Free Republic

Democrats are OK with changing the rules of the game to pass their agendas. But when it comes to Republicans using the same rules, Democrats warn of impending doom in order to defeat Republicans.For example, former Clinton Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, is now warning in a video by Moveon.org that if Republicans win the Senate they will pass their right-wing agenda using….wait for it….DUN Dun dun….RECONCILIATION!https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5SQP2KZflco Ok I don’t blame you if didn’t watch it. In short, reconciliation is a Senate rule that allows passage of a budget bill with a simple majority, bypassing the normal process that requires...

A couple of weeks ago, I ordered a ribeye, extra rare, and the chef or the waiter or somebody messed it up. I sent it back to the kitchen. A lesbian couple near Uniontown, Ohio, ordered a baby, extra white, and their order got messed up — the sperm bank mistakenly gave them the product of a black man, with the result that their daughter, Payton, is half black. And that’s the problem with treating children as consumer products: You cannot send them back to the kitchen. Good thing fertility doctors don’t work for tips. Naturally, there is a lawsuit...

You’ve seen this a lot in the last decade and a half: progressives asserting a moral equivalence between radial Islam and Christianity. The argument usually goes something like, “Yeah, sure, terrorists are bad, but they’re hardly the only people to kill in the name of their religion!” Then there’s the obligatory reference to the crusades. OK, sure, Christianity, like most religions, has had some less-than-flattering moments. But it’s history. If you can point me to the mass graves, severed heads or buildings for Christianity in our lifetime… no need to finish that sentence because there aren’t any. Christianity is an...

Hi everybody. I’m Bill Whittle and this is the Firewall. Ah, Progressives! You really have to – well, not admire them exactly – but if not admire them then at least grant them a grudging respect for the tenacity of their beliefs. Unfortunately for them, the Socialist utopia is a Cryptid, which, according to Wikipedia’s serviceable definition, is “a creature whose existence has been suggested but has not been discovered or documented by the scientific community.” Here’s another example of a cryptid: it’s called the Loch Ness Monster. Like the socialist utopia, the Loch Ness Monster requires a lot of...

The U.S. Constitution, as its framers understood it, was a means to an end. It was crafted and adopted for the sake of achieving the natural-law principles referred to in the Declaration of Independence. The progressives understood this very clearly as well. The robust regulatory and redistributive aims of the progressive policy agenda were inevitably at odds with the natural-law theory of the founding. This basic fact makes understandable Woodrow Wilson’s admonition (in an address ostensibly honoring Thomas Jefferson) that, “if you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the preface.” Do not, in other words,...

The US Constitution is much more important, and in much greater danger than most people realize. I will discuss both issues in this article. Some people believe, and I am one of them, that there is one short passage in our founding documents that encapsulates, enshrines, and defines what is so unique and important about the US Constitution, and the United States of America. Oddly enough it is not to be found in the Constitution at all – it is in “The Declaration of Independence.” I am talking about the preamble to the Declaration – specifically the first sentence. Without...

With the Vatican’s Synod on the Family fast approaching and Pope Francis’ call to the Catholic Church to be a “field hospital for sinners” more focused on mercy than rules, lots of people are looking for hints at what the gathering of bishops will urge at the extraordinary synod next month. A wedding of 20 couples in St. Peter’s Square, some of whom cohabited prior to marriage, has CBS News hailing the “progressive Pope,” who’s progressively progressive. Or something: Many had been living together prior to getting married, which is forbidden in Catholicism. Some even have children.But none of...

Detroit's Under-Funded Fire Departments Use a Soda Can For a Fire Alarm Where absent money leaves gaps, ingenuity fills in. Nowhere is that more true than in Detroit's fire departments, where, as Detroit Free Press reporter Tresa Baldas shows us, a soda can full of jangling coins and screws alerts the Motor City's long-suffering heroes when there's an emergency. The system is brilliantly simple: A soda can full of rattling metal is balanced on top of the fire department's printer at the end of the tray. When the printer spits out an emergency alert, the paper knocks over the can....

Unless you’ve been sticking your head in the sand, or had a busy summer of spending American tax dollars with Obama on the golf course, you’re probably aware of all the race baiting going down in Ferguson, Missouri. Several weeks ago, a black man named Michael Brown was shot and killed by a white police officer, in the economically depressed community outside of St. Louis, creating a perfect recipe for race riots, looting, and liberal race baiting geared toward keeping Americans divided. America’s favorite race hustler, the Rev. Al Sharpton shot over to Ferguson before Brown’s body went cold, sensing...

Over the weekend, a headline from the Daily Caller caught my eye: “Conservatives Are Greatest Threat To Nation, Obama Suggests.” It was a look at some comments Barack Obama (or whatever his name is) made in an interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. So, I pulled up the Times column, “Obama on the World,” and braced myself for the usual outrage that accompanies reading most anything that comes out of Obama’s mouth. I wasn’t disappointed. Most of the column was Obama’s deflecting, blaming and making excuses for his disastrous foreign policy and declaring that Israel should learn to...

