Free Republic

Several months ago, before anyone imagined the current crisis, I read a book called "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl. Frankl was a Jewish Viennese psychiatrist who was captured by the Nazis during World War II and managed to survive four concentration camps including the infamous Auschwitz and Dachau. He went through the ordeal observing human behavior, and the result was his formulation of a system of therapy he called logotherapy. Frankl found that those who were most successful, surviving under the most challenging circumstances, were those who retained a sense of meaning in their lives. That is, the...

"There are no libertarians in a global pandemic." So goes the smug punchline of large-government advocates who point to the necessity of collective action in the face of an unprecedented global crisis. Without government, they say, we'd all be dead. Few libertarians would disagree. The hardcore libertarians at Reason magazine aren't spending their days fulminating over the evils of government-required lockdown orders in the face of a fast-spreading, deadly disease. That's because they, like all other sentient human beings, recognize that collective action is sometimes necessary. But here's the dirty little secret: Institutional failures during this pandemic are more indicative...

RUSH: Mr. Snerdley is trying to goad me into talking about the bailout package. He asked me during the break, “So what are you gonna do with your big stimulus check?” Folks, I don’t have any idea how big my stimulus check is gonna be. I don’t know how big yours is gonna be. I know what Snerdley’s trying to do. Snerdley’s trying to stir up a bunch of garbage here about, “What happened to the limits on spending that we conservatives believe in? What do you mean a $2.2 trillion…? It’s like I said Friday. Remember everybody freaked out...

If you thought our Democrat legislators wouldn’t try to push through more pork in the Covid-19 congressional barrel, you have been living in a fool’s paradise. The House has just completed its response to the bipartisan Senate bill, the Cares Act. With its $2.2T price tag, what this act is “helping” entails a lot more than a coronavirus response. Of course, much of the money is targeted at necessary things that will directly mitigate Covid-19’s impact on our nation. But as Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel points out, “A rough calculation suggests the single biggest recipient of taxpayer dollars in...

Is the world's draconian response to the coronavirus a panicked leap backward into indiscriminate annihilation — not only of national economic health, but also of its prerequisite, individual liberty? Does it prepare a future path, give sanction and precedent to eventual dictatorial control by government, which could be usurped by a left-wing administration to promote the globalist agenda that Obama and the radical Democrat Party endorse? Black swan events that inflict a planetary cost will continue to occur. Clearly, this one has overwhelmed national governments. George Soros himself could not have fantasized, in his habitual delirium, a more enticing catastrophic...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's attempted partisan sabotage of the coronavirus relief bill might mark a new low for her. That the bill finally passed the Senate doesn't excuse her reckless gamesmanship. Republican and Democratic Senate leaders were close to an agreement when Pelosi parked her partisan broomstick and poured poison into the congressional punchbowl. "Talking to some Senate GOP sources," Townhall political editor Guy Benson tweeted. "They seem stunned and angry. I'm told there was lots of bipartisan input into the legislative outline & emerging specifics -- including an agreement in principle on broad strokes. Then Pelosi showed up and...

When governments frantically throw more money than they can afford at a crisis -- and we're throwing trillions (yes, trillions) at the desperate war against the coronavirus with that federal relief package out of Washington -- two truths are self-evident. One was famously expressed by Rahm Emanuel, the discredited former mayor of Chicago who dropped his re-election bid rather than get wiped out over his clumsy suppression of a police video of a black teenager being killed by a white cop. Now he dispenses wisdom as a talking head on ABC. And the other was proclaimed by Comrade Napoleon, the...

Only in the fevered brain of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could things like forcing the airlines to be carbon neutral, making sure Planned Parenthood qualifies for small business assistance, cancelling the Postal Service’s debt, and requiring nationwide same-day voting be seen as a proper and valid response to the Wuhan Virus crisis that is crushing our economy and killing our people. People are dying, both from the disease of and the depression and anxiety caused by looming mortgage payments, job loss, and watching their retirement funds built up over a lifetime evaporate. Pelosi wants to make sure boards of corporations...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi must be blind. She’s actually advocating that she and her fellow Democrats nationalize the medical supply chain and is holding the third coronavirus relief bill hostage until she and her party get what they want. She wants us to believe that this is the only solution to meet the growing need for goods to combat the coronavirus. What this is truly about is her and her colleagues’ own arrogance and quest for government expansion and control of the economy -- an obvious power grab that’s clearly designed to exploit the COVID-19 national emergency. Is Pelosi so...

To some lawmakers, there’s never been a better time to embrace pet projects and ideological wish lists. House Democrats recently introduced a $2.5 trillion “Take Responsibility for Workers and Families Act,” which includes many ludicrous items, ranging from carbon offsets for the struggling U.S. airline industry to $15 minimum wage stipulations for businesses getting relief from the government. But, perhaps the most hare-brained scheme is an asinine proposal to bail out the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). Americans need a simple, straightforward bill right now to get the country back on track, not misguided Postal “reform” and other insane non-priorities. According...

