Free Republic

There are signs building that the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers is getting ready to confirm what AT contributor Jack Cashill demonstrated years ago: he was the actual author of Barack Obama's first purported autobiography, Dreams from My Father. If he does so, this could be political dynamite for a president who has already demonstrated to the American people that he is willing to lie when it suits his political interests, as in, "You can keep your health insurance. Period." R. Emmett Tyrrell of The American Spectator offers the indicators that Ayers is getting ready to spill the beans:

Life is very, very good for the select few who gain entrance to Harvard University as undergraduates. Thanks to Harvey Mansfield, the very rarest of phenomena, an outspokenly conservative member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the world now knows that the average grade at Harvard College (the undergraduate portion of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences) is A minus. Matthew Q. Clarida and Nicholas P. Fandos of The Harvard Crimson report:

“Let me end by addressing the elephant in the room here, which is the seeming inability to get anything done in Washington these days.” Woo-hoo! I’m dying here! Did you catch that? The “elephant” in the room! Ha ha ha! The do-nothing “elephant” Congress. Kudos to the speechwriter who came up with that, you’ve got a standing job offer on the Daily Show.As I’m sure you’ve heard, Big Guy pivoted away from the continually unfolding disaster of Obamacare yesterday back to the economy which, by comparison, is doing much better.Donkey ears for the Prezzie making elephant jokesMaking the claim...

The "undetectable gun ban" does no good and does considerable harm.  I applaud Representative Thomas Massie for standing up against the bullies in the MSM.   Standing on principle when all the voices in the old media are against you takes guts.   From WFPL: Kentucky Fourth District Congressman Thomas Massie says he was the sole voice vote against a 25-year ban on firearms that can evade metal detectors and X-ray machines. The article goes on to mislead the readers: First passed in 1988, the Undetectable Firearms Act is set to expire on December 9. It bans the possession, manufacturing and selling...

It is that time of year again: Wednesday night reunions at hometown bars, Thanksgiving dinners on Thursday and shopping on Black Friday. However, a union created, and not so quaint, tradition is emerging. For most people, the day after Thanksgiving means taking advantage of holiday sales or recovering from a turkey induced food coma. For some labor unions, Black Friday means ginning up overhyped media stories to bully companies into taking away the secret ballot from their workers during unionization elections. In September, pro-union writer Josh Eidelson reported in the The Nation that in an "emailed statement, a campaign closely...

Why isn't Obama firing anyone for the failed health care website? Could it be that if he fires someone, that someone will spill the beans on how large a part Obama himself played in the incompetent roll-out of the plan? Obama is too vulnerable to fire anyone. Maybe he should fire himself? No, it wouldn't work. His whole staff would then feel free to tell the truth. We must remember that he never fired anyone with the IRS scandal or Benghazi, either. If you work for Obama, you have a lifetime position. Unless you're murdered by the incompetency of your...

Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary in the Clinton administration, spoke candidly about health care at UC Berkeley on October 26, 2007. In this video he reveals what an honest politician would say, but doesn't for fear of not winning an election. In part: "... [W]hat I'm going to do is I am going to try to reorganize [the American health care system] to be more amenable to treating sick people. But that means you -- particularly you young people, particularly you young healthy people -- you're going to have to pay more. And by the way, we are going to...

President Obama on Thursday will order the federal government to use renewables for 20 percent of its electricity needs by 2020. The Associated Press first reported the news and obtained a copy of the executive order to be released Thursday. The White House confirmed the report to The Hill. It will nearly triple the use of the federal government's renewable sources and apply to all federal agencies, civilian and military. "The federal government occupies nearly 500,000 buildings, operates 600,000 vehicles and purchases more than $500 billion per year in goods and services," the AP reported late Wednesday. "The government currently...

It's that time of year again. Like clockwork, Barry the Terrible has once again urged his faithful droogs to use the occasion of family holiday gatherings to aggressively promote his hard left agenda. If we want to hear a reverent holiday proclamation from this White House, we'll have to wait for Ramadan.

President Obama declared rising income inequality a “fundamental threat” to the United States on Wednesday. Speaking in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., Obama pledged that for the remainder of his presidency, his administration would “focus all our efforts” on addressing an issue that threatens the economy and the American Dream. The hour-long speech had all the trappings of a serious policy address, presenting a legislative agenda for the remaining three years of the Obama administration. But Democratic strategists, liberal economists, and political scientists questioned whether it marked a real shift in focus. Obama has long decried the...

