Free Republic

Top House leaders offered markedly different views on the future of the debt talks after Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner said he would no longer pursue a $4 trillion deficit-reduction deal proposed by the White House. Republicans now want a smaller deal, which would reduce the deficit by between $2 trillion to $2.5 trillion over 10 years, and consists largely of spending cuts. House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that the larger deal broke down because Democrats had insisted on including tax increases as part of any package, which is...

Tim Pawlenty winced audibly when The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg made the obvious explicit. In the race for the GOP presidential nomination, the columnist posited, "I guess you represent the John McCain-Lindsey Graham foreign-policy wing." Mr. Goldberg's question, after all, was asked only after listening to Pawlenty's speech at the Council on Foreign Relations - a McCain redoubt where dreams of a progressive world order frequently substitute for the world that is. Pakistan, is urging the Afghans to dump the United States and look not just to Pakistan and Iran but also to China for help striking a deal with the...

Chicago Police Chief Garry McCarthy told parishoners at Saint Sabina Church earlier this month that the easy availability of guns in the United States is the extension of a tradition of "government-sponsored racism" that began with slavery and Jim Crow. McCarthy -— like many urban police officials an advocate of strict gun control -- was speaking at a liberal, activist church whose priest, Father Michael Pfleger, drew national attention for mocking Hillary Clinton in 2008. "This is sensitive. You know, because everybody’s afraid of race. Have you noticed that? Everybody’s afraid of race," McCarthy, a former New York and Newark...

Mitt Romney is said to be the early frontrunner in the GOP presidential sweepstakes. One rival, Newt Gingrich, is perceived as floundering in a swirl of unforced errors and staff insurrection. Yet when it comes to Islam, which will continue to matter mightily in the next administration, the frontrunner could learn a thing or two from the flounderer. The issue is not religion. It is the seditious Islamist political program. Most Americans, myself included, would prefer not to have to think about Islam at all. Muslims forced their beliefs onto our consciousness by wanton violence and gross violations of human...

Congressman /Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy Talks About the Debt, Fields Questions from Bakersfield Tea Party Patriots at Bakersfield Townhall Meeting (Video). On Saturday, June 11, Kevin McCarthy joined the Bakersfield Tea Party for a Townhall meeting. About 75 patriots were on hand for breakfast and an opportunity to ask direct questions about the budget, debt ceiling, energy dependence, our nation's continued involvement in Libya, and other current issues and concerns. As the Majority Whip, McCarthy is the person who is tasked with gauging and building consensus within the Republican House. His unique role in Congress afforded the Tea Party an...

Sharia compliance correlates with violent attitudes among American Muslims. What is it that radicalizes Muslims, including American Muslims? Is it American foreign policy? Israeli “occupation” of the ancient Jewish territories of Judea and Samaria? Cartoons depicting the warrior-prophet as a warrior? Korans torched by obscure Florida pastors? The life of Osama bin Laden, or, perhaps, his death? Any of a thousand claimed slights, real or imagined, that purportedly provoke young Muslims to “conflagrate” — if we may borrow from the forgiving rationalizations of Faisal Rauf, would-be imam of the would-be Ground Zero mosque? Here is the unsettling but sedulously avoided...

Last week, I had the pleasure of introducing many of my readers to author Dorothy Thompson for the first time. Thompson, who died in 1961, started her career before World War I as a suffragette working to win American women the right to vote, then briefly worked as a social worker. After the war, she sailed to Europe and began a stint as a foreign correspondent in Europe, where she had the reputation for always being in the right place at the right time during a chaotic period of history. Later, she became an on-air commentator on world events and...

Roger Cohen in the NYT: Obama, in a first for an American president, has now said the border between Israel and Palestine should be “based on the 1967 lines.” Yes, it should. Netanyahu still talks of “Judea and Samaria,” a lexicon that, true to his Likud party’s platform, does not acknowledge those lines but sees one land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean..... What is “indefensible” over time for Israel is colonizing another people. That process has continued with settlements expanding in defiance of Obama’s urging. Andrew C. McCarthy in the National review: As the president utters his paeans...

Would that the president of the United States were as worried about Arizona’s border as he is about “Palestine’s.” There was less fanfare about this latest Obama oration on the future of the Middle East, staged at Foggy Bottom, than there was about his 2009 Cairo speech. It was, however, every bit as delusional, and twice as treacherous. As for the delusional, “Arab Spring” devotees are thrilled that the president has morphed into his predecessor on the Democracy Project — the enterprise in which future generations of American taxpayers go deeper into hock as our tapped-out government borrows more Chinese...

A House bill that could drastically overhaul the nation’s gun control laws and strengthen federal power over states' handling of individuals' background checks is expected to be introduced today by New York Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, The Daily Caller has learned. McCarthy is expected to drop the Fix Gun Checks Act of 2011 — a  near-identical companion to that of fellow New Yorker Chuck Schumer's Senate bill — according to sources familiar with the legislation.A draft of the bill obtained by TheDC makes clear that McCarthy's legislation significantly mirrors Schumer's much-publicized bill and would make three significant changes to current national...

