Free Republic

Runaway spending and deficits continue to grow unabated in part because any attempts to rein them in are relentlessly demagogued by defenders of big government. The latest example is the budget recently authored by House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R–WI) and passed by the House of Representatives. Most critics have failed to provide any credible alternative to the House budget. Yet that has not stopped them from relentlessly misrepresenting the House budget with the following myths. Myth #1: The House budget recklessly cuts taxes by $4 trillion. Fact: It cancels a future tax increase. Critics charge that the House...

Did you know:Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room at a dance hall? ►If the entire population of China walked past you -8 abreast, PLA-style- , the procession of humanity would never end because of the rate of reproduction (!)  ►Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors. ►Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite! ►Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated. ►The average person's left hand does 56% of the typing. ►The cruise liner, QE 2 moves just six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns. ►A cat has 32 muscles in each ear. ►A goldfish has a memory span of...

“We’re actually producing more oil here than ever.” ~ Barack Obama (05/06/2011) ~The truth: We are producing fewer barrels of oil here than we did in 1951. ~Obama would be correct, if our nation was founded in the year 2003. But of course anyone born before 2003 knows that Obama’s statement is - in fact - not true. For those more interested in truth, than in the shallow words of lying politicians, we are actually producing fewer barrels of oil today than we produced in the year 1951. It’s time to start drilling, and time to stop lying. If Obama...

With all the interests, political grandstanding, and cheap punditry surrounding the union demonstrations in Wisconsin, it’s no surprise that a mythology has developed around Gov. Scott Walker’s proposals. Here are some of the most common myths being propagated, and the countervailing facts. MYTH: Wisconsin is not actually facing a deficit. Rachel Maddow on her February 17 show said, “Despite what you may have heard about Wisconsin’s finances, the state is on track to have a budget surplus this year. I am not kidding.” FACT: Maddow wasn’t kidding, but she was wrong. She evidently derived her conclusion by reading to page...

Rocky Marciano was the only heavyweight champion who never lost a single fight in his whole career-- and, at the time, he seemed the least likely fighter to do that. In many a boxing match, he was battered, bruised and bleeding. One of the reasons Marciano took so much punishment in the ring was that he had shorter arms than most other heavyweights. It was easier for others to hit him than for him to hit them. In a sense, Republicans today are in a similar position in the political arena. With most of the media heavily tilted toward the...

As 2010 draws to a close, do you remember hearing any good news from the mainstream media about climate? Like maybe a headline proclaiming "Record Low 2009 and 2010 Cyclonic Activity Reported: Global Warming Theorists Perplexed"? Or "NASA Studies Report Oceans Entering New Cooling Phase: Alarmists Fear Climate Science Budgets in Peril"? Or even anything bad that isn't blamed on anthropogenic (man-made) global warming--of course other than what is attributed to George W. Bush? (Conveniently, the term "AGW" covers both.) Remember all the media brouhaha about global warming causing hurricanes that commenced following the devastating U.S. 2004 season? Opportunities to...

Introduction I know that Christians are supposed to be the ones who believe a lot of myths. However, the vast majority of atheists believe myths such as religion is the primary cause of wars, and the vast amount of atrocities have been caused by religious people, the Bible has been vastly changed over the centuries, Paul invented Christianity, and the list goes on and on. Find your favorite myth below and read the article so that you won't embarrass yourself in the future. Atheists' Myths Atheists have Proven God Does Not Exist. Right? - Only if that god is not the God...

I'm a California Attorney and have been for the last 25 years and a conservative too. I have to be conservative, because facts, as is so often said, are stubborn things. Many elegant legal theories have been destroyed by one simple ugly fact. An attorney's currency is facts. Sure we attorneys spin facts, dance around facts, try to distort facts; but, facts are what they are whether the trier of facts, such as a jury, is amused by your presentation or not. Juries do get it. And why wouldn't they? They're voters too. I have tried cases before juries. And...

In the recent "dump" of classified documents NewsBusters explains that the search for WMDs was successful... thus undermining WikiLeaks founders position on this topic. I updated my large WMDs post that originally grew out of a debate during the first year of the Iraq conflict with a professor of history from the University of Michigan. Newsbusters info is found here: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2010/10/24/imagine-wikileaks-docs-show-there-were-wmds-iraq Gateway's info on it is here: http://gatewaypundit.firstthings.com/2010/10/wikileaks-papers-reveal-troops-did-find-wmd-in-iraq/

New York City’s Columbia University, which last year hosted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the name of its ”academic freedom,” now has decided that “Palestine” is a country and has opened the first U.S. Center for Palestine Studies. Calling itself “one of the world's great educational institutions and a bastion of academic freedom,” the university dedicated the center to the late Edward Said, a “Palestinian” Arab who taught comparative literature at Columbia for 40 years. During the British Mandate, from 1917 until the re-establishment of the State of Israel n 1948, the term Palestine referred to all of what now...

