Free Republic

You hear it said and see it written that Bernie Sanders will be another George McGovern -- that is, a left-wing nominee who lost a presidential election in a landslide. I'm here to tell you that's wrong. Because the times are different. And because Sen. Sanders is, or ought to be, a scarier candidate and a further departure from historic American norms than George McGovern ever was. I speak perhaps from a position of prejudice. I supported George McGovern in 1972, in the primaries and in the general election. And though my views on issues have changed since then --...

If reason ruled in politics, the Democratic party would urge its presidential candidates to eliminate the vitriolic posturing from their campaign, and would then begin to concentrate on the only question that matters: Who can beat Reagan? That is different from asking whether Walter Mondale would make a better chief executive than Gary Hart, or whether Hart’s “new ideas” are preferable to Mondale’s old-line liberal values. What troubles me is that, given the rising nastiness, this campaign begins more and more to resemble the terrible script written in 1972, when another new face, George McGovern, was buried by Richard Nixon’s...

Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” host Chris Matthews offered his take on the Democratic Party’s drift to the far-left, which he warned could have an impact on the 2020 presidential election. Matthews reminded voters of the 1972 presidential election between incumbent President Richard Nixon and then-Democratic presidential nominee Sen. George McGovern (D-SD). Nixon won in a landslide, taking 49 states and 60% of the popular vote. He suggested such a scenario could be possible in 2020 if Democrats nominated a far-left candidate to go up against President Donald Trump in 2020. ~snip~ “What’s hard is to identify a leading candidate that...

Presidential candidate Andrew Yang is campaigning on the platform of Universal Basic Income. He says everyone from MLK to Milton Friedman to Richard Nixon were for it. But were they? The answer won't surprise you.

Dr. Milton Friedman, Nobel Laureate, promoting "Free to Choose" on the show Donahue.Worth watching....Donahue...actually conducted a decent interview.

Thomas Sowell now fears U.S. may not resist 'siren song' Revered economics columnist Thomas Sowell’s warning that Americans may not resist the “siren song” of socialism recalls the late legendary economist Milton Friedman’s warning of the inevitable “drift” toward collectivism that any society with a free enterprise system must constantly battle.

Quotations from Friedman, variously attributed: Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property. When government-- in pursuit of good intentions tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player. The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion...

Milton Friedman's prescient notions regarding Antifa and all like-minded communist brownshirts: Why Communism Must Lead to Corruption

For political observers of a certain vintage, long-shot presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s proposal to give every American adult $1,000 a month brought back a distinct memory from 1972. That year Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern also proposed writing a $1,000 check to every American — $1,000 a year, however (there’s been a lot of inflation since then). To put it mildly, it did not go over well. Even though McGovern eventually abandoned the proposal, and even though it was similar to the “negative income tax” idea crafted by famed free-market economist Milton Friedman and briefly considered by Richard Nixon, the...

“One Thousand Killed in 5 days of Fierce Street Fighting!” read a New York Times headline on Jan 4, 1959. The fake news headline dealt with the (utterly bogus) “battle” of Santa Clara in central Cuba where Ernesto “Che” Guevara earned much of his enduring (and totally bogus) martial fame. “Commander Che Guevara appealed to Batista troops for a truce to clear the streets of casualties,” continues the breathless The New York Times article. “Guevara turned the tide in this bloody battle and whipped a Batista force of 3,000 men!”A year later, Che’s own diaries revealed that his forces (which actually numbered...

[I begin] with the story of a series of Socialist scholars conferences that Barack Obama attended when he lived in New York City between the years 1983 and 1985. And when I finally reconstructed what had gone on at these Socialist conferences that Barack Obama attended, I truly was amazed because what I saw was a kind of map of Barack Obama’s entire subsequent political career. It was at this Socialist conferences in New York in the mid-’80s that Barack Obama encountered the groups, the strategies, and the mentors who would guide him throughout his entire political career. [T]hese Socialist...

Just 712 Democratic officials will decide whether Clinton or Sanders wins the nomination. Documents show that's what the party planned all along. This post originally appeared at In These Times. Since its launch, a specter has haunted Bernie Sanders’ run for the Democratic nomination. It’s not his age, though at 74 he would be the oldest president in American history. And it’s not that he’s an avowed socialist, the label that a mere eight years ago was used to smear Barack Obama as a sinister, alien threat to the American way of life. Rather, it has been the so-called superdelegates...

The political scientist who applies the ‘rational choice’ theory of economics to voters says there was a method to the GOP’s primary madness. Go to the source:

While Republicans debate whether Ted Cruz is Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan, Democrats are faced with a similar conundrum concerning Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont. Some more elderly Democrats, with memories going back decades, wonder if the angry, white-haired socialist is the second coming of George McGovern.

You win the presidency, Richard Nixon supposedly observed, by tacking to the right in the primaries and to the center in the general election. Hillary Clinton seems to be following that strategy except, as a Democrat, she is tacking to the left. This strategy has risks, as Nixon, who lost the presidency once and won it once by narrow margins, understood. Your right- or left-wing stances in the primaries can hurt in the general. As happened to George McGovern, the leftward-tacking Democratic nominee in 1972, whom Nixon beat with 61 percent of the vote. In the four decades since only...

California rapper Brandon McCartney, known by his professional name Lil B The Based God, released a track last year expressing his love and respect for Bill Clinton. And in his ode to the former President, titled "B---- I'm Bill Clinton," he raps a sort of endorsement for Hillary Clinton even before her 2016 presidential bid was announced: "Shout-outs to Hillary Clinton. You gonna win that presidency." But last month, Lil B took that endorsement back, and in a series of passionate tweets, he publicly endorsed Bernie Sanders, saying, "As much as I want to a woman leading the USA, right...

Ben Wattenberg died this week at the age of 81. He gave me my first job in Washington, as his research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. (I returned to AEI as a fellow a few years ago, my office just a few doors down from where Ben used to work.) Ben was one of the last star pundits of what might be called the Old Order, before cable news and the Internet transformed the landscape. When everyone was rushing to CNN to shout at each other on "Crossfire," he launched a PBS show called "Think...

It’s different when you’re on the receiving end. The former Michigan Democratic congressman, liberal pit bull, academic, antiwar firebrand and labor-union BFF has undergone an epiphany, making him simpatico with businesses and the profit motive.When his family approached him more than four years ago about starting Zest, Bonior became a scrappy entrepreneur. He used his congressional access to knock on every one of 435 congressional offices, dropping off a flier for Zest. He worked the Metro stations, handing out coupons. He went door-to-door, as if he were campaigning.“We kept thinking of ways to reach out.”He knew it was risky. Most...

<p>Sen. Rand Paul’s criticism of the National Security Agency’s spying programs puts him in the same category as the late George McGovern, the anti-war 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, Rep. Peter King, R-New York, said Sunday.</p> <p>Echoing remarks last week from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, King sharply chastised Paul for suggesting admitted NSA leaker Edward Snowden was performing an act of civil disobedience when he revealed the massive snooping programs.</p>