Free Republic

For the first time in nearly three decades, Chicago public school teachers went on strike this morning. At first glance, you might be tempted to think that what happens in Chicago has little to no effect on the politics of Washington and the presidential race. But, you’d be wrong. There are several reasons to believe that what happens in Chicago could have a real — and negative — impact on President Obama and the broader race for the White House this fall. We list the three biggest reasons below. * It’s Chicago: Yes, we know that President Obama has no...

White House spokesman Jay Carney says President Barack Obama has no comment on the teacher strike in Chicago: The president, as I think you just heard from me, has not expressed any opinion or made any assessment about this particular incident."

When ideas fail, words come in very handy. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Words are a poor substitute for understanding, as the above cynical statement about words relates. In politics, words lie louder than actions, which is why you cannot get the average politician to shut up. Many are the means for misusing morphemes. Some are as delicate as dew drops while others are as subtle as a Russian invasion. Fine words butter no parsnips but they do propagandize and polarize people heading to polls. Just ask the American Association for Justice, who was originally called the Association of Trial...

Does anyone remember the American Jobs Act? A year ago President Obama proposed boosting the economy with a combination of tax cuts and spending increases, aimed in particular at sustaining state and local government employment. Independent analysts reacted favorably. For example, the consulting firm Macroeconomic Advisers estimated that the act would add 1.3 million jobs by the end of 2012. There were good reasons for these positive assessments. Although you’d never know it from political debate, worldwide experience since the financial crisis struck in 2008 has overwhelmingly confirmed the proposition that fiscal policy “works,” that temporary increases in spending boost...

U.S. Department of Education: 79% of Chicago 8th Graders Not Proficient in Reading By Terence P. Jeffrey September 10, 2012 (CNSNews.com) - Seventy-nine percent of the 8th graders in the Chicago Public Schools are not grade-level proficient in reading, according to the U.S. Department of Education, and 80 percent are not grade-level proficient in math. Chicago public school teachers went on strike on Monday and one of the major issues behind the strike is a new system Chicago plans to use for evaluating public school teachers in which student improvement on standardized tests will count for 40 percent of a...

I recently had a nice conversation with an old friend Grif, who now lives in Kentucky. He has been struggling some lately in finding the best way to sell conservatism, while avoiding the ‘warts’ if you will. As the discussion progressed it was clear that most of the ‘warts’ revolved around religion. My first instinct is that it sounds like he needs to be selling Christ and not Conservatism but I will defer for now. My advice to him was to ‘sell the sizzle’. It used to be the #1 rule in marketing; I suppose it still ranks up there...

Even though I don’t own that many guns, I’m an unyielding supporter of the 2nd Amendment. Indeed, I use gun control as a quick and simple of way of deciding whether politicians meet minimum standards of acceptability. I’m not a single-issue voter, though, since politicians have to pass a number of tests (unwavering opposition to tax hikes, support for entitlement reform, etc) before receiving the Dan Mitchell Seal of Approval. I guess this is why 99 percent of them fail. But I’m digressing. Back to the topic at hand, my support for private gun ownership and constitutional freedoms has motivated...

The U.S. has fallen for the fourth straight year, by two spots, to the seventh most competitive country, according to The Global Competitiveness Report 2012-2013 by the World Economic Forum. It is now led by Switzerland, Singapore, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany.

One of the centerpieces of the Democratic case for Barack Obama‘s reelection in Charlotte last week was the President’s record on national security – specifically, his decision to pursue the operation that eventually led to the death of Osama bin Laden. That impressive achievement, however, may be blunted by the force of revelations by former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen in today’s Washington Post. Thiessen writes: President Obama is touting his foreign policy experience on the campaign trail, but startling new statistics suggest that national security has not necessarily been the personal priority the president makes it out to be. It...

Negotiators for the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union are back at the bargaining table this morning. The talks began around 10 a.m.10:30 a.m. Some students balk at crossing pickets

Yes, Obama is winning. So was Jimmy Carter. So was Michael Dukakis. So would any Democrat, incumbent or not, who enjoyed the fawning coverage the mainstream media heaped on President Barack Obama. During the Republicans’ convention, the media interrupted, fact-checked, and cut to commercials. During the Democrats’ convention, they swooned, and barely mentioned the awful jobs report that followed the next day. So? Par for the course. You know who else was winning at this point? John McCain, by 5 points. And Democrats panicked. The media panicked. Tom Friedman of the New York Times told Obama he needed to “start...

