Free Republic

Mrs Palin is not running for office, but her vice presidential candidacy in 2008 as an anti-abortion, mother-of-five from a conventional background has played a central role in persuading more women with similar outlooks to step into the limelight. Often controversial, outspoken and resolutely Right-wing, Republican women are beginning to overhaul the image of the party. After its heavy losses in 2008 to the Democrats, the Grand Old Party was written off as too male, too old and too out of touch. A record 140 women have competed in Republican primaries for the House of Representatives and the Senate this...

5 minutes ago Rush tops Stern as the "most important radio talk show host of all time" Rush Limbaugh To commemorate the 20th anniversary of Talkers Magazine, there’s an all-time list of the “Heaviest Hundred.” Calling him “The most important innovator in modern news/talk,” Rush Limbaugh took the top spot on the list. At #2, the talker called “the standard by which younger-demo talk is judged,” Sirius XM’s Howard Stern. Following Limbaugh and Stern to round out the top-10, in order, is Larry King, Sean Hannity, Don Imus, Arthur Godfrey (called the “pioneer of unscripted talk radio”), Dr. Laura Schlessinger,...

"JournoList e-mails reveal how the liberal media shaped the 2008 election" At the link is the first MSM article I have seen that makes the case for part of the role that the MSM played in the '08 Election.

There are some events that you will always remember where you were when they happened. The events of July 3, 2009 is one of those times. It was an average Friday, the day before our nation’s 233rd birthday. It would have been a slow news day, normally, and on this weekend, the 24 hour news channels had coverage of Michael Jackson’s death playing on an endless loop. What would happen that Friday afternoon would knock Michael Jackson right off the TV and send the political world reeling. We got word “something” was about to happen in Alaska. Now as a...

Michelle Obama unveiled the newly-expanded President’s Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition to D.C. school children last week. For years the Council (formerly known merely as the President’s Council on Fitness and Sports) busied itself with pushing Americans to get outside and run around. But as with so many government initiatives under the Obama administration, its goals have expanded. The council now wants to influence your diet and while not a member, Michelle Obama will be working closely with the group to help guide its initiatives.

“Only government can implement policies and subsidies to provide an institutional framework for quality journalism.” Does that statement give you chills? How about this one: “The news is not a commercial product. It is a public good, necessary for a self-governing society. Once we accept this, we can talk about the kind of media policies and subsidies we want.” Or this one? “In the end, there is no real answer but to remove brick-by-brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles.”

For a Party with only a few thousand members and supporters, centered in about a dozen major cities, the Communist Party USA has a significant amount of influence. This is achieved by infiltrating and controlling much larger groups, including several major labor unions, sections of the Democratic Party, some Black and “mainstream” churches, the health care and “peace” movements and even Obama’s “private army” Organizing for America! Links to elected officials, including several members of Congress such as John Conyers in Michigan, Hilda Solis and Barbara Lee in California and Dennis Kucinich in Ohio are also carefully cultivated.

John Calvin's 16th century reply to medieval Catholicism's buy-your-way-out-of-purgatory excesses is Evangelicalism's latest success story, complete with an utterly sovereign and micromanaging deity, sinful and puny humanity, and the combination's logical consequence, predestination: the belief that before time's dawn, God decided whom he would save (or not), unaffected by any subsequent human action or decision. Calvinism, cousin to the Reformation's other pillar, Lutheranism, is a bit less dour than its critics claim: it offers a rock-steady deity who orchestrates absolutely everything, including illness (or home foreclosure!), by a logic we may not understand but don't have to second-guess. Our satisfaction...

President Obama is losing friends left and right these days. Moderate Dems to his right are getting queasy over just how liberal and profligate some of his policies turn out to be. Ultra-liberals to his left are miffed he isn't even more liberal. ..President Obama still has one unstinting and stalwart comrade: the unions. After decades in inexorable and well-deserved decline, unions are back bigtime in the Obama-nation. It is an unholy union. It’s bad for business, bad for the economy, bad for our country. Worse, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, this alliance could lead to bigger government...

WASHINGTON — In the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling that ended most restrictions on corporate funding in elections, a congressional panel was asked Wednesday to enact greater limits on the influence of foreign companies in U.S. elections. At the hearing of a House of Representatives Judiciary subcommittee, experts also sought congressional intervention to restrict contributions from out-of-state corporations. The 5-4 decision last month in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has sparked debate about the prospect of a possible surge in corporate spending on election campaigns. How to sort out who owns or controls a multinational corporation —...

