Free Republic

Senate Republicans on Saturday voted against extending the Bush tax cuts to only the middle class in a pair of votes Democrats are seizing to paint the GOP as guardians of the rich. The Senate voted 53-36 to extend all expiring tax cuts on individuals with incomes of less than $200,000 a year and married couples making less than $250,000 -- seven shy of the required 60 to advance. The other proposal, which drew opposition from White House officials, would have renewed them for all tax filers with incomes of $1 million or less. That also failed in a 53-36...

The Senate bill contains fees that could be considered tax provisions, which under congressional rules supposed to originate in the House, according to House and Senate aides who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the situation. House Republicans could call a vote to send the bill back to the Senate for another vote. That could hurt the bill's chances as Congress rushes to wrap up for the year.

RedState.com has received exclusive video showing the events leading up to the now infamous curb-stomp of MoveOn.org activist Lauren Valle. What is seen on the video contradicts Ms. Valle's account that she has repeated on main stream media programs and has been regurgitated on left-wing web sites.

The number two at the Dutch embassy in Ankara was called by Turkish government officials on Monday to explain parts of the coalition accord which relate to Turkey, the Volkskrant reports on Tuesday, quoting diplomatic sources. In particular, the Turkish authorities are concerned about parts of the agreement which anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders made a condition of his support for the minority agreement. They want to know about the clause which will limit social security payments to people who return to Turkey and calls to renegotiate the terms of Turkey's association agreement with the EU. A court in Rotterdam ruled...

It may well become the trial of the century: this week, Dutch MP [Member of Parliament] Geert Wilders stands before the judge on charges of “sowing hate” through his speeches and writings about Islam. ... For Wilders, however, its timing could not come at a more strategic moment. As the founder and leader of Holland’s far-right Freedom Party (PVV), Wilders is not only Holland’s most controversial politician, but also its most-favored, ranking higher in the polls now than it did after a sweeping victory in parliamentary elections this past June. Moreover, just last week, after months of debate, the Dutch...

[From CNN CEO memo making the announcement]: Ultimately, the goal is that the kind of front-page reporting and analysis that captures a news event, translates its meaning and shapes the dialogue about the story will continue to emerge in even more prominent and more accessible ways to CNN’s audiences. The search for this person is currently underway.

The crash of Sweden's long-ruling Social Democrats to their worst defeat since 1914 highlights the decline of socialist parties in much of Europe, drained by social change, economic crisis and the rise of new issues. ... Socialists' long-standing support for European unification, religious tolerance and integrating immigrants has made them vulnerable to right-wing populists like the Sweden Democrats, Geert Wilders' Dutch Freedom Party or France's National Front.

For the month of July, Site Analytics shows Free Republic as having 6,187,862 visits (1,320,954 unique visitors).MSNBC.com had 5,224,538, down 16.9% (2,002,914 unique visitors).

Reminiscent of the West's imperial push in the 18th and 19th centuries - but on a much more dramatic, determined scale - China's rulers believe Africa can become a 'satellite' state, solving its own problems of over-population and shortage of natural resources at a stroke. With little fanfare, a staggering 750,000 Chinese have settled in Africa over the past decade. More are on the way. The strategy has been carefully devised by officials in Beijing, where one expert has estimated that China will eventually need to send 300 million people to Africa to solve the problems of over-population and pollution....

Anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders has emerged as a possible member of the next Dutch government after the centrist Christian Democrats agreed to informal talks with Wilders and the VVD party that won recent Dutch elections. Wilders says the Christian Democrats' move is "positive news" and he is prepared to start the talks as soon as possible.

AMSTERDAM—The Netherlands lurched deeper into political limbo Tuesday after renewed efforts to form a coalition government broke down amid disagreements about the scope and speed of economic overhauls. [snip] The center-right Liberals were negotiating with a center-left trio of the Labor Party and the smaller Democratic Liberals and Green Party.

AMSTERDAM/JAKARTA (BosNewsLife)-- The Dutch far right Party for Freedom (PVV) says the Netherlands should demand that Indonesia improves protection of Christians amid reports that hard-line Muslims prepare for a religious war with that country's Christian minority. In a petition, PVV-leader Geert Wilders and party representative Raymond de Roon ask the government to summon the ambassador of Indonesia and suggest that the Netherlands "freezes" cooperation with its former colony. They wrote Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime to tell the Indonesian ambassador that "the Netherlands demands immediate action of the Indonesian government to protect the Christian minority in the city of Bekasi and...

The Dutch politician Geert Wilders has hit the bullseye: ‘Jordan is Palestine,’ said Wilders, who heads the third-largest party in Holland. ‘Changing its name to Palestine will end the conflict in the Middle East and provide the Palestinians with an alternate homeland...There has been an independent Palestinian state since 1946, and it is the kingdom of Jordan.’ Wilders also called on the Dutch government to refer to Jordan as Palestine and move its embassy to Jerusalem. Wilders has spoken the big inconvenient truth. As a result, it is inevitably being dismissed as merely what ‘the right’ regularly says. So of...

The FINANCIAL -- According to RIA Novosti, the death toll from riots on May 2 in China's Muslim Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region has risen to 140. Riots began in the regional capital of Urumqi on May 2 when a group of protesters demanded an investigation into the deaths of two ethnic Uighurs killed in a fight with Han Chinese workers at a toy factory in late June. Xinhua said protesters from the Uighur Muslim ethnic minority group began attacking ethnic Han pedestrians, burning vehicles and attacking buses with batons and rocks. The news agency cited a spokesman for the regional...

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We are seeing similar homophobic acts from the left here in the States. San Francisco, long thought of as the gay capital of the world, has turned on the gay community to bow and scrape to Islam. Last week I wrote about a group Muslims who shot a gay man in his face. In that piece I noted that the homophobic shooters were not identified as Muslims in the San Francisco Chronicle -- SF Gate. What is not known is that allegedly this was not a decision made by the media, but by the DA. Worse yet, the story wasn't...

The European Union is often mocked as a toothless political entity that lacks any military power. There has been talk of an EU-wide army, but so far most military functions remain with individual member states. Internal security is a different matter. Brussels has quietly organized an outfit called EUROGENDFOR, the European Gendarmerie Force, which is designed to quell riots, uprisings, and other forms of violent internal dissent. According to the report below, EUGENDFOR is preparing to deploy to Greece to prevent a possible descent into violent anarchy in the wake of the country’s severe economic crisis. Our Flemish correspondent VH...

A LEADING British government scientist has warned the United Nations’ climate panel to tackle its blunders or lose all credibility. Robert Watson, chief scientist at Defra, the environment ministry, who chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 1997 to 2002, was speaking after more potential inaccuracies emerged in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on global warming. The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the...

Journalists are wont to moan that the slow death of newspapers will mean a disastrous loss of investigative reporting. The web is all very well, they say, but who will pay for the tenacious sniffing newshounds to flush out the real story? ‘Climategate’ proves the opposite to be true. It was amateur bloggers who scented the exaggerations, distortions and corruptions in the climate establishment; whereas newspaper reporters, even after the scandal broke, played poodle to their sources. It was not Private Eye, or the BBC or the News of the World, but a retired electrical engineer in Northampton, David Holland,...