CLICK ON ABOVE LINK FOR COMPLETE EXPLANATION AND CHARTS HERE's A SUMMARY : * 45 million Americans were living in poverty in 2009 * 2009 saw the largest single year increase in the U.S. poverty rate since the U.S. government began calculating poverty figures back in 1959 * The U.S. poverty rate is now the third worst among the developed nations tracked by the OECD * Household participation in the food stamp program has increased 20.28% since last year * The number of Americans on food stamps surpassed 41 million for the first time ever in June * As of...

I confess--I had never heard the phrase "the Queen of the Sciences" until a few months ago. Even when I read it, it made no sense. They seemed to be talking about geography. What was all this??? Apparently, the wise and scholarly had much more respect for geography a thousand years ago than we do now. Once you start thinking about this decline--from Queen to corpse--you gain new insight into how radical (in the worst sense) our Education Establishment is. These people never saw a fact they didn't want to drop overboard in a deep part of the ocean. So...

Congressional Democrats and the White House will continue their attempts to enact policies they believe will boost the economy—and which are also aimed at persuading voters they are working to make things better. ...And while the economic situation remained dire when President Barack Obama took office in January 2009, most Democrats assumed that the economy would rebound by the time they stood for office this year. A series of disappointing economic reports has made clear that won't be the case. The most recent one came Friday, when the government reported that the economy grew at a much slower pace in...

The following are 50 random facts that show just how dramatically America has changed..

In a new ad, Obama says, "I don’t take money from oil companies." We find the statement misleading: •Obama has accepted more than $213,000 from individuals who work for companies in the oil and gas industry and their spouses. •Two of Obama's bundlers are top executives at oil companies and are listed on his Web site as raising between $50,000 and $100,000 for the presidential hopeful. See this from factchec.org dated March 31, 2008.

This is becoming common - two videos based on data taken directly from my Gun Facts book are on YouTube. Keep up the good work troops! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qO83qjMW1fkhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f28a_FAs4ek

Last week the political campaign propaganda season began, and President Obama fired the first shot at Republicans. In an effort to shift the subject from the Gulf oil disaster, the president went into campaign mode (again) when he said, "We can return to the failed economic policies of the past, or we can keep building a stronger future."Unfortunately, the facts do not substantiate the president's claim when we compare December 2008 economic statistics before Obama took office to where we are today.   December 2008 June 2010 National debt $9.5 trillion $13 trillion Gross Domestic Product , or GDP $14.1...

Andrew Sullivan is not a huge fan of Israel; he is entitled to his opinion. However, his latest column about the incident in the waters outside of Gaza makes up the facts. Honestly, in the case of most of the posts Sullivan writes about Israel, Andrew is living in his own reality, where truth and facts do not matter. The Atlantic columnist begins his latest example of creative writing begins with the first paragraph. Maintaining the siege and blockade of Gaza (because its citizens elected a government Israeli abhors), and strafing it with military might over a year ago, is...

The current edition of Gun Facts, the de facto desk reference for firearm policy, has been translated into Latin American Spanish and released on the Gun Facts web site at www.GunFacts.info. “Freedom is not negotiable,” said Guy Smith, author of Gun Facts. “This includes the human right of self-defense. People in Latin America, encouraged by freedoms in the United States, are resisting gun control. It is time for Gun Facts to help refute the anti-freedom factions in the South as it has in the North.” For more than a decade, Gun Facts has debunked common gun control myths. In 118...

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, April 16, 2010 – Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates today disputed claims that the Defense Department was withholding information from the Senate Homeland Security Committee about the Nov. 5 Fort Hood, Texas, shooting incident. “We have no interest in hiding anything,” said Gates, who earlier this week had traveled to Peru, Colombia and then Barbados to discuss regional security issues.“But what [is] most important,” Gates told reporters here, “is this prosecution, and we will cooperate with the committee in every way with that single caveat -- that whatever we provide does not impact the prosecution. That is the...