Free Republic

Yesterday’s New York Time’s has an editorial titled “Drowning in Campaign Cash” that shamelessly repeats democratic talking points. The NYT seems to forget that in this election cycle the biggest spender was the union of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. No mention of that special interest, only those dastardly bogeymen known as “Republicans” and 501(c) organizations. This brings some points to mind. The liberal 501(c) organization moveon.org was extended a special rate by the New York Times for their disgraceful add “General Betray Us“. Liberal causes have been effectively using 501(c) organizations for some times yet there...

This newspaper makes the following recommendations for Tuesday's ballot. CONGRESS U.S. Senate David Vitter Much of Sen. Vitter's first term in the Senate came in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the levee breaches that left 80 percent of New Orleans under water. The senator fought hard to hold the Army Corps of Engineers accountable and to get recovery resources for South Louisiana, including vital funding for coastal restoration. He was a leader in the push to finally close the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, the corps-built waterway that contributed to the devastation during Katrina. He also played an important role in...

Twenty years ago this Sunday, East and West Germany reunited, capping one of the most extraordinary transformations in modern history. Communism in the Soviet Union and its eastern European satellites had collapsed; the oppressed nations of Europe rejoined the “free world.”My generation was the last to straddle the two worlds, pre- and post-Soviet Union. When I was in elementary and high school, fear of atomic annihilation was real. The USSR was the great, looming adversary on the world stage. Debate over the strategy of “mutually assured destruction” was the ominous focus of international policy discussions.Suddenly, everything changed. Both grizzled Cold...

One of the guiding principles of the tea-party movement is based on a myth Wouldn't it be splendid if the solutions to America’s problems could be written down in a slim book no bigger than a passport that you could slip into your breast pocket? That, more or less, is the big idea of the tea-party movement, the grassroots mutiny against big government that has mounted an internal takeover of the Republican Party and changed the face of American politics. Listen to Michele Bachmann, a congresswoman from Minnesota and tea-party heroine, as she addressed the conservative Value Voters’ Summit in...

Asymmetrical warfare was supposed to benefit the insurgents. For the price of a few flying lessons a gang of jihadis brought down the World Trade Center,a terrorist with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and powdered Tang can blow up an airplane,and a few pounds of plutonium can cripple a major city. Meet the Reverend Terry Jones, asymmetrical warrior. It appears that pinpricks can produce chain reactions in the Islamic world. The threat may be termed asymmetrical because Islam is more vulnerable to theological war than Christianity (or for that matter Judaism). As the youngest of the major religions (apart from...

Book burning is antithetical to American ideals. People have a constitutional right to burn a Koran if they want to, but doing so is insensitive and an unnecessary provocation – much like building a mosque at Ground Zero.

It was an $800 billion misadventure that will be wreaking havoc on the econ omy for years to come. No, not the war in Iraq, where an American combat-troop presence officially comes to an end tomorrow. We're talking about President Obama's economic-stimulus program. Remember the stimulus? The miracle cure Obama said would boost the economy and save millions of jobs? Well, the president's panacea turned out to be an $862 billion bottle of snake oil -- and it cost $100 billion more than the entire Iraq campaign to date. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the total Iraq tab comes...

It’s a classic movie plot. Think “Woman of the Year,” with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. At first the man and the woman hate each other, then they fall into each other’s arms? Well, feature the fight that has erupted between the president of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka, and Governor Palin of Alaska. The leader of Big Labor went to Anchorage to give a speech and attacked Mrs. Palin, accusing her of doing everything from writing notes on her hands to coming out with conspiracy theories about President Obama and his “death panels” to getting close to calling for violence....

Sunday's Examiner editorial entitled "Time to admit Obamanomics has failed" was the most-read editorial ever published on this site. It's not hard to see why, considering two of the latest economic indicators made public at the same time. First, there is the continuing plummeting of consumer confidence, as seen in Rasmussen Reports latest Consumer Index: "The Rasmussen Consumer Index, which measures the economic confidence of consumers on a daily basis, slipped on Monday to 69.7. "That’s down nine points since release of Friday’s disappointing jobs report and the lowest level of confidence measured since December 2, 2009. Eight percent (8%)...

It was apparent last night why McCain has only agreed to participate in two Senate debates with JD Hayworth, because of the awkwardness attempting to explain his flip-flopping back to the right now that it is an election year. Both debates between the two candidates are taking place well into the primary, after McCain has had months to spend $6 million in smear attack ads against JD. $5 million of that was leftover from prior campaigning, including $1.1 million from convicted Ponzi scheme criminal Scott Rothstein - the top contributor to two of his 2008 presidential campaign funds. Unlike other...

