Free Republic

Sarah Palin looks at a cover of Newsweek handed to her as she arrives for a book signing of her new book 'Going Rogue' in Grand Rapids, Michigan November 17, 2009

The Service Employees International Union on Sunday reported spending nearly $1 million on an independent expenditure television campaign praising eight House Democrats for backing a health care bill earlier this month. Here's how the SEIU spent $998,000 among the eight districts: Baron P. Hill, Indiana's 9th district ($162,000); Dina Titus, Nevada's 3rd ($157,000);

"At a time when Indian public opinion was looking forward to fruitful results from the forthcoming visit of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to the US, reports from Beijing on Obama's visit to China would strengthen the impression that Obama is not India's cup of tea." .................................................................................... By B.Raman (November 19, Chennai, Sri Lanka Guardian) The failure of President Barack Obama to understand the distrust of China in large sections of the Indian civil society has landed the US in a situation in which the considerable goodwill between India and the US created during the administration of his predecessor George...

GAZING from the Great Wall of China last week, US President Barack Obama appeared to be making the most of one of the perks of White House occupancy -- a private guided tour of Asia's most spectacular tourist spot. White House aides exulted that choreographed pictures of this moment would make front pages around the world. Yet an experience Mr Obama declared to be magical turned sour as he returned home to a domestic revolt that is fanning Democratic unease. It was not just that the US media have suddenly turned a lot more sceptical about a president with...

The Copenhagen Conference opens on December 7, 2009. On that same date in 1941, the Japanese government and military forces bombed one of our protectorates at the time, but today a Sovereign State; our leader at the time, a liberal Democrat President named Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared it “A Day of Infamy.” Could that happen again 68 years later? I’ll tell you what I think...

When the CRU emails first made it into news stories, there was immediate reaction from the head of CRU, Dr. Phil Jones over this passage in an email:From a yahoo.com news story: In one leaked e-mail, the research center’s director, Phil Jones, writes to colleagues about graphs showing climate statistics over the last millennium. He alludes to a technique used by a fellow scientist to “hide the decline” in recent global temperatures. Some evidence appears to show a halt in a rise of global temperatures from about 1960, but is contradicted by other evidence which appears to show a rise...

If you're watching the complex processes in a living cell, it is easy to miss something important—especially if you are watching changes that take a long time to unfold and require high-spatial-resolution imaging. But new research* makes it possible to scrutinize activities that occur over hours or even days inside cells, potentially solving many of the mysteries associated with molecular-scale events occurring in these tiny living things. A joint research team, working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has discovered a method of using nanoparticles to illuminate...

Scientists' Leaked Correspondence Illustrates Bitter Feud over Global Warming The scientific community is buzzing over thousands of emails and documents -- posted on the Internet last week after being hacked from a prominent climate-change research center -- that some say raise ethical questions about a group of scientists who contend humans are responsible for global warming.The correspondence between dozens of climate-change researchers, including many in the U.S., illustrates bitter feelings among those who believe human activities cause global warming toward rivals who argue that the link between humans and climate change remains uncertain.Some emails also refer to efforts by scientists...

Climate change scientists have been manipulating and fixing data according to bloggers that are spreading information contained in hundreds of hacked emails. Bloggers say the 62 mb worth of emails were hacked from the Climate Research Unit (CRU), part of Britain’s University of East Anglia and released onto the Internet. The file containing the emails were packaged and posted on blogs by an anonymous hacker. A list of the emails is on a site called ‘an elegant chaos.’ “We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps,” said the hacker on the...

Is Congress, behindhand on Barack Obama's deadlines on health care and cap-and-trade legislation, and flummoxed by the failure of the stimulus package to hold unemployment below 10.2 percent, prepared to address the immigration issue next year? Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says it better be. The current situation, she told the Center for American Progress on Nov. 13, "is simply unacceptable." We need a "three-legged stool," with provisions to strengthen enforcement, legalize some illegal immigrants and improve "legal flows for families and workers." Ironically, the push for legalization in 2006-07 resulted instead in stronger enforcement measures. Some 600 miles of...

