Free Republic

First ladies generally are allowed considerable immunity from criticism, because they generally stick to feel-good issues, like literacy, roadside beautification, and other subjects most people can agree on. But not Michelle Obama, who has enjoyed some of the most unrealistic flattery in the history of first ladies, such as the concerted effort to convince the public she is a fashion icon.After becoming the national food and exercise scold, provoking vast waste and mass starvation as public school students discard the unappetizing and skimpy lunches she has forced on school cafeterias, she has now turned toward outright slander of those who...

My dearest wish is to one day have the pleasure of living in a small cabin in the frigid wilderness. There I will spend my nights covered in heavy wool blankets, eating smoked fish and dried fruit. Over time, my beard will grow to the point where I’ll be indistinguishable from a medium-sized woodland creature. The villagers I’ll come to know during my rare visits to town will call me “the wolfman,” not least because I will communicate solely by howling and scratching out messages with my clawlike fingernails. For now, I live in a big city, where such unconventional...

Five days after Jason Carter jumped into the Georgia governor’s race, his grandfather, former President Jimmy Carter, delivered a speech urging a ban on the death penalty. Within hours, the newly minted candidate felt compelled to issue a retort: while he loves his grandfather, he told a reporter, “I believe in the death penalty for heinous crimes, and that won’t change when I’m governor.” The episode spoke to the benefit and potential burden of the Carter surname for the upstart Democratic state senator, who is waging a long-shot bid to unseat first-term Republican Gov. Nathan Deal. Practically everyone in the...

I am sure there will be many commentaries from the right this weekend opening with Chris Matthew’s self-righteous apology on behalf of “all white people” for the incidents of racial profiling black men have had to endure in the United States. As a Christian American black man, I feel the need to respond individually to Mr. Matthews: You can keep it! I am not interested in empty gestures. “But let every man prove his own work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another. For every man shall bear his own burden.” Galatians 6:4,5 I...

In the libertarian sci-fi classic, "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress," Robert A. Heinlein describes a successful revolution of the individualistic, free-market-oriented residents of the Moon against the Earth's tyrannical big government. The ins and outs of agitating and organizing the masses to fight the oppressive Authority feel just as realistic as the finer points of everyday life in the underground Lunar cities of the future. The proposed revolutionary scenario could even serve as a workable model for similar real-life endeavors, if only the renowned futurist author hadn't neglected to factor in the immanent function of any oppressive regime: systemic...

"As I walked through the ruins of mighty Rome, I saw not only what 2,000 years has done to them, but what 2,000 more years will do to us. What is left of mighty Rome, is a glimpse into our own mortality." -- Ruins of Rome. What a terrible thing, Brother, is a civil war. One week your dominion is at peace, the enemy on all borders has been subdued, the army is draining marshes for farmland and repairing fortifications, the Emperor is satisfied, and the Church is expanding; then with one fell blow, one ill-advised order from on high,...

link only http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=whether_we_drill_or_not_its_time_to_ask_more_questions#

Glenn Beck TV thread July 13th 2010 Welcome to the GLENN BECK television thread...Stand. Never give up. Never give in. We are another day closer to the 2010 elections. All Beckerheads, infidels, sick twisted freaks, ilks and lurkers are welcome and are encouraged to participate in the thread.

In explaining the full White House press on government-controlled health care, top Obama strategist David Axelrod could have been describing the Obama White House m.o. in general: "Ultimately, this is not about a process, it's about results." Which is just another way of saying the ends justify the means. B

These little Che Guevaras and Obamas finally ran everyone's patience at NYU to an end. highlights are: spouting the usual mob-rule collectivist nonsense about "democratic process," threatening the administration, shouts of "police brutality," and, my personal favorite, trying to tell the security and police staffs what they can and cannot do..It's classic collectivist nonsense. If I came away with anything from this video, it's that I do not want my kids to go to NYU. What a bunch of snotty little Ches.