The House speaker not only wants to use the coronavirus pandemic to entrench Obamacare, she wants to make taxpayers fund abortion in the process In the words of her former House colleague Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi never wants to let a crisis go to waste. The House speaker not only wants to use the coronavirus pandemic to entrench Obamacare, she wants to make taxpayers fund abortion in the process.A recent summary of the legislation Pelosi plans to introduce as an alternative to Senate Republicans’ “stimulus” bill laid out the strategy. House Democrats want to force insurers to reopen enrollment in...

This is not an emergency virus bill. It is a Democratic election wish list, at a time hundreds are dying, thousands are losing their businesses, and millions are out of work in the United States. The weekend began with a bipartisan plan. People were hopeful. Outside of Washington, business owners told The Federalist they finally saw light in all the darkness. They thought they’d be able to hire their employees back again. These are employees who have families, mortgages, and lives, people who have never asked for public assistance in their lives and never thought they’d have to.The mood in...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's coronavirus bill is not enough. It is not nearly enough. And if there is any hope of keeping the U.S. economy from free fall, its deficiencies must be addressed this week. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s coronavirus bill is not enough. It is not nearly enough. And if there is any hope of keeping the U.S. economy from free fall, its deficiencies must be addressed this week with a combination of immediate and direct aid to the businesses that feed our families, host our celebrations, employ our neighbors, sponsor our Little Leagues, and make our towns our...

It was just a little over 10 years ago, at the height of the 2008-2009 financial crisis, that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said one of the dumbest things in modern times. The best way to stimulate the economy, she declared, was with "unemployment insurance and food stamps." Right. Paying people not to work will get more people to work. Now here we go again. In the throes of the COVID-19 financial crisis, Pelosi is still spreading her economic pixie dust. Maybe it is just an inviolable rule of politics that politicians never seem to learn from their past mistakes. The...

It won't be comfortable in a city that has grown used to substituting talking points and campaign ads for governance, but the nature of the coronavirus crisis demands answers, and here's why. Washington, D.C. — Washington’s politicians are frightened for the economy and for their health, but in all this fear and the rush to flee the city there might be room for a political bargain — the kind of bipartisan bargain the working class and small and mid-sized business owners need to get through what’s coming.Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin are...

Mark your calendars because today is the day Townhall Senior Columnist Kurt Schlichter agreed with Big Chief Warren and Scat Francisco Congresscreature Nancy Pelosi. Yes, they are correct that Americans rejected Sitting Bolshevik because she was a woman, specifically, because she was a very, very annoying woman who, besides her track record of tacky lies, was very, very annoying in a uniquely female way. Putting aside that she is the Bud Light of faculty lounge socialism, Americans had no desire to spend four years with some national librarian in the Oval Office pestering us about using our inside voices and...

Remember that giant gavel that Nancy Pelosi carried in triumph across Capitol Hill after the House voted for Obamacare in 2010?   You know, the one that looked like a croquet mallet? During the State of the Union address last week, she looked bereft without it as she chewed her lip, gauging the distance between her and Mr. Trump.  It would have been so quick and easy. And who could have blamed her? Certainly none in the media. They would instantly have discovered all sorts of mitigating circumstances.But, not having her mallet handy, she settled for ripping up her copy of...

Speaker Nancy Pelosi can't stop talking about impeachment, which is weird because the president was acquitted earlier this month on the two articles that House Democrats managed to drum up against him. The Speaker wants everyone to believe the president is damaged goods and Trump will now remain "impeached forever." But Doug Collins isn't having it. The Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee told Fox and Friends on Sunday that what Speaker Pelosi keeps saying in interviews simply is "not true," and he encouraged Pelosi to "get over the disaster" that her and her fellow Democrats put the country...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) made waves when she shredded President Donald Trump's State of the Union address earlier this month. The next day we learned that she planned to make a scene, as evidenced by video footage. She confirmed her desire for attention during an exclusive interview with CNN on Saturday. "Are you giving a signal that the Democrats will fight back hard, that you will not be constrained by what you believe to be insurgent behavior on the other side, and that this is, you know, a time to go mano a mano?" CNN's Christiane Amanpour asked. "Let me...

With their ludicrous impeachment exercise, Democrats have forever destroyed impeachment as a political tool even as they ensured that it will get pulled out of the drawer repeatedly by their radical political progeny in the years ahead. It took mere milliseconds following acquittal before the raging impeachaholics started fantasizing about the next round. The latest round of impeachment hysteria was triggered by President Trump's removal of the villainous Vindmans, the failed ambassador par mediocre, and other assorted swamp creatures. Patriotic Americans wondered why it took so long. Those with TDS reprised the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail,...