and misplaced xenophobia are finding a home in the Democrat-led Congress. All that's going to do is make us poorer. Even respected liberal economists like former Fed Vice Chairman Alan Blinder have started uttering nonsense against free trade, so there's no doubt a bad current of populist thought has taken hold. In Congress, the blight's the worst. Anti-free-trade Democrats like Charles Schumer of New York and Max Baucus of Montana, and Republicans like South Carolina's Sen. Lindsey Graham, are weighing in with encouraging Smoot-Hawley-like tariffs...

"I'm concerned about protectionism, isolationism." Those were the first words President Bush spoke as he sat down Wednesday at an editorial board meeting at The Wall Street Journal. Reading his remarks calls forth only sadness. For neither the president nor his acolytes at the Journal appear to have learned anything from the disasters their ideas have visited upon the party and country. Can Bush not see that the isolation of America is a result of the war he launched on a nation that, no matter how odious its regime, did not threaten us? Can he not see clearly now the...

BE HERE, OR BE NOWHERE!

For someone as conservative as myself, I usually harbor far less respect and admiration for George Will than most people would think. He may gaze more astutely at his navel than I do mine, but there’s an asymptotic limit to what the guy can tell me about lint hair that I would really care about. Today, however, he cut through the mendacious cattle droppings with a sharpened broadsword of an opinion column. Today, he unloaded on the farcical issue of the minimum wage. It seems that The Democratic Party has made it a cornerstone of their plan to fight poverty...

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.

Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot, by Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Carlos Alberto Montaner, and Alvaro Vargas Llosa, translated by Michaela Lajda Ames, New York Madison Books, 218 pages, $24.95 My Costa Rican friend Celeste, ordinarily mild-mannered to a fault, was turning purple. The TV newscast said her country was about to get its first maquila, a factory where cloth would be imported duty free from the United States, cut and sewn into garments, and shipped back to the United States. An enterprising reporter discovered that the Costa Rican seamstresses--though well paid by local standards--would be making about $4 an...