Free Republic

When asked about the roots of political partisanship in Washington, retiring Senator Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) traces the issue to Newt Gingrich. “I can see it very directly going back to 1994 and Newt Gingrich,” Conrad told C-Span in an interview. “He had a view, to take over the House of Representatives one had to bring down the institution and things have never been the same since.” …

Nicole Hawkins‘ three daughters have matching glittery boots, but none has the same father. Each has uniquely colored ties in her hair, but none has a dad present in her life. As another single mother on Sumner Road decked her row-house stoop with Christmas lights and a plastic Santa, Ms. Hawkins recalled that her middle child’s father has never spent a holiday or birthday with her. In her neighborhood in Southeast Washington, 1 in 10 children live with both parents, and 84 percent live with only their mother

If ever there were a moment for President Obama to learn from history, it is now, in the wake of Friday’s shootings at the elementary school at Newtown, Conn. The timely lesson for Obama, drawn from the experience of Lyndon B. Johnson — the last president to aggressively fight for comprehensive gun control — is this: Demand action on comprehensive gun control immediately from this Congress or lose the opportunity during your presidency. In the aftermath of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (just weeks after the fatal shooting of Martin Luther King Jr. and only a few years after...

Fifty-five percent of small business owners and manufacturers would not have started their businesses in today’s economy, according to a new poll that also reports 69 percent say President Obama’s regulatory policies have hurt their businesses. “There is far too much uncertainty, too many burdensome regulations and ... 67 percent say there is too much uncertainty in the market today to expand, grow or hire new workers.” Why? Because “President Obama’s Executive Branch and regulatory policies have hurt American small businesses and manufacturers,” according to 69 percent of the business owners surveyed.

The first time religious organizations were given an exemption from paying taxes was with The Wilson Tariff Act of 1894. The next year this act was overturned by the Supreme Court, but every tax code since has allowed the exemption to be part of the tax code. However, up until 1954 religious organizations still had the freedom to participate in political and lobbying activities. That is when, then Senator Lyndon B Johnson, introduced amendment 501(c)(3) to the tax code during a Senate floor debate on the 1954 Internal Revenue Code. Without hearings, testimony, or comments by any tax-exempt organizations,...

Republican operatives in Washington are praising Scott Brown's latest campaign ad. The ad, a contrast spot being run by the Republican Massachusetts senator, shows that Brown's Democratic opponent, Elizabeth Warren, is to the left on economic issues of John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Lyndon B. Johnson, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan. Instead of being in the mainstream, Warren, along with President Barack Obama, is shown to be an opponent of free enterprise. The ad is called, "Let America Be America Again." "Devastating," says one Republican operative. "Long--but does a really good job of showing how radical the Obama/Warren view of...

ALICE — There are about 325 supercentenarians in the country and 79th District Attorney Armando Barrera finds it hard to believe 18 of them voted in the Brooks County primary in May. In a petition to contest the election filed Friday, Barrera lists 18 voters who were all born on either Jan. 1, 1900, or Jan. 1, 1901, making each of them more than 110 years old. “Can you believe it?” Barrera said. “Maybe they’ve found the fountain of youth.” Armando and Homero Cruz are two men listed in the petition. According to Barrera, the two were both born on...

I am curious, how were race relations before LBJ's great society? Would you have walked, relatively safe, down the streets of Harlem back in 1960?

“The vast majority of current programs are focused on making poverty more comfortable … rather than giving people the tools that will help them escape poverty.” (CNSNews.com) – The federal government is not making much headway reducing poverty despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars, according to a study by the libertarian Cato Institute. Despite an unprecedented increase in federal anti-poverty spending, the national poverty rate has not declined, the study finds. “[S]ince President Obama took office [in January 2009], federal welfare spending has increased by 41 percent, more than $193 billion per year,” the study says. Federal welfare spending...

WATERLOO, Iowa — Joe Carpenter has more questions than answers about what happened on June 8, 1967 — but no question about the valor of his shipmates. Carpenter, a 1965 West High School graduate, was a crew member of the USS Liberty. The U.S. Navy ship was attacked by Israeli forces during the 1967 Six Day War, in which Israel defeated a host of Arab nations and captured the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank, Golan Heights and East Jerusalem. Thirty-four of Carpenter's shipmates were killed and 174 wounded — two-thirds of the crew of 294. Carpenter himself was reported...