<p>It must be understood, the Pentagon, under the reign of Barack HUSSEIN Obama, is less of a forward arm for America’s defense than a helpmate to its enemies. There you have it.</p>

Obamacare “raided” $300 billion for Medicare Advantage and seniors will begin feeling the cuts next year, according to an analysis Tuesday by the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee. Obamacare took $700 billion from Medicare and $300 billion from Medicare Advantage alone for its own funding, according to the subcommittee. The cuts to Medicare Advantage beneficiaries will “begin to be fully realized in the next year,” according to the subcommittee. “There was a promise made to seniors as well. The promise was that we’re going to use your Medicare dollars as a piggy bank to fund the Affordable Care Act,...

Moscow’s new active-array missile could be the most accurate ever By combining two existing technologies, Russian engineers have devised what could be the world’s deadliest air-to-air missile. And the U.S. military doesn’t have anything like it … or adequate defenses. Designers at the Detal bureau, part of the state-owned Tactical Missile Munitions Corporation, added an active electronically-scanned array radar—a so-called “AESA”—to the nose of a long-range R-77 missile to produce the K-77M model. Thanks to its new guidance sensors, the K-77M is way more accurate than other missiles. How accurate? Flying 40 miles or more, the K-77M should be able...

After a glowing news conference yesterday citing “night and day” progress on HealthCare.gov, I decided to log in this morning and take the Web site for a test drive, as I’m sure many others are doing. Early reports had been promising. What I found was hardly encouraging — long delays loading pages, an endless circle of tasks (some already completed) and ultimately an error message. The load-time issues (sometimes more than a minute) reminded me of the problems users encountered in the very first days of the Web site, which handles health insurance enrollment for residents of 36 states. It...

“Light in the Darkness” (Romans 13:8-14) Advent is a season of light. In fact, you could say that Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany--the whole three-month sequence centered around Christmas--each of these seasons could be called a season of light. Think of it: You’ve got the Advent wreath, with its candles for the four Sundays in Advent. You’ve got the Christmas tree, of course, with its tradition of being adorned with lights. And at Epiphany we think of the star that led the Wise Men to the Christ Child, and so we put an Epiphany star on top of the Christmas tree....

Tongue firmly in cheek (I think), Ben Domenech tells the political equivalent of a campfire ghost story. The odds of Mitt Romney actually being interested in the ultimate salvage operation are south of one percent, I’d guess, but on a news day as slow as this one, that’s more than enough to justify blogging the possibility. Dude, I’m nervous: What Obama needs right now more than ever is a turnaround artist. Ideally, he would find someone with executive experience and bipartisan bona fides, someone experienced in the health policy space, who understands how these complicated exchanges are supposed to work....

Muslim deaf & dumb juveniles are kept chained in rural Bengal • Chained in ropes and shackles for years. Inhumane treatment to deaf and dumb juveniles in Muslim families of rural Bengal. It is obviously inhumane and utter injustice to put some juveniles in ropes or shackles as they are challenged persons, very unfortunately. But, in a Muslim village of Sahebdanga near Shantipur (in Nadia, West Bengal, India) it is an Islamic fashion to put the Deaf and Dumb or mentally incapacitated juveniles in chain as they are simply uncontrollable or misunderstood sometime. Take the story of cute Arfin of...

AND…creepier. An assignment sent home from an Oak Forest, IL high school government class is raising eyebrows among parents who are shocked by the questionnaire they and their children are required to fill out. The questionnaire (below) has the parents identify their positions on a number of highly-charged issues, and then places them on a “political spectrum”. The survey is part of Oak Forest High School’s Common Core curriculum, which according to the school district’s website is to …”provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do...

Our government was designed that citizens elected officials to represent them and work together to create legislation to govern our land. While America is not a true democracy in the strictest sense, being a Republic, this method of governing has led a great deal of influence onto laws by the average voter. This allows unpopular legislation to be shot down by an angry public, despite the wishes of the progressive elite that they know better than us common serfs. However, this bond between citizen and government is being subverted by a relatively new menace: regulation. This is where federal agencies...

Last year a poll was conducted where more people thought Santa was a Democrat. I did a graphic for this back then in response to this, but I've updated it with a few new items to consider.In last year's post it was a real squeaker...but this year one side really runs away with it...