“Why should we give a damn about the Afghan people?” Andy McCarthy asks. Our presence in Afghanistan, he says, is “pointless.” Now, this is different than saying we would like to help them but the ability to do so is beyond our reach. It’s also a separate matter from saying that there are countless claims on our conscience, but because of inherent limitations on our resources, the suffering the Afghan people are experiencing doesn’t warrant our assistance. And it’s a different argument from saying we shouldn’t continue to expend American blood in a 10-year-old war.No, what McCarthy is arguing, in...

John McCain, Joseph Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham are the Senate’s most energetic proponents of sinking the nation ever deeper into the Libyan morass. In a joint interview on Fox last weekend, Senators McCain (R., Ariz.) and Lieberman (I., Conn.) were breathless in their rendering of the “freedom fighters” and the “Arab Spring” of spontaneous “democracy.” Friday they upped the ante with a Wall Street Journal op-ed, rehearsing yet again what an incorrigible thug Qaddafi is and how “we cannot allow [him] to consolidate his grip” on parts of Libya that he still controls. For his part, Senator Graham (R., S.C.)...

For nearly 20 years, we’ve willfully blinded ourselves to the Rosetta Stone that decodes our enemy’s war doctrine. But the jihad (or shall we call it “kinetic Islam”?) is catalyzed not by al-Qaeda but by sharia — by Muslim law. So is the “Arab Spring,” now playing in Tripoli (and elsewhere) after rave reviews in Cairo. I have been opposed to our country’s starting a war against Libya. And starting a war is exactly what we have done, exactly what we would call it if the shoe were on the other foot — the “kinetic” and “limited” obfuscations of intervention...

Freedom's Enemies: A collaborator of the Rosenbergs admits his previously unknown Soviet espionage more than 60 years after the fact. It's just the latest revelation that the anti-communists of that era were right. The "innocent victims" of the Red Scare were once legion — like suave U.S. envoy Alger Hiss, who doubled as a Soviet spy chief, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who gave Moscow A-bomb plans. The latest debunking of this myth is Rosenberg fellow spy Morton Sobell, who finally admitted it in 2008. But in a December interview with Ronald Radosh and Steven Usdin, Sobell, 93, added that...

Author: Andrew C. McCarthy Why do intervention proponents insist on calling them rebels when they call themselves mujahideen -- Muslim warriors fighting a jihad? At Pajamas, John Rosenthal has details of a report by French jounralist Marc de Chalvron, who was embedded with the Libyan "rebels" before they were turned back by Qaddafi's forces. They refer to their battle as "the jihad" -- Islamic holy war. (At least that's what they interpret jihad to mean. They apparently haven't gotten the memo from Georgetown that jihad is really a peaceful internal struggle for personal betterment, a solemn commitment to brush after...

Virginia Tea Party activists this weekend turned up the pressure on House Majority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) over the speed at which the GOP-led Congress is looking to cut spending.  Leaders of the Virginia Tea Party Patriot Federation issued a tough statement on Sunday, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, calling on Cantor to make deeper cuts to the budget at a faster pace. "We are extremely disappointed in Eric Cantor, but not surprised," Mark K. Lloyd, the group's chairman, said in a release. "The will of the American people was pretty clear in November — cut, cut, cut spending. Apparently,...

Representative Peter King will chair a hearing Thursday on radicalization within the American Muslim community. Doing so has stirred a nest of leftist hornets. The ACLU, along with several other "civil rights organizations," have "warned" King to refrain from examining religious beliefs. A number of threats against King have necessitated additional security. And critics are tripping over themselves to craft the most hyperbolic comparisons to Joseph McCarthy. However, such comparisons have the potential to backfire, at least among those with an accurate perception of history. The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus took a reasoned stance Wednesday. Certainly, the best evidence against...

WASHINGTON – The Republican congressman who has organized controversial hearings into radical Islam called Muslims "part of the mosaic" of America Wednesday and said they shouldn't feel threatened or intimidated by his inquiry. "If there is going to be animosity, I would blame it on my opponents," Rep. Peter King said in a nationally broadcast interview. King, who heads the House Homeland Security Committee, has come under withering criticism for the hearings scheduled to begin Thursday. Protests have already started, and comparisons to McCarthyism and the era of communist witch hunts are being heard. In one appearance on morning television,...

LOS ANGELES – Betty Garrett, the vivacious Broadway star who played Frank Sinatra's sweetheart in two MGM musicals before her career was hampered by the Hollywood blacklist, has died in Los Angeles, her son said Sunday. She was 91. Garrett died Saturday at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, most likely from an aortic aneurysm, said her son, Garrett Parks. Garrett had been in good health and taught her usual musical comedy class at Theater West, the non-profit organization she helped found, on Wednesday night, but Friday checked into the hospital with heart trouble, and died with her family at her...

The Act also makes the magazines non-transferable, and so it would also be a federal crime for Americans to carry pre-H.R. 308 normal capacity magazines if they did not also possess them prior to enactment of the bill. The constitutional "time-shifting" doctrine thus implied by McCarthy's magazine ban is that the power of Congress to ban the possession of any item is unlimited if the item is possessed in the future by any person not previously in possession of the item.