WASHINGTON (AP) - A once-dismissed loose confederation of Tea Party activists opposed to big government, bailouts and higher taxes is causing heartburn for establishment candidates across the country. They swept into Massachusetts with lightning speed when polls began to show that the eventual winner of last week's special election, Republican Scott Brown, had a shot at upsetting Democrat Martha Coakley for the Senate seat that liberal lion Edward M. Kennedy had held almost 47 years.

It's official: Americans admire Glenn Beck more than they admire the pope. This news, at once unsettling and unsurprising, came from the Gallup polling organization on Wednesday. Beck, the new Fox News host who has said President Obama has a "deep-seated hatred for white people" and alternately likens administration officials to Nazis and Marxists, was also more admired by Americans than Billy Graham and Bill Gates, not to mention Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. In Americans' esteem, Beck only narrowly trailed South Africa's Nelson Mandela, the man who defeated apartheid. The 45-year-old recovering alcoholic and Mormon convert has become...

Love him or hate him, Antonin Scalia has had a greater influence on the way Americans debate the law today than any other modern Supreme Court justice. Conservatives hail Scalia as the founding prophet of their true faith — the Jurisprudence of Original Understanding — and the leader of the opposition to moral relativism and judicial imperialism in the age of Obama. [...] It’s hard to write a fair-minded biography of such a polarizing figure, but that’s what Joan Biskupic has done with “American Original.” ... On the court, Scalia has shown a disdain for elites that keeps him not...

Last month's passage of a sweeping ban on federal funding for abortion in the House healthcare bill caught most of Washington by surprise. The Democratic House leadership is closely aligned with the party's pro-abortion rights base, which alleged the ban would roll back abortion access for many women by keeping coverage for the procedure out of federally subsidized healthcare plans. And for abortion rights activists, the central role of the Roman Catholic bishops in pressing House leaders to allow a vote on the ban, known as the Stupak-Pitts amendment—and in helping prod 64 Democratic congressmen to support it—was as galling...

Oral Roberts died this week and the obituaries have been abuzz with analyses of his life and legacy. The USA Today headline summed up his contributions this way: "Oral Roberts brought health-and-wealth Gospel mainstream." The Los Angeles Times gave a similar snapshot of the man: "Oral Roberts dies at 91; televangelist was pioneering preacher of the 'prosperity gospel'" But Christianity Today's lead blogger, Ted Olsen, disagreed. He responded with a post titled "Why the Oral Roberts Obituaries Are Wrong." The long subtitle at the head of Olsen's post explained: "The 'faith-healer' (who hated the term) may have done much to...

Rush Limbaugh Voted America's Most Influential Conservative By Noel Sheppard Created 2009-11-29 23:36 A poll done by CBS's "60 Minutes" and Vanity Fair found Rush Limbaugh to be America's most influential conservative. In second place was Fox News's Glenn Beck, followed by former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, Fox News's Sean Hannity, and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio). In fairness, those were the only choices given to respondents. That said, there were some other poll results people will find interesting as reported [1] by Vanity Fair: John F. Kennedy is the president 29 percent of...

(To be clear, that is a relatively low bar. Republicans went into the political wilderness in a major way following Bush's re-election as he grew increasingly less popular and it became increasingly more clear that the party was either unable or unwilling to break with the chief executive in any major way. Polls suggest that the Republican brand remains badly damaged in the eyes of the American public with most people still trusting Obama far more than Republicans in Congress to solve the major issues of the day.) With 2010 right around the corner, there is significant movement in this...

At 75, Charles Manson has spent more than half his life in prison for masterminding the notorious Helter Skelter killing spree that left actress Sharon Tate and six others dead in Los Angeles during the summer of 1969. Manson spent his 75th birthday this week at the state prison in Corcoran, California, where he is in the protective housing unit. Some records indicate that Manson was born on November 12, but Manson's current associates and other records indicate his birthday was on Wednesday, November 11. "He spent the day the same way he spends every day in prison," said Terry...

To regain its strength, an out-of-power party like the Republicans needs ideas to fuel its recovery and leaders to promote and deliver them. In this war of ideas, those committed to presenting a sensible, philosophically grounded conservative case to Americans play a special role. Because conservatives are distrustful of concentrated power, it is awkward to select just seven Washington power players, but here are my picks...

WASHINGTON – Nicole Kidman conceded Wednesday that Hollywood has probably contributed to violence against women by portraying them as weak sex objects. The Oscar-winning actress said she is not interested in those kinds of demeaning roles, adding that the movie industry also has made an effort to contribute to solutions for ending the violence. Kidman testified before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee that is considering legislation to address violence against women overseas through humanitarian relief efforts and grants to local organizations working on the problem. Asked by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., if the movie industry has "played a bad role,"...