As the sorry ramifications of situational morality play out on virtually a daily basis, many of us wonder where this all came from. With no hard edges on ANY concept these days, let alone good and evil, we observe the seeming paradox that with endless shades of gray comes not compromise, but more division! Of course, there is one thing on which we can all agree: money and debt. If I owed you $1000, you would consider yourself cheated unless I paid back every penny. There is a clear standard here. It’s the economy, stupid! Now throw into the mix...

Every now and then I come across a story so unbelievable, it’s simply laughable beyond all comprehension. Here’s the latest. Progressive socialists have revealed themselves to America for who they are and regardless of the media manipulation, lies, deceit, and coercion their agenda is failing — as it has worldwide. So what’s their next step? Well, according to a piece in the Washington Post by E J Dionne, “Its time for Progressives to reclaim the Constitution.” Really?? Dionne advocates for progressives to enshrine themselves in the fundamental document of our Republic, the U.S. Constitution. Excuse my vernacular, but I just...

"One of the most appalling things about NRA was the sudden multiplication of new rules with which businesses must comply, rules not resting on settled law but on arbitrary decisions of administrative bodies, subject to change almost without notice.The business community was suddenly called upon to rush to Washington to participate in the making of codes, codes which represented bargains among different elements of the industries, bargains with labor, and bargains with an extraordinarily incapable set of Government officials and employees, many of whom were extremely radical, and few of whom knew anything about business"

At the behest of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Cale Keable, D-Burrillville, the Rhode Island House has finally voted to ratify the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which reqired direct election of U.S. Senators. Before the amendment took effect in 1913, senators were elected by state legislators. That system was widely criticized for breeding corruption as senate aspirants bribed lawmakers to secure the votes needed to win senate seats. The ceremonial resolution approved by the House doesn’t change anything, Keable acknowledged, but he said it does send a message ``that Rhode Island values democracy.’’ Rhode Island never ratified the 17th...

Remember that the little guy in America is rich by world standards. If you made a global division of wealth, the guy at the bottom in America would be in the top quintile, the top fifth of affluent people in the world. So if you’re a global redistributionist, you recognize, or you believe that even the poor guy in America has got to pay because if we’re going to have global redistribution, wealth has to be transferred even away from the American poor toward even poorer people in other countries. And so I think what we’re going to see under...

In the great dispute over utilization of our Federal lands in the West, the attempt is frequently made to end run the arguments over how best to manage those lands by asserting the Federal government has no capacity to own the lands. The argument goes that since the Constitution is a delegation of enumerated powers, if there is no provision therein for ownership of land, the Federal government must lack standing to be a legitimate owner. This is not an idle question. It is said to have given Jefferson great pause prior to deciding to make the Louisiana Purchase. However,...

Red Alert at the White House? When the VA scandal leads even such as Sam Stein to question liberalism . . . The VA scandal is getting so grievous for the Obama admin and for the liberal project at large that it has led even liberals to question their most cherished ideological beliefs. On today's Morning Joe, Sam Stein of the Huffington Post wondered "is liberalism, is progressivism, in this instance the right thing" given that the additional money the Obama admin spent on the VA has not yielded results? View the video here.

Have you noticed that the cries of the cultural and political “left” in the U.S. are becoming more venomous and shrill? As President Barack Obama flails on the international stage and approval for his domestic agenda and his party in Congress slips away, so-called “progressive” Americans are also watching something else slip away: the chances of politicians and government bureaucrats getting a strangle-hold on the petroleum energy industry. The stated goal of progressive energy policy is to stave-off “global warming” (or “climate change” or “climate disruption” or whichever term progressives choose at any given moment), and the means to that...

Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy is still a cause célèbre for the right-wing, drawing praise from Tea Party activists, Republican politicians, and conservative media outlets. Kevin Williamson of National Review called him a “dissident” like Mohandas Gandhi or Henry David Thoreau, Nevada Sen. Dean Heller hailed him as a “patriot,” and Sean Hannity has praised him as somebody that’s “willing to fight.” This was bad enough as an instance of conservative recklessness when Bundy was just a lawless rancher backed by armed militamen. It’s even worse now that we know that Bundy is full of racist bones. Here he is, as...

If you’ve ever engaged in a debate with a progressive, you know first-hand the definition of futility. After a few minutes, they run out of whatever talking points they just read in Mother Jones or Salon, and out come the names. It used to take longer – there were even reported cases of debates reaching double-digits in minutes before the expletives and personal attacks began. Cries of racism/sexism/homophobia used to be where Democrats ended up in a debate. Now, it’s where they start. What once was simply the last arrow in their quiver has turned into their favorite. Now, the...