Free Republic

Imagine being not yet seventy years old and being told, not exactly politely, that in the interest of liberalism you have to be put out to pasture. When that message went out to Justice Stephen Breyer in 2021, he was at least over eighty when the leftists told him his time was up on the Supreme Court. With Justice Sonia Sotomayor, despite being over ten years younger than Breyer when he retired, Josh Barro writing for The Atlantic announced that it was time for her to withdraw in the interest of liberalism as you can see in "Sonia Sotomayor Should...

Give Josh Barro credit for candor. When it comes to guns, the New York Times correspondent makes no bones about the kind of draconian, Second Amendment-defying approach he thinks is necessary. Forget about expanded background checks or other such measures. The only way to have a "big impact on violent crime," according to Barro, is to emulate Australia and "really take away massive amounts of guns that people have, reduce the rate of gun ownership substantially." View the video here.

Some liberals like to pass Josh Barro off as a conservative. The New York Times correspondent debunked that notion himself, tweeting that he was most easily understood as a "moderate." But after his appearance on MSNBC today, another term might more aptly apply: elitist liberal. Speaking with Alex Wagner, Barro crammed a carload of condescension into thirty seconds. Barro claimed that health insurance is "weirdly complicated," and thus that Americans can't be permitted to choose it as they would other products. No, we can't let people use their "own judgment." The free market "doesn't work very well" with health insurance....

There’s a great deal of truth to the conservative praise for Canada. Its fiscal choices have shown how a country can maintain a strong social safety net while taxing and spending efficiently and encouraging private investment. Openness to trade and skilled immigration have made Canada an attractive place to invest; perhaps too attractive for some, given the dizzying way Chinese investment has driven up housing prices in Vancouver. But there are two big caveats to the conservative case for Canada. First, the offsets. “The things conservatives love about Canada are closely linked to the things they hate most about Canada,”...

Last night, New York Times reporter Josh Barro tweeted out a disturbing message: “Anti-LGBT attitudes are terrible for people in all sorts of communities. They linger and oppress, and we need to stamp them out, ruthlessly.” This is rather shocking. Barro is no angry blogger writing manifestos in his basement. He is a respected reporter from a prestigious newspaper that prides itself on equanimity in the face of heated debate. Yet he seems, by any reasonable measure, to be fomenting a campaign to rout all dissenters from the sexual revolution. Erick Erickson wrote a brief response to Barro’s tweet, to...

Kansas has a problem. In April and May, the state planned to collect $651 million from personal income tax. But instead, it received only $369 million. In 2012, Kansas lawmakers passed a large and rather unusual income tax cut. It was expected to reduce state tax revenue by more than 10 percent, and Gov. Sam Brownback said it would create “tens of thousands of jobs.” In part, the tax cut worked in the typical way, by cutting tax rates and increasing the standard deduction. But Kansas also eliminated tax on various kinds of income, including income described commonly—and sometimes misleadingly—as...

This week, the Kansas House of Representatives passed House Bill 2453, "An act concerning religious freedoms with respect to marriage." Despite its name, this bill isn't about religious freedom. It's about creating new special rights (yes, those dreaded special rights) for people with anti-gay views. The bill would protect the ability of any individual, government agency, or "religious entity" (which includes a business operated in accordance with owner's religious views) to refuse service based on sincere religious beliefs about sex or gender, and to refuse to recognize any marriage or similar arrangement for those reasons — even if such service...

I've gotten a number of messages in the last few days — from both supporters and opponents of gay rights — expressing sympathy over the rude and hateful messages I've been getting (and publishing) ever since I started writing about Phil Robertson. This is sweet, but misplaced. The worst of my problems from being openly gay is that I get some nasty email. That means I have it really easy. In a country where gay teenagers are being bullied at school and thrown out of their homes by their parents and told by their clergy that they're going to Hell,...

Matt Lewis writes of the controversy over Duck Dynasty that "There really are two Americas" and that the divide over the show "has as much to do with class and geography and culture and attitude as it does with religion." That's true. Specifically, there's one America where comparing homosexuality to bestiality is considered acceptable, and another where it is rude and offensive. In one America, it's OK to say this of gays and lesbians: "They’re full of murder, envy, strife, hatred. They are insolent, arrogant, God-haters. They are heartless, they are faithless, they are senseless, they are ruthless. They invent...

<p>Virtually every other show [aside from "Morning Joe"] belongs to hosts who unstintingly support Obama and the Democrats, with only minor points of disagreement. ([Host Chris] Hayes criticizes Obama for his drone killings and surveillance programs, and often conducts friendly interviews with Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who collaborated with Edward Snowden. Melissa Harris-Perry, who appears on weekends at 10 a.m., nearly always defends Obama, and called Glenn Greenwald a “jerk.”) Conservatives are far less visible on MSNBC than liberals are on Fox News, and the right-leaning guests who do appear are typically critics of the conservative movement: Steve Schmidt, the Republican strategist, who says the party is too tolerant of “nuts” and “kooks”; Josh Barro, an advocate for Republican reform who describes himself as “neoliberal”; Abby Huntsman, the daughter of failed presidential candidate Jon, who has described the G.O.P. as a party of “non-inclusion.” The over-all impression is that your average Republican or conservative is simply too fanatical to be part of polite discourse.</p>