As the Chinese lunar lander Chang'e 3, carrying the Jade Rabbit rover, voyages to the moon, the question arises what should NASA's response be, aside from congratulations to a rival space power. RESOLVE might just fit the bill. RESOLVE or Regolith and Environment Science and Oxygen and Lunar Volatile Extraction is designed to prospect for lunar resources mounted on a rover. "RESOLVE includes a drill, a chemical plant (with an oxygen and volatiles extraction node, gas chromatograph, and mass spectrometer), a neutron spectrometer, and a near infrared spectrometer." It has been tested on Earth as part of a joint American/Canadian...

Some time ago I found an interesting post in a blog by an Indian in London. The post, now removed, was entitled "Dubai - Still Racist?", and said: Dubai (and the UAE) then and now is arguably one amongst the more institutionally racist places in the world with a strict hierarchy of privilege. Arabs are at the top of the heap, followed closely by Western Europeans and US (called the Whites in Dubai), Eastern Europeans, Philipinos and finally Indians and Pakistanis. The different communities were completely isolated from each other in terms of housing, schools, social clubs – it...

If I were a young person, I would think twice about signing up for ObamaCare. Besides the healthcare.gov website being a huge hassle, here are some reasons to just BLOW IT OFF: --It is not worth the price you are being charged to pay for yourself AND us older folks who don’t need your help, AND pay for a lot of things you don’t need that are required in ObamaCare policies (like sex-change operations). --Not only are you paying for old people’s healthcare, you will be paying an estimated 18% more for insurance over your lifetime. It’s a bad deal!...

On Monday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said that Obamacare will place a special focus on members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered community because "for too long...[they] were pushed to the side," Paul Bedard reported at the Washington Examiner. "LGBT individuals have faced limited access to health care and insurance. They have been less likely to get the preventive care they need to stay healthy, they have higher rates of tobacco use, and they are often at increased risk for mental health illness," she said. To counter this, the administration is drawing attention to new benefits...

In quite possibly the worst song ever written, HealthCare.gov has a message to deliver: the Affordable Health Care “ain’t about the cha-ching cha-ching, ain’t about the bling bla-bling.” It is, in fact, there to keep you “young and healthy.” That was the resounding, ear-splitting commentary from “Don’t Worry About the Price Tag,” a music video that HealthCare.gov chose as its winner to a national competition in which proponents of ObamaCare made videos espousing the greatness of the law. The title of “Don’t Worry About the Price Tag” is fairly ironic, considering that the President had promised that Americans would see...

There was a tremendous panel discussion today in the U.S. Senate hosted by the Federalist Society. The discussion concerned the proposed Corker-Warner bill to “reform” the housing finance system. The moderator was Troy Paredes and the speakers included Ronald Case, Bernard Weinstein and myself. Going forward, what should happen to the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Weinstein argued that they should be kept in place, but regulated to avoid Congress from forcing them to take on too much risk. Case gave an eloquent discussion of the necessity for the rule of law in whatever happens going forward. What...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Obama asks us to “forget� his broken promise to reduce annual premiums by $2,500 In February 2008, Obama said:“We are going to work with you to lower your premiums by $2,500. We will not wait 20 years from now to do it, or 10 years from now to do it. We will do it by the end of my first term as president.”However, by the time his first term was over, family premiums had gotten bigger, not smaller. The increase was $3,065 per family.Afterward, the Obama administration chose a video called “Forget About the Price Tag�...

Hypocrisy about the nuclear option comes easily to today's Democrats.If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, then calling Harry Reid, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden hypocrites for abandoning their previous “principled” defense of Senate filibusters is an insult to hypocrites. Hypocrites, after all, recognize the power of principles and try to squirm out of the vice of violating them, but today’s post-modern Democrats feel no shame in making contradictory “principled” arguments because they no longer pay any tribute whatsoever to the virtue of neutral, non-partisan principle.These Democrats are practicing the philosophy of post-modernism preached by liberal theorists...

Like many districts in Michigan, Milan Area Schools suffered a reduction in student enrollment. But unlike other districts, many of the district's employees will be getting more money this year than originally planned even with the drop in enrollment. Milan Superintendent Bryan Girbach said it was because the district took a hard look at enrollment trends while unions worked with the district to get a balanced budget. The result: employees will get 1.7 percent back from their contractual concessions, Girbach said. Milan Area Schools had 2,385 students in 2012-13. It budgeted for a 7 percent reduction to 2,231 students. The...

