Free Republic

The present four-year California drought is not novel — even if President Barack Obama and California governor Jerry Brown have blamed it on man-made climate change. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, California droughts are both age-old and common. Predictable California dry spells — like those of 1929–34, 1976–77, and 1987–92 — are more likely result from poorly understood but temporary changes in atmospheric pressures and ocean temperatures. What is new is that the state has never had 40 million residents during a drought — well over 10 million more than during the last dry spell in the...

The present four-year California drought is not novel -- even if President Barack Obama and California Gov. Jerry Brown have blamed it on man-made climate change. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, California droughts are both age-old and common. Predictable California dry spells -- like those of 1929-34, 1976-77 and 1987-92 -- more likely result from poorly understood but temporary changes in atmospheric pressures and ocean temperatures. What is new is that the state has never had 40 million residents during a drought -- well over 10 million more than during the last dry spell in the early...

<p>Is immigrating from less-developed countries to the West a good or a bad thing, for host and guest? Is the immigrant angry at, or nostalgic for, the country he left? Is he thankful to or resentful of the country he has come to? Does the Westerner know why the other seeks him out or why he himself chooses not to emigrate to the non-West? These questions and dozens like them are not so much never answered as never even asked. The result is chaos.</p>

Senator Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) was a vocal critic both of President Obama’s executive-action opening to Cuba and his nuclear non-proliferation talks with Iran. In the midst of his loud opposition, he found himself suddenly the target of renewed federal charges that had aired much earlier without consequence. I think the message was not that the administration was worried over appearances, but rather that it wished to remind all of Washington that it actually welcomed the appearance of not being worried over the idea of federal prosecutorial power being used for tit-for-tat vendettas. Malice is a valuable political tool for...

The Western capitulation to Adolf Hitler in the 1938 Munich Agreement is cited as classic appeasement that destroyed Czechoslovakia, backfired on France and Britain, and led to World War II. All of that is true. But there was much more that caused the Munich debacle than simple Western naiveté. The full tragedy of that ill-fated agreement should warn us on the eve of the Obama's administration's gullible agreement with Iran on nuclear proliferation. Fable one is the idea that most people saw right through the Munich folly. True, Europeans knew that Hitler had never once told the truth and...

<p>California is not suffering one drought, but four. Each is a metaphor of what California has become.</p> <p>The first California drought, of course, is natural. We are now in the midst of a fourth year of record low levels of snow and rain.</p>

The NBC anchor’s lies are symptomatic of a culture in which truth has become relativized. NBC Nightly News anchorman Brian Williams frequently fabricated a dramatic story that he was under enemy attack while reporting from Iraq. NBC is now investigating whether Williams also embellished events in New Orleans during his reporting on Hurricane Katrina. Williams always plays the hero in his yarns, braving natural and hostile human enemies to deliver us the truth on the evening news. Former CBS anchorman Dan Rather tried to pass off fake memos as authentic evidence about former President George W. Bush’s supposedly checkered National...

The president’s disastrous foreign policy is as much a product of his own vanity as anything else. Members of the Obama administration have insisted that the Taliban are not terrorists. Those responsible for the recent Paris killings are not radical Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood is largely secular. Jihad is a “legitimate tenet of Islam.” And “violent extremism,” “workplace violence,” or “man-caused disaster” better describe radical Islamic terrorism. Domestic terrorism is just as likely caused by returning U.S. combat veterans, according to one report by a federal agency. What is the point of such linguistic appeasement? The word “appeasement” long ago...

After six years, it is no surprise that the Obama administration does not see the Taliban as “terrorists” or that it will not associate “violent extremism” with radical Islam or just Islam. After all, when Maj. Hasan murdered U.S. soldiers it was nothing more than “workplace violence,” as if he were a disgruntled post office employee of the 1970s. Our two top intelligence chiefs assured us that the Muslim Brotherhood was “largely secular” and that jihad “was a legitimate tenet of Islam.” Add in “workplace violence” and the old “overseas contingency operations.” Do we remember that Ms. Napolitano’s Department of...

Fueling the Western paralysis in dealing with radical Islam is the late 20th century doctrine of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is one of those buzzwords that does not mean what it should. The ancient and generic Western study of many cultures is not multiculturalism. Rather, the trendy term promotes non-Western cultures to a status equal with or superior to Western culture largely to fulfill contemporary political agendas. On college campuses, multiculturalism not so much manifests itself in the worthy interest in Chinese literature, Persian history, or hieroglyphics, but rather has become more a therapeutic exercise of exaggerating Western sins while ignoring non-Western...

