Free Republic

Over the past three weeks, one Republican has gained more national attention than any other: Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX). He has been everywhere - calling up the Texas National Guard, appearing on network interviews, headlining Sunday shows, touring the southern border with Fox News' Sean Hannity, appearing on The Blaze with Glenn Beck. Perry has penned national op-eds on border security in The Wall Street Journal and The USA Today. Gov. Perry greeted President Obama on the tarmac, met with him in Dallas, and spent the next day on the southern border--a marked contrast with President Obama who spent the...

Hoping to stem the recent surge of migrants at the Southwest border, the Obama administration is considering whether to allow hundreds of minors and young adults from Honduras into the United States without making the dangerous trek through Mexico, according to a draft of the proposal. If approved, the plan would direct the government to screen thousands of children and youths in Honduras to see if they can enter the United States as refugees or on emergency humanitarian grounds. It would be the first American refugee effort in a nation reachable by land to the United States, the White House...

Testifying before Congress last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen cherry-picked data on inflation by noting prices are up, on a year-over-year basis, less than the Federal Reserve's target of 2 percent. The Labor Department's Consumer Price Index has accelerated recently and averaged 3.5 percent for the three months ending in June. Once inflation gets out of control, history has shown it is difficult to contain without a steep and painful recession. Recognizing these dangers, Ms. Yellen's cognitive dissonance will add new life to proposals in Congress to rein in the Fed's independence. A bill under consideration would require...

President Obama’s plan to transform the U.S. health-care market is once again in trouble. This time, two Republican-appointed judges on a federal appeals court have invalidated a key portion of the program. In other words, the U.S. constitutional system is functioning normally. That’s not to say that the majority of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit correctly struck down the issuance of tax credits through the federal health insurance exchanges in 36 states — though it is true, as the judges said, that the law only speaks of “Exchanges established by the State.”...

Is everything copasetic at your job? Are you feeling happy, content and secure? If so, I have some advice for you -- DON'T! Know it or not, like it or not, you could be whisking down the road to termination. In the slightly altered words of "The Music Man," that's Termination with a capital "T," and that rhymes with "Thee," and that stands for "Canned." If you're not worried now, take a quick peek at a recent column by Joann S. Lublin in The Wall Street Journal. Titled "Six Subtle Signs You're About to Lose Your Job," Lublin lays out...

DARBY, Pa. – A doctor who was grazed by gunfire from a patient in his office at a suburban hospital on Thursday helped stop him by apparently returning fire with his own weapon and severely injuring him, but not before a caseworker was killed, authorities said. The patient opened fire after entering the office with the caseworker, District Attorney Jack Whelan said. Witnesses reported hearing yelling before the gunshots. Several hours after the shooting, investigators had only limited information on what happened inside the closed office but believe the doctor, a psychiatrist, "from all accounts, would have acted in self-defense,"...

~Favorite Clothing Song's~ Gene Wilder - Young Frankenstein (1974) - Puttin' on the Ritz *Video* Del Shannon - Hats Off to Larry *Video*

WASHINGTON -- It did not take all that long, when you think about it, for America's Nobel Prize-winning statesman to bring the world to a boil. Perhaps our Nobel Prize-wining president was only a community organizer all along. He has brought the world to a boil not by his use of force but by his inattentiveness. He has been playing golf or lecturing the world from a higher plain. He has been picking fights with the Republicans or devising new ways to thwart the Constitution. He has not reacted to provocations around the world that threaten peace and our allies....

Do you know your family? You may think that’s a silly question. “Of course we know each other,” many parents would reply. “We live under the same roof. We see each other daily. We go on vacations together. How could we not know each other?” Yet, in an important sense, many parents and their children are almost strangers. The time many families spend together is crammed with wall-to-wall activities. Mothers and fathers ferry their kids feverishly about—a play date here, a practice there, not a moment to spare—tethered by cell phones and sustained by meals on the run. You can’t...

SHREVEPORT, La. -- "Goin' Home." It keeps going around and around in my head as we drive around my old home town -- the slow, sweet musical theme Dvorak used for the largo in his New World symphony. By writing lyrics for it, a gifted pupil of his turned it into a kind of modern Negro spiritual, putting into words the plaintive, elegiac spirit of the music -- and the longing felt by anyone homesick for an irretrievable past: Goin' home, goin' home, I'm a-goin' home; Quiet-like, some still day, I'm jes' goin' home. It's not far, jes' close...