In 1968, the political world was shocked when President Lyndon Johnson, running for reelection just four years after a landslide victory, was held beneath 50% of the vote in the Democrat primary in New Hampshire. Sen. Eugene McCarthy scored a shocking 41.5% of the vote against the incumbent President. The result confirmed Johnson's weakness going into the November general election. Within weeks, Sen. Robert Kennedy announced he would seek the Democrat nomination for President and Johnson announced that he would not. LBJ was bowing out of his reelection bid. Today, the Obama reelection campaign is reeling from his disastrous performance...

Nobody can accuse Big Guy of not aspiring to be the best he can be. Remember how many times Big Guy told us “We can’t wait”? Well, as it turns out, he’s not going to. Not content with just being the nation’s first authentically half-black and all-gay president, he decided he can’t wait for future historians to write him into the history books so he went ahead and had some of his greatest hits entered into the existing Big White historical book of Presidential Biographies. Seriously, you can’t even buy propaganda historical perspective like this, butt apparently you can write...

When the April figures on unemployment were released May 4, they were more than disappointing. They were deeply disturbing. While the unemployment rate had fallen from 8.2 percent to 8.1 percent, 342,000 workers had stopped looking for work. They had just dropped out of the labor market. Only 63.6 percent of the U.S. working age population is now in the labor force, the lowest level since December 1981. During the Reagan, Bush I and Clinton years, participation in the labor force rose steadily to a record 67 percent. The plunge since has been almost uninterrupted. Here is a major cause...

Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, who helped shape the political history of the 1960s, facing down segregationists, riding herd on historic civil rights legislation and helping to map Vietnam War strategy as a central player in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, died on Tuesday night at his home in Skillman, N.J. He was 90.

(VIDEO INTERVIEW WITH BOB TUR AT THE LINK) Bob Tur, the L.A. Riots’ Eye in the Sky, on Reginald Denny & More by Matthew DeLuca Apr 26, 2012 9:00 PM EDT Bob Tur invented the news helicopter—and used it to film the beating of Reginald Denny on live TV. He tells Matt DeLuca about his strange souvenir, his wife's warning, and more. Well before the Los Angeles riots broke out on April 29, 1992, Bob Tur knew what was missing from television news: images. Footage of what was happening as it was happening. Not shot from a news van or...

Jackie Onassis believed that Lyndon B Johnson and a cabal of Texas tycoons were involved in the assassination of her husband John F Kennedy, ‘explosive’ recordings are set to reveal. The secret tapes will show that the former first lady felt that her husband’s successor was at the heart of the plot to murder him. She became convinced that the then vice president, along with businessmen in the South, had orchestrated the Dallas shooting, with gunman Lee Harvey Oswald – long claimed to have been a lone assassin – merely part of a much larger conspiracy. Texas-born Mr Johnson, who...

Formerly Great Cities All Over America Are Turning Into Open, Festering SoresJanuary 1, 2012 Once upon a time, the people of the United States constructed beautiful, shiny cities from coast to coast that were the envy of the entire globe. We had the largest and most vibrant middle class that the world has ever seen and life was quite good in America. But now all of our prosperity is coming crashing down and many of our formerly great cities are turning into open, festering sores. Unfortunately, we are drowning in so much debt that we can barely even slow down...

The state chairman of Indiana's Democratic Party resigned Monday as a probe of election fraud in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary widened. State law requires a presidential candidate to gather 500 valid signatures in each county to qualify for the ballot. Barack Obama may not have met it. Investigators think 150 of the 534 signatures the Obama campaign turned in for St. Joseph County may have been forged. ~snip~ Former Democratic Rep. Artur Davis, who is black, said vote fraud is rampant in African-American districts like his in Alabama. "The most aggressive contemporary voter suppression in the African-American community is...

Obama is certainly the most arrogant president in American history. This clip from the end of the entire 60 Minutes Obama interview didn't make it on air.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-24/obama-s-mythical-political-skills-won-t-save-him-ramesh-ponnuru.html