Banks are avoiding commercial real estate losses by refusing to assess property values. Losses on commercial real estate have been the proverbial "other shoe" waiting to drop on bank balance sheets for months now. So far, though, loan losses on office buildings, shopping malls and real estate developments have been subdued. What's the holdup? A troubling report from one analyst contains some clues. Banks are doing everything they can to avoid placing a firm value on buildings that have likely fallen sharply in price, writes Joe Morford, who monitors bank stocks for RBC Capital. This kind of "see no evil"...

Economists See Joblessness Bottoming Out Should peak in first quarter, but hiring and consumer spending to lag Economists expect the joblessness that has weighed down the nation's economic recovery will start to slowly abate in 2010, but they predict consumers will continue to keep a tight rein on spending, according to a new survey. While signs have pointed to the end of the recession, joblessness remains rampant. The national unemployment rate jumped to 10.2 percent in October, the highest in 26 years. About 9 million people currently receive unemployment benefits. The November outlook by the National Association for Business Economics,...

India May Get $1 billion In IT Outsourcing Contracts: Report MUMBAI (Reuters) – Leading Indian outsourcers such as Tata Consultancy (TCS.BO), Infosys (INFY.BO) and Wipro (WIPR.BO) stand to gain contracts worth about $1 billion in the next one or two years as U.S. banks emerge from the troubled asset relief program, the Economic Times reported on Monday. The newspaper said JPMorgan (JPM.N), Goldman Sachs (GS.N) and Morgan Stanley (MS.N) that received approval to buy back government stake worth $68 billion earlier this year are among the firms seeking operational efficiencies by outsourcing non-core IT and back-office projects to India.

A new poll shows 68 percent of Republicans in Iowa hold a favorable view of Sarah Palin. That is only two percent lower than 2008 Iowa Caucus winner Mike Huckabee. The Des Moines Register poll proves that Palin would be the decisive factor in the 2012 Caucus, if she runs.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York says that health care reform that includes a public option can pass the Senate. The Senate has voted 60-39 to open debate on the bill. A rowdy floor debate is expected next month as Democratic leaders try to push through legislation that would extend health care coverage to roughly 31 million people who lack it.

It used to be a lot easier for people in power like Al Gore to control peoples opinions. Not too long ago you if you said something stupid on national TV it was no big deal, just a phone call to a couple of big newspapers and the story went nowhere. But now if you say anything wrong at all, like the earth's core is several million degrees instead of several thousand degrees, all the little bloggers with no credentials jump all over it and make a big deal about it. Or when Senator John Kerry, in explaining the need...

It's a little-known - and slightly ironic - fact that when Lehman Brothers exploded last year it did so as the proud owner of 500,000 pounds of yellowcake uranium: enough to make a nuclear bomb. Uranium’s appeal was as a maturing commodity, one reaching the stage where it had become attractive not just to countries with military ambitions but also to energy traders with one eye on the growing global demand for new reactors. Less than a decade ago, nuclear was a dead industry. The US, Germany, the UK, Russia and even the atomic bandleader France had no intention of...

NOVEMBER 23, 2009 She's Back A transcript of the weekend's program on FOX News Channel. Stuart Varney: This week "The Journal Editorial Report," Sarah Palin's relaunch. The former Alaska governor re-emerges on the national stage to mixed reviews. We'll have ours. And a double-dip recession? President Obama says it's a risk with rising debt. So why is there talk of another multibillion-dollar stimulus? *** Varney: Hello everyone. Welcome to "The Journal Editorial Report." I'm Stuart Varney, in this week for Paul Gigot. First up, the relaunch of Sarah Palin. The former Alaskan governor and vice presidential candidate launched a nationwide...

The glancing reference to South Asia in the Barack Obama-Hu Jintao joint statement on November 17 in Beijing has raised a storm of comment in India, not least from the South Block which read it as insinuating a third party into what it insists must be a bilateral Indo-Pakistan relationship. We read the statement as insinuating a larger claim. The statement says among other things: ''The two sides support the improvement and growth of relations between India and Pakistan [and] are ready to work together to promote peace, stability and development in [the South Asia] region.'' This can be read...

The Department of Homeland Security has spent $230 million to develop better technology for detecting smuggled nuclear bombs but has had to stop deploying the new machines because the United States has run out of a crucial raw material, experts say.

