Free Republic

The number of workers who filed new claims for unemployment benefits rose 26,000 last week to 436,000, the U.S. Labor Department reported Thursday. Economists polled by MarketWatch had expected claims to rise to a seasonally adjusted 429,000 in the holiday-shortened week of Nov. 27.

With multiple media outlets confirming now that Governor Sarah Palin will indeed join the Republican ticket as John McCain’s running mate, McCain has clearly chosen to play offense rather than defense. Instead of a safe choice, such as closest runner-up Mitt Romney or genial Everyman Tim Pawlenty, McCain took some risk with a relative newcomer to national politics. Palin will inject risk, excitement, controversy, and an unexpected historic note to the Republican convention. First, though, let’s assess the risk. Palin has served less than two years as Governor of Alaska, which tends to eat into the experience message on which...

A few weeks ago, I noted a shift in polling data indicating that Barack Obama's stranglehold on the so-called "youth vote" was weakening. A Reuters summary of the latest Zogby poll confims the trend: "Obama's support among voters between the ages of 18 and 29, which had been one of his strengths, slipped 12 percentage points to 52 percent. McCain, who will turn 72 next week, was winning 40 percent of younger voters." Anecdotally, I can attest that several of my friends — fellow twenty-somethings — who were once quite enthusiastic about Obama have recently expressed disappointment in his campaign....

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has seen his lead in Massachusetts and across the nation slip precipitously over the past few months, especially with older, more experienced, voters. In June, Obama was ahead of Republican candidate John McCain by 23 percentage points, but this summer, Obama has been virtually bleeding support in the Bay State. He now leads McCain by only 9 percentage points here. Nationally, Obama's lead varies on an almost daily basis. In recent days, he has been tied with McCain, ahead by 3 points and ahead by 1 point. The fluctuating numbers come on the heels of...

Kabul, Afghanistan — This place should have had real appeal to Senator Barack Obama. The poverty of the Afghan people is evident everywhere. Wracked by decades of Soviet occupation, civil war and an oppressive Taliban theocracy, the country is a veritable centerpiece for one of Mr. Obama’s legislative objectives: a frontal assault on global poverty. Regrettably, when Senator Obama was here last week to play basketball for the cameras, neither he —nor any of the media sycophants traveling with him— mentioned the Global Poverty Act of 2007 (S.2433), legislation that he introduced on January 7, 2007. The bill – which...

June 21, 2008 -- Awash in campaign cash, Barack Obama this week announced that he's opting out of the public-financing system for presidential campaigns. He'll be the first general-election candidate to do that since the system was set up. This gives new meaning to the notion of "politics of change." "In February 2007, I proposed a novel way to preserve the strength of the public-financing system in the 2008 election," he wrote in November. "My plan requires both major party candidates to agree on a fund-raising truce, return excess money from donors and stay within the public-financing system for the...

Barack Obama’s much touted campaign cries for “Change We Can Believe In” and the response of the everyday citizens of Europe to the recent “no” vote from the Irish are raising the same questions on two continents. What are the questions? Average Americans are not fully aware of the machinations of their own political system so when it comes to European politics they are largely in the dark. Admittedly most Europeans feel they are in the dark now too since the Irish vote to ratify the Lisbon Treaty was shot down on June 12, 2008.

Squeamish Marxist Democrats avert your eyes. I am about to swat you on the nose with a rolled-up Che Guevara poster. The tapestry of a carefully woven biography of Barack Hussein Obama is a cloth of deception and self-promotion this candidate has been weaving since childhood called in Arabic “Taqiyyah”, adapting and amending his life story to fit his circumstances.

Obama's Amerikkka Corps is coming to your town. Barack Obama's campaign is mobilizing 3,600 volunteers for six weeks of political work in 17 states, calling the campaign jobs "Obama Organizing Fellowships," the Washington Post reports. In exchange for working on the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate's campaign, fellows are promised training in community organizing techniques, which is a euphemism for leftist political agitation. (Perhaps fellows will be instructed in the fine art of fraudulent voter registration ACORN-style.) As this month's Foundation Watch report on Obama's radical roots notes: Agitation is what Chicago-born Saul Alinsky (1909-1972), the father of community organizing, called...

    The Chicago Sun- Times Ad This letter will be ran in a full page ad on a Sunday.   AN OPEN LETTER TO HOWARD DEAN, NANCY PELOSI, HARRY REID, SUPER DELEGATES, ALL DNP DELEGATES AND THE DEMOCRAT NATIONAL PARTY: FROM:   HILLARY CLINTON SUPPORTER'S FOR JOHN MCCAIN (www.hcsfjm.com/) This is an open letter to inform you that we will not be backing, supporting or voting for Obama in November at the General Election.   We have heard all of you say that we are "FEW" or that we are a "SMALL" group of angry, bitter women, but that...