Democrats for over a century were associated with the American middle class. Working-class voters once believed that Democratic-inspired intervention into the economy – minimum-wage laws, overtime pay, Social Security, Medicare, workers’ compensation – protected their interests better than unfettered free-market capitalism. Republicans often had trouble selling the argument that an unleashed economy and new technology would relegate poverty to a relative, not absolute, condition – something like suffering with a cheap outdated iPhone 4 while the better-off afforded an iPhone 6. Why, then, have Democrats lost the working class – especially white, lower-middle-class voters? There are several obvious reasons. For...

A gentrified cocoon of progressive privilege has cost Democrats the middle class. Democrats for over a century were associated with the American middle class. Working-class voters once believed that Democratic-inspired intervention into the economy — minimum-wage laws, overtime pay, Social Security, Medicare, workers’ compensation — protected their interests better than unfettered free-market capitalism. Republicans often had trouble selling the argument that an unleashed economy and new technology would relegate poverty to a relative, not absolute, condition — something like suffering with a cheap, outdated iPhone 4 while the better-off could afford an iPhone 6. Why, then, have Democrats lost the...

There are lots of hypocrisies surrounding the recently released executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA's detention and interrogation program. But they pale in comparison to the current Democratic silence about President Barack Obama's policy of targeted drone assassinations. Since 2004, drones have killed an estimated 2,400 to 3,888 individuals in Pakistan alone, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London. An estimated 345 to 553 individuals in Yemen have been killed in drone strikes over the same period. The BIJ reports that the Obama administration has "markedly stepped up the use of drones. Since...

<p>When IRS Commissioner John Koskinen arrogantly told Congress that he had no apologies for an agency that has targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny, had a top-ranking bureaucrat take the Fifth Amendment, and destroyed its own correspondence, he meant it. Nor did Lisa Jackson, the former head of the EPA, offer any apologies for concocting a fake persona, replete with false e-mail identity (“Richard Windsor”), to hide her own communications. Kathleen Sebelius was likewise unapologetic after presiding over the ruined initial implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Nor did she pay any consequence for campaigning for Democratic candidates while a cabinet secretary, in violation of the Hatch Act.</p>

A large war is looming absent preventive American vigilance The world is changing and becoming even more dangerous — in a way we’ve seen before. In the decade before World War I, the near-hundred-year European peace that had followed the fall of Napoleon was taken for granted. Yet it abruptly imploded in 1914. Prior little wars in the Balkans had seemed to predict a much larger one on the horizon — and were ignored. The exhausted Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were spent forces unable to control nationalist movements in their provinces. The British Empire was fading. Imperial Germany was rising....

There is a humane, transparent, truthful -- and constitutional -- way to address illegal immigration. Unfortunately, President Obama's unilateral plan to exempt millions of residents from federal immigration law is none of those things. Obama said he had to move now because of a dawdling Congress. He forgot to mention that there were Democratic majorities in Congress in 2009 and 2010, yet he did nothing, in fear of punishment at the polls. Nor did Obama push amnesty in 2011 or 2012, afraid of hurting his own re-election chances. Worries over sabotaging Democratic chances in the 2014 midterms explain his inaction...

Last week, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Jonathan Gruber, one of prominent architects of Obamacare, was exposed as little more than an elitist fraud. Gruber was caught on videotape expressing the haughty attitude that drove the Affordable Care Act, deriding the "stupidity" of Americans as a way to justify misleading them. Gruber apparently thinks such deception is OK because yokel voters could not handle the truth about the looming chaos he helped to engineer in their health coverage. Unfortunately, Gruber's disdain for the proverbial masses -- he was paid nearly $400,000 in consulting fees -- is thematic of the last...

Obama’s legacy: government-induced chaos at home, moral equivalence abroad. The last but long gasp of the Obama administration is characterized not so much by deceit and incompetence as by growing chaos. Everything appears to be coming apart. The chariot of state now veers up and down with a terrified Phaethon clueless at the reins. Whether it is ISIS, Ebola, Putin, or Obamacare, the common strain is not simple incompetence, but a maladroitness born of intolerant ideological fundamentalism. Have our government agencies ever seemed more corrupt or useless or both, staffed by political cronies and leftist zealots? What ever happened to...

The Duke of Wellington said of his close-run victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo that the French "came on in the same old way, and we sent them back in the same old way." Something like that happened to the Democrats in Tuesday's midterm elections, as they lost the Senate, a few more seats in the House and additional governorships. They came on with the same old strategy, but this time they went down with it. Obama and the Democrats chose not to defend the administration's record of the last six years. On foreign policy, no Democratic chorus...

<p>Facts now pale in comparison with the higher truths of progressivism.</p> <p>Do bothersome facts matter anymore?</p> <p>Not really. This is an age when Americans were assured that the Affordable Care Act lowered our premiums. It cut deductibles. Obamacare allowed us to keep our doctors and health plans, and lowered the deficit. Those fantasies were both demonstrably untrue and did not matter, given the supposedly noble aims of health care reform.</p>