G.K. Chesterton’s Prophetic Look at National Health Care Dale Ahlquist | 2-20-2012 | American Chesterton Society Blogweb.archive.org/web/20130811135205/http://www.chesterton.org/2012/02/a-prophetic-look-at-national-health-care-2/G.K. Chesterton considered himself a member of the Liberal Party until 1912. As he would later say, he did not leave the Liberal Party. It left him. He believed in something called liberty, the idea that people should be able to make most decisions for themselves, especially the most basic and most important decisions, and not have such decisions made for them by anyone else, especially by the government. He believed, as a liberal, that the State’s role was to preserve liberty, not take...

"Most of our children are teenagers," she said. "They have crossed the border, so they're older. For youths who are 13 and older, [the payment to foster parents is] $24.79 per day." $24.97 per day adds up to about $750 per month, but foster parents who take in more than one minor can collect thousands of dollars each month. In addition to standard payments, foster parents additionally receive a "clothing allowance" for the minors every three months. The spokeswoman pointed out that that healthcare costs for the illegal immigrant minors are "provided for" by the government, and that the children...

<p>When Luke Grimes started on HBO’s “True Blood” last season his character James Kent was wooing a female vampire. But Grimes reportedly quit in December when he found out Kent was bisexual and starting a romantic relationship with a gay character in the seventh and final season.</p>

Judge Michael Baird of the federal Dallas Immigration Court said on July 22 that 18 of the children whose cases he was scheduled to hear on that day didn’t show up for court. The unaccompanied children were among 20 from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala who were set to appear in Baird’s court for initial deportation hearings. The Dallas Morning News cited Baird’s statement describing the absentee rate that day as “highly unusual” — so high that he reset the hearings for August 11 rather than possibly issuing a deportation order. Baird said he was concerned that the children may...

There’s no shortage of piling-on when it comes to the controversy over the name of the Washington Redskins football team. But too often overlooked is the government’s response to all the noise. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) created a fatal contradiction for itself when it announced on June 18 that it would cancel the trademarks of the Washington Redskins. In handing down the decision, the PTO claimed the name was disparaging. However, a Freedom of Information Act request showed that nobody complained to the PTO about being disparaged by the name, revealing the decision as entirely subjective....

Hoping to stem the recent surge of migrants at the Southwest border, the Obama administration is considering whether to allow hundreds of minors and young adults from Honduras into the United States without making the dangerous trek through Mexico, according to a draft of the proposal. If approved, the plan would direct the government to screen thousands of children and youths in Honduras to see if they can enter the United States as refugees or on emergency humanitarian grounds. It would be the first American refugee effort in a nation reachable by land to the United States, the White House...

There were more than a few trembling chins, red eyes and sniffly noses as sailors filed past a crowd to board HMCS Toronto on Thursday morning. And those were just the crew members. On the jetty at HMC Dockyard, a little girl bawled as she watched her dad walk toward the gangplank. A couple embraced and indulged in a kiss that would normally be reserved for a private setting. One last whispered “I love you” and it was time to go. Two hundred and fifty-seven women and men set sail from Halifax to join NATO forces responding to the crisis...

The example of “bigotry” used in a sentence is: “The report reveals racism and right-wing bigotry.” The iPhone utilizes the New Oxford English American Dictionary to define words, and the questionable example sentence appears in the web version of the dictionary as well. In the web version, however, there is an option to view more example sentences. None say anything about “left-wing bigotry,” but there is a sentence about bigotry leading to empty churches.

Why isn't Mexico doing more to deter unaccompanied minors from Central America from traversing Mexico to cross the U.S.-Mexico border? If this is a humanitarian crisis, then shouldn't Mexico be taking in its neighbors? Mexico's secretary of foreign affairs, Jose Antonio Meade, met with the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board Tuesday, so I had a chance to ask him. His answer was instructive: Mexico offers health services for migrants passing through the country, he said, but when Mexican officials "find an unaccompanied minor within Mexico, he doesn't want to stay in Mexico." And: "At the core of the child's interest...

The New York Times notices the smoke collecting on the ceiling of the auditorium of the world and wonders whether there might be something to worry about. Peter Baker in an article titled “Crises Cascade and Converge, Testing Obama” notices that things are falling apart. “Not long after a passenger jet exploded in midair and plummeted to the ground in Ukraine last week, escalating a volatile crisis pitting the United States and Europe against Russia, President Obama’s thoughts turned to Syria.” Baker has a thought. These problems may be linked. Rarely has a president been confronted with so many seemingly...