"Green energy" is proving to be no miracle solution to the nation's monumental unemployment problems, and it is doing little to help the economy emerge from its deepest recession in decades, economists say. A large part of the $786 billion stimulus bill was devoted to green or renewable energy projects, with President Obama, Democratic legislators and their environmental allies repeatedly promising that the money would be used to create an army of home weatherizers, wind-turbine factory jobs and other employment opportunities that would help put to work the nearly 8 million people who have lost jobs during the recession. The...

The Fort Hood terror attack that killed 13 adults and an unborn child and left dozens injured was the first such radical Islamic assault on United States soil since Sept. 11, 2001. Now the producers of the startling documentary "TheThird Jihad" have announced a plan to arm citizens with information about the possibilities of more attacks, using strategy in line with the timeless battle adage – "Know thy enemy." Clarion Fund previously partnered with WorldNetDaily.com to stream its powerful documentary "The Third Jihad," which uncovers a stealth influence by radical Islamists to undermine American society.

The theft of 1,000 private e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA) shows that deniers have learned lessons from dirty politics and are running a new campaign to undermine public trust in climate scientists. The feeble response from the UEA and the climate science community shows that scientists are still totally underestimating the fragility of that trust and the crucial role it plays in building public belief. The Importance and fragility of Trust The lay public, when presented with confusing data and competing arguments about climate change deploy the heuristic (a fancy word for...

Just imagine if we learned we were about to be landed with the biggest bill in the history of the world - simply on the say-so of a group of scientists. Would we not want to be absolutely sure that those scientists were 100 per cent dependable in what they were saying? Should we not then be extremely worried - and even very angry - if it emerged that those scientists had been conspiring among themselves to fiddle the evidence for what they were telling us? This is the extraordinary position in which we find ourselves thanks to news reported...

A growing number of states reported rising jobless rates in October, and thirteen states reported unemployment rates above the national average of 10.2%, according to a government report released on Friday

Global warming alarmists are scrambling to save face after hackers stole hundreds of incriminating e-mails from a British university and published them on the Internet. The messages were pirated from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA) and reveal correspondence between British and American researchers engaged in fraudulent reporting of data to favor their own climate change agenda. UEA officials confirmed one of their servers was hacked, and several of the scientists involved admitted the authenticity of the messages, according to the New York Times. The article opined, "The evidence pointing to a growing human...

As Sarah Palin embarks on a publicity tour for her book, conservative commentators have again taken to likening the former Alaska governor to the GOP’s revered conservative icon Ronald Reagan. Palin, like Reagan, brands herself as an articulate conservative. Both Palin and Reagan were governors from Western states, but the similarities end there. When Reagan entered the White House, he had successfully completed two terms as governor of California and had run for president against President Ford. Palin chose not to complete her first time as governor. Reagan’s Republicanism was that of the big tent—the kind where contrasting opinions, even...

British Army officer, Lieutenant Paddy Rice, has been described as "the luckiest soldier in Afghanistan" after surviving being shot by a Taliban sniper. video at link

Throughout critics such as myself have pointed out that making it easier to be unemployed at the expense of the people who we want to be doing the hiring was hardly a way to fix unemployment. And it turns out we were right: WASHINGTON – As if small businesses needed another reason not to hire, consider their latest financial burden: The cost of rising unemployment itself. Employers already are squeezed by tight credit, rising health care costs, wary consumers and a higher minimum wage. Now, the surging jobless rate is imposing another cost. It’s forcing higher state taxes on companies...

NOVEMBER 20, 2009 The Coming Deficit Disaster The president says he understands the urgency of our fiscal crisis, but his policies are the equivalent of steering the economy toward an iceberg. DOUGLAS HOLTZ-EAKIN President Barack Obama took office promising to lead from the center and solve big problems. He has exerted enormous political energy attempting to reform the nation's health-care system. But the biggest economic problem facing the nation is not health care. It's the deficit. Recently, the White House signaled that it will get serious about reducing the deficit next year—after it locks into place massive new health-care entitlements....

Most of the media hate Sarah Palin. Given the hyperfocused offensive targeted at her, the simple conclusion is that the left-wing establishment views the former Alaska governor as the greatest threat to the current Democratic monopoly on power in Washington. Certainly Mrs. Palin's book tour is generating a lot of enthusiasm across the country, with thousands of admirers flocking to each stop. The book itself, "Going Rogue," was locked in at No. 1 on best-seller lists for weeks before it was officially available for sale. Mrs. Palin's appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" attracted the largest audience the program has...