When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, he notably dissented from liberal orthodoxy on welfare and the death penalty. Many observers have been wondering if Barack Obama will follow Clinton's example. They frequently raise school choice as a cause Obama could take up to show his independence from Democratic interest groups. It doesn't look as if that's going to happen, as ABC News's Jake Tapper reports: On the same day that he was extolling the need to shake up the "status quo" in education, Obama also defended his opposition to school vouchers. "We don't have enough slots for every...

Last week, the campaign of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama announced that it had established a “war room” to battle rumors spread on the Internet and amplified by other media reporting. Obama supporters will use a website titled “Fight the Smears” to identify allegedly untrue statements about their candidate and provide evidence in an effort to refute them. That sounds like a good public relations strategy, but the implementation will ultimately have a negative impact on Obama. The campaign employs the Media Matters for America model for dealing with so-called “smears.” In fact, Obama’s war room uses the George...

Red diaper baby Barack Obama's collectivist beliefs go way back. We dug up an enlightening old article, "What Makes Obama Run?" (by Hank De Zutter, Chicago Reader, Dec. 8, 1995) that offers more insight into what Obama, the Democrats' presumptive presidential candidate, thinks about America and traditional American values. The short answer: not much. In it Obama, at that time a candidate for the Illinois Senate, criticizes individualism as what intellectual John Ralston Saul has called the cult of the Hero: "In America," Obama says, "we have this strong bias toward individual action. You know, we idolize the John Wayne...

Videographer Hollywood7 has compiled caches of the web pages which have been scrubbed from barackobama.com. Check it out…. [you tube video at site]

An Illustrated Guide to Obama’s Gun-Grabbing The Democratic nominee wants to take away your guns — specifically, these guns. June 15, 2008 - by Bob Owens Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has come under fire in recent days for anti-Semitic comments posted at my.barackobama.com, a portion of the first-term senator’s website where almost anyone can create a user account and post their own content. Once the offending content was flagged by bloggers, it came down. Obama defenders point out that the offensive comments were not posted by the campaign, which is undoubtedly true. As Andrew Romano notes at Newsweek’s Stumper,...

Barack Obama may be lacking in judgment and experience – most recently demonstrated by the selection of former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson to vet his veeps (along with Eric Holder, who signed off on Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich). But he’s a quick study, and he knows there’s a lot he doesn’t know. Because revealing the gaps in his understanding could be devastating to Obama's presidential hopes, understandably he's doing everything he can to conceal them. That involves not only stiff-arming the same Democrat and media establishment that has rushed to embrace him. It also undermines the reformist...

As the United States edges ever closer to tyranny with freedom dying a little more each year with the passage of new laws, the handing down of judicial rulings, and the promulgation of executive orders, it is assumed by increasing numbers that it is the role of government to provide for all of our needs and to save us from our own worst tendencies irrespective of whether or not these are matters we want massive bureaucracies poking into our private lives about. As bad as such intrusions are, the fear such a scenario provokes pales in comparison to the almost...

How long can Barack Obama carry forward this ruse that he is a uniter, when he has placed himself in a climate that is, at the very least, quite accomodating to the anti-white racist perspective, vulgarity and anti-Americanism? It strained credulity that Obama could have been unaware of the toxic environment of his Trinity United Church of Christ and its pastor, Jeremiah Wright. That didn't pass the laugh test. But now we have the Rev. Michael Pfleger bursting on the scene and spewing the most offensive, racially charged remarks imaginable. Truly, if Obama weren't the darling of the MSM and...

Erik Ericson of RedState.com has a very detailed article today on Barack Obama's connection to a neo-Marxist political party called the "New Party." (I wrote about the New Party here.) Basically, Obama sought out the group as a result of his work with another far left organization ACORN - a "non-partisan" acvitist group whose members have been convicted in several states of vote fraud. And not only did Obama receive their endorsement, he used many of the party's members as campaign workers on his first state senate campaign:

Having now left Trinity United Church of Christ, can Barack Obama escape responsibility for his decades-long ties to Michael Pfleger and Jeremiah Wright? No, he cannot. Obama’s connections to the radical-left politics espoused by Pfleger and Wright are broad and deep. The real reason Obama bound himself to Wright and Pfleger in the first place is that he largely approved of their political-theological outlooks. Obama shared Wright’s rejection of black “assimilation.” Obama also shared Wright’s suspicion of the traditional American ethos of individual self-improvement and the pursuit of “middle-classness.” In common with Wright, Obama had deep misgivings about America’s criminal...