Who can forget the heady days of 1972-1974 when the Watergate scandal dominated the media? I’m no fan of Richard Nixon, but compare how he was handled by the Washington Post to how this same paper is giving the kid gloves treatment to Barack Obama. No objective observer can dispute that the crimes of the Nixon administration pale in comparison—in both quantity and severity—to those of the current administration. Finally, though, there are some negative pieces in WaPo, including a front page story on December 2nd noting that: The enrollment records for a significant portion of the Americans who have...

Fresh from His historic success in banishing fear of Iranian nuclear weapons, President Obama today announced a similar approach to banishing our concerns about crime in the United States.The Obama-Kerry plan to banish the threat of Iran's development of nuclear weaponry by not mentioning it -- thereby shielding her devoutly sensitive leaders from any embarassment that might result from learning that even they suspect it -- is working as intended. It harmonises beautifully with His new plan to banish our concerns about crime. Although multifaceted and multicultural, the plan can be summarized as follows: Those who commit crimes are sadly undermedicated and otherwise...

We keep hearing about what I like to call the Holy Grail theory of demographic change. This is the argument that the future is inevitably Democratic because Republicans aren’t just losing young people — they are structurally unable to win them, and will become more so over time. But what if this Holy Grail never appears? I don’t have any solid, irrefutable evidence that it’s happening, but Harvard’s Institute of Politics has just come out with a new survey of Millennials — whom they define as those aged 18 to 29 today — and its findings don’t provide a lot...

Wednesday, December 04, 2013 The Liberal God Dies Again Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog The god of liberalism is an idea and ideas are notoriously fragile things. They fall apart once they make the transition from the ivory tower of the mind to the mud and dross of reality. Every writer and artist has had the experience of holding a perfect ideal in his mind only to lose it as he struggles to set it down on canvas or paper. The creative process is that recognition that the ideal cannot be made real. Liberalism, progressivism and...

President Obama on Wednesday declared that addressing income inequality would be the focus of “all” of the White House’s efforts “for the rest of my presidency.” In a sweeping address that touched on raising the minimum wage, investing in infrastructure and ending tax breaks for the wealthy, Obama warned that the American economy has become “profoundly unequal,” declaring economic mobility the “challenge of our time.” “The combined trends of increasing inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American dream, our way of life, and what we stand for around the globe,” he said in an hour-long speech...

Democratic gubernatorial candidate and former Congressman Mark Schauer has proposed raising Michigan’s minimum wage to $9.25 per hour over a period of three years and indexing it to inflation from there forward. While mandating higher wages often sells well politically, the cost of doing so would be worse for the very people it is intended to help. Proponents of increasing the minimum wage essentially are asserting that government can set wages with little adverse effect. But that's not true. While there is debate among economists over all of the ancillary effects of increasing the minimum wage, the majority of the...

It has never been this American-Israeli’s intention to denigrate U.S. or Israeli leadership. Far from it. But chips fall where they do and it is not a patriot’s (especially if one is both a committed Zionist and a Conservative American…a double whammy) obligation to cover up a leadership’s faults, or, in some cases, their treachery. Rather, it is incumbent upon all of us to reveal whatever shakes out of various trees and that is that. So, on the U.S. front, this blog has consistently, unflinchingly indicted the anti-American Islamist-in-Chief for his betrayals. It is summed up within concomitant commentaries, yet...

image courtesy of Maggie's NotebookMichael Cannon of the Cato Institute testified before Congress yesterday about the dangerous territory into which the country is headed. Obama took an oath to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” and Cannon spells out in clear detail how badly Obama is flouting his oath and the Constitution. The law is a reciprocal pact between the government and the governed. Public order requires government to remain faithful to the law as much as it requires the citizenry to do so. If the actions of government officials lead citizens to conclude that those officials are...

There is a cancer in the American body politic. It is looking likely that only radical surgery can save the patient. Cancerous cells have three common mutations that make them fatal. First, they have to avoid being killed (apoptosis is the process where abnormal cells are destroyed). Next, the cells must have a means to grow unregulated. Finally, cancerous cells must spread throughout the body. The political cancer called socialism works in the same three phases. In America, our Constitution of limited and enumerated powers was the primary apoptosis mechanism, designed to keep government from doing the nasty things other...

They've fixed the website.