McCain calls Hayworth a "pig." He desperately defends his flip-flops and record of voting for the billion dollar pork TARP bailouts which included $150 billion in earmarks, co-sponsoring amnesty with Ted Kennedy and cap and trade legislation with Joe Lieberman, and voting against tax cuts twice. Hayworth easily proves that he is much more conservative than McCain on the very things McCain has been attacking him on – pork and earmarks. In their second, and likely final, Senate primary debate, JD Hayworth again easily defeated John McCain. McCain avoided discussing real issues, where he has a record of flip-flopping in...

Last month, Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., introduced a bill that might -- we're not really sure -- give the president the authority to shut down all or portions of the Internet in the event of an emergency. It's not a new idea. Sens. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, proposed the same thing last year, and some argue that the president can already do something like this. If this or a similar bill ever passes, the details will change considerably and repeatedly. So let's talk about the idea of an Internet kill switch in general. It's a bad one....

Agency head complained of 'free ride' for online news readers Federal Trade Commission (FTC) leaders are attempting to distance themselves from controversial proposals published in a May 24 working paper on "reinventing" the media. The report presents a suite of options through which government could step in and supposedly rescue journalism, most notably by imposing taxes. A fee could be levied on websites such as the Drudge Report that link to the best news of the day, or a tax could be imposed on consumer electronics such as iPads, laptops and Kindles. Funds collected would be redistributed to traditional media...

In justifying its broad moratorium on deepwater drilling, the Obama administration emphasized that the measure was recommended by an Interior Department report prepared in consultation with scientists and industry experts. The May 27 report to President Barack Obama said the experts "peer reviewed" its recommendations, including the six-month moratorium and 22 safety measures. But eight of the 15 members of the review panel are charging that the administration misrepresented their position by suggesting they supported a blanket moratorium that they actually oppose. Their criticism, and the administration's response, are evidence that the six-month stoppage is based on politics rather than...

And on the 38th day he spoke. At long last President Barack Obama held a full-dress news conference - his first in 10 months - and finally answered questions about the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It was his mission to reassure residents of the Gulf region particularly that “from the moment this disaster began, the federal government has been in charge of the response effort . . . that BP is operating at our direction.”

Kirsten Gillibrand, New York's junior senator, doesn't just flip-flop on is sues as convenient -- she also revises her past. Voters, beware: Gillibrand is a chameleon on plaid, a woman who has and will do anything, say anything, forget anything, spin anything to get elected. Her 180-degree reversals on gun control, gay marriage and immigration -- making her one of the most liberal members of the Senate -- are old news. But that's far from the only way she remakes herself, as we discuss in our new book, "2010: Take Back America." Start with her habit of censoring her own...

Nuclear doctrine consists of thinking the unthinkable. It involves making threats and promising retaliation that is cruel and destructive beyond imagining. But it has its purpose: to prevent war in the first place. During the Cold War, we let the Russians know that if they dared use their huge conventional military advantage and invaded Western Europe, they risked massive U.S. nuclear retaliation. Goodbye Moscow. Was this credible? Would we have done it? Who knows? No one's ever been there. A nuclear posture is just that — a declaratory policy designed to make the other guy think twice. Our policies did....

We know about the angry outbursts against (mainly Democratic) lawmakers as Congress finished work recently on health care reform legislation. We know that protesters spat on at least one black member of Congress, yelled the “n” word at another and used homophobic slurs against a third. We know lawmakers’ home offices have suffered smashed and bullet-riddled windows.

An article by a conservative named Cliff Kincaid, who serves as editor of the Accuracy in Media (AIM) Report, provides a perfect example of how different libertarians are from conservatives and, well, for that matter, how there ain't a dime's worth of difference, when it comes to individual freedom, between conservatives and liberals. The article concerns the drug war and is entitled, "Dopey Conservatives for Dope." Ardently defending the continuation of the drug war, despite some 35 years of manifest failure, Kincaid takes fellow conservatives to task who are finally joining libertarians in calling for an end to the drug...

Would Obama dare tell Russian to make goodwill gestures toward the attackers? As Jews worldwide prepared for Seder night, the Russian capital was rocked by twin blasts that left 39 dead and scores wounded, some of them critically. Muslim terrorists in the Caucuses apparently blew themselves up during the morning rush hours with the aim of killing as many passersby as possible. Yesterday, two more explosions were detonated in Kizlyar, near the Dagestan-Chechnya border. As crowds gathered after the first car bomb went off, another was triggered to hit onlookers and rescuers. We in Israel are unfortunately no strangers to...