The theme that most seemed to rouse the enthusiasm of delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte was that we are all responsible for one another — and that Republicans don't want to help the poor, the sick and the helpless. All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against facts. Yet the notion that people who prefer economic decisions to be made by individuals in the market are not as compassionate as people who prefer those decisions to be made collectively by politicians is seldom...

Last week I and some fellow editors were joking about how the media would spin the August jobs report. It seems one of their chief responsibilities during this campaign is to put a positive spin on any bad economic news. Its turns out, however, the jobs report was too awful to spin. For every job created, almost 4 people gave up and left the labor force. So, the media has struck a different tack; go ahead and just declare Obama the winner. With the exception of John Kerry, every presidential candidate comes out of their convention with at least a...

The media has done its best to ignore the Occupy terrorists, but have now confessed. Perhaps drawing inspiration from Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who can lie with an utterly straight face about reality (what she said on tape about the Israeli ambassador, what happened on the floor of the DNC when the words Jerusalem and God were excised and then restored to the platform), the Southern Poverty Law Center has stepped in to solve the problem for the left. Re-define the Occupy movement as "radical right."

The recently rolled out "Democrats for Brown" coalition has racked up nearly 500 Democratic politicians and grassroots supporters statewide. Representative Chris Fallon was the first Democrat currently serving in the State Legislature to cross over when he gave his public endorsement to Republican Senator Scott Brown late last week. Fallon joined the likes of Springfield's former Democratic Mayor Charlie Ryan and Boston's Ray Flynn, as well as Worcester's own former Mayor and current City Councilor Konnie Lukes, who appeared in one of Brown's campaign ads earlier this election cycle. The three former mayors will serve as co-chairs of the newly-formed...

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., suggested that images of the Democratic National Convention booing at the addition of the word “God” to the party platform could haunt the presidential election in swing states. “I think images are worth a thousand words and I think one of the bad images that they have to overcome is images of everybody booing God,” Paul said on CBS today when asked about Obama’s apparently-favorable path to reelection. “And that didn’t look so good, you know, when ‘God’ was in the platform, out of the platform — and then when they were putting ‘God’ back in...

President Barack Obama's campaign and its Democratic partners raised more than $114 million in August, narrowly beating Republican rival Mitt Romney for the first time in months as the race for the White House approaches its final stretch. Former Massachusetts governor Romney and fellow Republicans raised more than $111 million, continuing a string of high-dollar hauls that leave him well equipped to contest the November 6 election. While Obama shattered every fundraising record in 2008 after becoming the first presidential candidate to opt out of a federal matching funds system, Romney has outpaced him significantly on the fundraising front since...

First Lady Michelle Obama’s pitch to voters last night relied on the premise that she and her husband understand what it is to struggle to make ends meet. She spoke movingly about their early years--about how a young Barack Obama drove a car that was “rusted out" and found his furniture “in a dumpster,” how they both came from families that had to “scrape by.” Her fairy tale--however well-delivered--was one great, big, colorful lie.

We have heard the claims over and over again from the Obama campaign; the President "saved" General Motors and Mitt Romney said "let Detroit go bankrupt." The clear implication is that GM never went through the bankruptcy process that Romney suggested. Here's news for voters who didn't pay attention to how, exactly, Obama "saved" GM; $50 billion dollars of taxpayer money was given to GM to get them through a manipulated bankruptcy process. Replacing the word bankrupted with saved does not change the facts. And the fact is, GM DID go bankrupt. The media has not questioned the clearest example...

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) -- Federal agents arrested the mayor of New Jersey's capital city early Monday as part of an ongoing corruption investigation into bribery allegations related to a parking garage project that was concocted as part of an FBI sting operation. Trenton Mayor Tony Mack, his brother, Ralphiel, and convicted sex offender Joseph Giorgianni, a Mack supporter who owns a Trenton sandwich shop, were accused of conspiring to obstruct, delay and affect interstate commerce by extortion under color of official right.