Barack Obama's Uncle Omar -- an illegal alien from Kenya, who evaded a Federal deportation order for decades as a fugitive, and nearly smashed into a police cruiser while driving drunk in Boston in 2011 -- has been handed a green card by a Department of Justice immigration judge. Omar, who goes by the name of Onyango Obama, is a liquor store manager who was arrested in September 2011, after his DUI. Instead of being deported, as ordered by a Federal judge's in 1992, ICE released him after just two weeks. Today, facing immediate deportation, with his high-priced Chicago immigration attorney by...

Though I have written about the fact often, it bears repeating that the National Education Association and its affiliates are employers. Between them they hire thousands of workers to perform a variety of tasks. Virtually all of these workers are covered by collective bargaining agreements in which the teachers’ union is management – bosses, to put it plainly. Union employees use the contract to set salaries, benefits, working conditions and protections against arbitrary actions by union executives.About 500 people work at NEA national headquarters in Washington, DC. A handful of unions represent them, the largest being the National Education Association...

Speaking about Obamacare, MIT economics professor Jonathan Gruber said, “We’ve decided as a society that we don’t want people to have insurance plans that expose them to more than six thousand dollars in out-of-pocket expenses.�   What does it mean that “we� decide something “as a society�? It’s an important question: This sort of statement gets used frequently as a justification of government of intervention. When, in the same fashion, Obama says “we as a nation,� he is just using a variation of the same expression and talking like the average politician.   “We as a society� or “we as...

The gay agenda, which the liberal establishment has been driving forward with alarming aggressiveness and success, is not just about conferring special status on a favored group, or even about corrupting society by mainstreaming deviancy and degeneracy.It is tyranny.Just ask Britain’s Peter and Hazelmary Bull: Peter and Hazelmary Bull, the Christian hoteliers fined for refusing a single room to two homosexual men in September 2008, have lost their appeal to the UK’s Supreme Court, with the court ruling that their company policy was “discriminatory.”Despite the fact that the couple proved that their policy applied equally to any unmarried couples, and...

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) on Tuesday reintroduced legislation that would require the government to study the most practical ways of taxing drivers based on how far they drive, in order to help fund federal highway programs. Blumenauer's bill, H.R. 3638, would set up a Road Usage Fee Pilot Program, which he said would study mileage-based fee systems. He cast his bill as a long-term solution for funding highway programs, and proposed it along with a shorter-term plan to nearly double the gas tax, from 18.4 cents to 33.4 cents per gallon. "As we extend the gas tax, we must also...

Young voters are turning against President Obama and his signature healthcare law, according to a new poll from Harvard University's Institute of Politics. Obama's approval rating has plunged to 41 percent with voters aged 18-29, down from 52 percent the last time Harvard polled the group. While 56 percent in the poll say they backed Obama last year, just 46 percent say they would do so again. "We're now seeing a sea change among this critical demographic," says Harvard Institute of Politics Director Trey Grayson. "The president has experienced a double-digit drop in his approval rating among millennials over the...

In its heyday Cunard cruise lines used the tagline, “Getting there is half the fun.” It worked well because the “there” its ships were getting passengers to was a happy vacation in an attractive part of the world. Now that Obamacare’s website repairs have “fixed” 90% of its problems according to Barack Obama, we are to believe that getting to Obama’s promised land, “..is half the fun.” But believing this means believing there is actually a desirable “there” at the end of one’s Obamacare journey. Clearly a growing majority of Americans don’t believe this. Like all liberal programs, Obamacare relies...

With no major world power posing any kind of a threat to them, China is donning their war paint and swaggering towards conflict. On the eve of Joe Biden visiting Japan, China ratcheted up the rhetoric of war and militarily threatened Japan over China’s newly declared air defense zone. They boldly state they will ‘enforce’ new aircraft controls in a maneuver that amounts to a dare to Japan to step over this midair red line. Poke, poke, threaten, dare – repeat until something happens: Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Geng Yangsheng accused Japan in a statement of “making trouble” and he...

Former Rep. Mike Kreidler (D-Wash.), the Washington state insurance commissioner, testified on Wednesday that the administration’s proposal to allow people to keep their existing coverage won’t work. Kreidler, a healthcare law supporter, has declined President Obama’s offer to allow states to continue offering plans that don't meet ObamaCare's mandated requirements for an additional year. He argued that allowing the discontinued plans back into the marketplace at this late date would create “uncertainty and disruption” for his state’s exchange, could lead to a premium spike in 2015, and would contribute to prolonging a “failing system” whereby insurers can gouge consumers with...