The cloth from which a man is cut can be determined in many ways; one can examine his worth to society by analysis of his products and thereby his contribution to its elevation or one may evaluate the overall happiness he tends to exude and generate a favorable unfavorable opinion. The methods of analysis are endless and vary greatly in degrees of accuracy. That being said, if one wants to truly evaluate a man in order to conclude his innermost workings the deduction is best conducted during heights of celebration. Here, when he is most confident of himself, feasting on...

In my exclusive interview with Barack Obama airing tomorrow on This Week, the president-elect told me that fixing our economy over the long term will require sacrifice from every American and scaling back some of his campaign promises. "Our challenge is going to be identifying what works and putting more money into that, eliminating things that don’t work, and making things that we have more efficient. But I’m not suggesting, George, I want to be realistic here, not everything that we talked about during the campaign are we going to be able to do on the pace we had hoped,"...

“We have outlived the short-term and are suffering from the long-run consequences of [Keynesian government] policies.” --Ludwig von Mises --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In 1918, at the end of the First World War, Randolph Bourne wrote his famous line, "War is the health of the state." Now, 90 years later, in the midst of a financial world war, we can expand that quote to say, "A Wall Street crisis is the health of the state." What! The SEC under Republican “conservative” Chris Cox bans short selling. The Bush adminstration and Congress seek to create a new Resolution Trust Corp. to buy up and...

Quiz GUESS WHICH COLLECTIVIST SAID IT... ... and find out on which side of the gulag fence you'll be tomorrow. (Warning: some questions are more equal than others, and some answers will make you want to slap yourself upside the head with a shovel).

College Park, Maryland - You can see it in their flushed-face smiles and hear it in their screams. They say the phenomenon is difficult to describe, but once they experience it they tell their friends, sisters, mothers and daughters, and they come back for more if they can.

I note that someone else has seen the similarities between Obama's campaign and the campaigns of Adolf Hitler. So I thought I might put up a few more quotes about Hitler's appeal that sound very much like Obama's: As this writer noted: When brainwashers spoke to Germans after the war, as part of efforts to "psychoanalyze'' the Nazi experience, they found few remembered any specific content in Hitler's speeches. Almost all could remember being part of the experience, if they were in attendance, and most remembered the "excitement'' in listening to them on the radio. The words 'hypnotic'' and "mesmerizing''...

Speaking in 2004 to a crowd of wealthy democratic supporters during a fund raising event in San Francisco, Hillary Clinton spoke the very words that illustrate the intentions of the government so very well. "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." While those words were spoken three years ago, they are just as important today. They represent not just the Democrat party's strong commitment to the redistribution of wealth rightfully earned by the American people, it provides insight into the focus that our politicians have in running our nation. It highlights the precise...

Isn't that nice? The city of Manhattan Beach is renaming an oceanfront park, Bruces' Beach, after Charles A. and Willa Bruce, an African-American couple who had purchased the land in 1912 and developed it into a beachfront resort in the 1920s. The Bruces were driven off their land in the mid-1920s, according to a Los Angeles Times article last week, after city officials became uncomfortable with the idea of numerous black people sunbathing and dining at Bruces' Lodge. At the urging of the local community, the officials discovered a compelling public interest in creating a public park on that very...

Chávez tells parliament: 'We have decided to nationalize the whole Venezuelan energy and electricity sector, all of it, absolutely all.' Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez said on Saturday the country's entire energy sector had to be nationalized, reinforcing his socialist revolution and possibly giving himself more targets for state take-over. But he said he would permit foreign firms to hold minority stakes in energy deals. The president was reinaugurated this week for a term that runs through 2013. Chávez has already pursued oil and gas projects and power utilities but on Saturday left no leeway for a private company to hold...

I've been searching for the perfect way to describe the fashion that the liberal press covers the Bush Administration, conservatives and their policies. It's always been difficult, because journalists continually adapt their approaches to maximize insult and injury. Sometimes they try to imply guilt by association. Other times they report rumors and innuendo as fact. They often underreport or completely ignore stories that favor the Administration, and then over-hype anything that can be seen as damaging. But I finally realized that I have seen this kind of mass manipulation before. As a matter of fact, it was thoroughly depicted over...