Free Republic

If I had my druthers, the never-ending conflict between Israel and Palestine would be but a small news brief in American newspapers. But since we police the world, we must always monitor our global police scanner, where not only Israel's conflicts, but those of North and South Korea, the nation of Georgia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, and pretty much everywhere else is the United States' business because we insist on making it so. What many Americans bizarrely consider national "defense" is actually an aggressive and enduring offense, and yet we are always surprised when other nations get offended. Last week,...

Voter dissatisfaction with Republicans and Democrats is at historic levels, and the tea-party movement is hoping to play kingmaker in the November elections. The country’s current breed of discontent is ideal for the tea parties, because economic concerns are foremost, allowing the movement to sidestep the divisions between its libertarian and conservative wings. As the elections near, however, voters will want to know where the party stands not just on the economy but on social issues. A perfect illustration is drug policy, where conservatives advocate continued prohibition but libertarians argue for legalization. Which way should the tea party lean when...

The one main benefit to the financial reform effort so far is that it helps further do away with the false paradigms of "left" or "right" and "Democrat" or "Republican" - fewer and fewer people are falling for those lies anymore. Try to get an ideological conservative to explain why Republicans love spending and so eagerly give welfare to banks. Try to get your local liberal to explain why it was a good idea to make backroom deals with abhorrent corporations and drill, baby, drill. Heck, even try to get a Tea Partier to explain choosing bailout-lover Sarah Palin to...

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) wants to allow the government to interrogate U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism without warning them of their right to remain silent—a proposal that would dramatically rewrite the rules regarding suspects captured inside the United States. “Miranda warnings are counterproductive in my view,” Graham said at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing Wednesday. “The homeland is part of the battlefield. So this idea that you get to America, the rules dramatically change, to the benefit of the suspect – the terrorist – makes no sense,” he said. Graham told POLITICO he is working on...

I posted this first to the latest Glenn Beck thread. I think it embodies what Glenn is talking about in a concentrated summary and deserves notice, IMHO: A right-wing progressive can be defined as one who joins with the left in promoting the all-encompassing all-powerful Commerce Clause in order to push a social "conservative" or religious agenda, primarily today in the federal War on Drugs. (Right-wing Progressivism predates left-wing Progressivism in the alcohol temperance movement of the 1870s and also in the premature ending of Reconstruction and Plessy v. Ferguson institutional and statute-enforced segregation.) The right has been willing to...

If the idea is to create a drug-free America, then we can safely say that after hundreds of billions of dollars spent, millions of arrests, and decades of escalating police and military efforts, the war on drugs is a complete failure. The reason is clear if you think about it. The attempt to use government force and central planning -- violence and socialism, essentially -- to effectively mold society by preventing people on an individual basis from growing, producing, transferring, and ingesting drugs of their choice, is a ridiculous fantasy and always has been. There will forever be ways to...

A former White House speechwriter, Mark Thiessen, has jumped to the defense of his former boss, writing for the Washington Post that George W. Bush “established a conservative record without parallel.” Even by the loose standards of Washington, that is a jaw-dropping assertion. I’ve been explaining for years that Bush was a big-government advocate, even writing a column back in 2007 for the Washington Examiner pointing out that Clinton had a much better economic record from a free-market perspective. I also groused to the Wall Street Journal the following year about Bush’s dismal performance. “Bush doesn’t have a conservative legacy”...

Sarah Palin said Wednesday that the embattled chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC) is "doing a great job." During an appearance on conservative commentator Sean Hannity's show on the Fox News Channel, Palin said, "I support Michael Steele.... I think he's doing a great job. Michael Steele is an outsider. The machine, I think, is tough to penetrate... I think it's been good to have an independent outsider trying to create some change in the Republican Party." The former Alaska governor's remarks are in sharp contrast to the comments of other leading Republicans, who have criticized Steele in recent...

Link only, per FR copyright rules