$1160 now shattered. Just like last week, gold is rocking out of the gate, breaking $1160/oz for the first time. Astounding.

Larry Grathwohl was one of the experts/witnesses we interviewed for the documentary. He had been undercover inside the Weather Underground and had worked closely with Ayers, Dohrn, and their fellow terrorists. I asked, "Well what is going to happen to those people we can't reeducate, that are diehard capitalists?" And the reply was that they'd have to be eliminated. And when I pursued this further, they estimated they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these reeducation centers. And when I say "eliminate," I mean "kill." Twenty-five million people.

"We are no longer just a Christian nation. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers." (INAUGURAL SPEECH)

Wave of Debt Payments Facing U.S. Government EDMUND L. ANDREWS November 22, 2009 WASHINGTON — The United States government is financing its more than trillion-dollar-a-year borrowing with i.o.u.’s on terms that seem too good to be true. Treasury officials now face a trifecta of headaches: a mountain of new debt, a balloon of short-term borrowings that come due in the months ahead, and interest rates that are sure to climb back to normal as soon as the Federal Reserve decides that the emergency has passed. Even as Treasury officials are racing to lock in today’s low rates by exchanging short-term...

'Land of the Lost's' dismal box office helped land star Will Ferrell at the top of our annual list of Hollywood's Most Overpaid Stars. Ferrell is no longer the sure bet he seemed after hits like 'Elf.' ($220 million worldwide box office) This summer's 'Land of the Lost' was one of those epic Hollywood disasters that makes outsiders question why anyone is in the movie business. The concept seemed like a good idea: pair funnyman Will Ferrell with a cult kids show from the '70s and hilarity is bound to ensue. Or not. The film ended up costing an estimated...

There seemed to be enough lawmakers on the Sunday news shows the day after a major health care reform vote to make up a quorum, but the one clear message that emerged was the long and difficult road the legislation has to go in the Senate . While New York Sen. Charles Schumer said on CBS Face the Nation that "now, the wind is at our back," Democrats wrestled with questions about how to keep aboard some in the party who were willing to vote to get debate started on the Senate floor, but still harbored serious reservations about provisions...

WASHINGTON – If you stacked the pink slips Congress has received warning members away from support of the health-care bill, big spending, hate crimes legislation and energy taxes, the pile would tower over the tallest buildings in the world. Laying them end to end would result in a trail that would extend over nearly two-thirds of the American continent from East to West.

In case you hadn’t heard, the US Marxist Party’s Senate vote to ostensibly “continue debate” on its draconian version of “we will now control everything you say and do” ObamaCare proposed bill passed by 60-39—along straight party lines. The last minute purchase of corrupt Marxist-Democrat Senator votes (with OUR tax money) at over $100Millions a pop clenched the deal. The ObamaGov is placing the final nails in the coffin of our Republic and is replacing it with its onerous and totalitarian Marxist presence.

Why Is No One Laughing? By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. WASHINGTON -- What would the mainstream media's response be if former governor Sarah Palin described China's economic growth to an audience of students in Shanghai as "an accomplishment unparalleled in human history"? That is what the most inexperienced president in modern American history said in Shanghai this week. I wonder if any of the assembled journalists choked. President Barack Obama makes such unhinged pronouncements with the kind of frequency that if he were anyone else he would be set down by the media as a boobie. I take that back....

This is the position of the New York Times when given the chance to publish sensitive information that might hinder the liberal agenda. Of course, when the choice is between publishing classified information that might endanger the lives of U.S. troops in the field or intelligence programs vital to national security, that information is published without hesitation by the nation's paper of record.

A place to discuss Bill's radio program. Click here for available internet streams.

Hackers Expose Climate Brawl Monday Nov 23, 2009 Caroline Overington writes up the story of the hackers breaking in to the East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU), but misses the meat of the story. The Australian can tick that box: “Covered”, but not tick that box, “Incisive”.She includes a few of the emails, but misses the bombshells while wasting column space discussing irrelevancies. As the Australian Senators sit down to assess the meaningfulness of an Emissions Trading Scheme this week, we can only hope they have better sources of information than our national masthead.The extraordinary emails from the East Anglia...

Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana said she’ll vote to move ahead with the Senate health bill, but has three conditions before she agrees to vote yes on the final bill. Those conditions are important, because Ms. Landrieu is one of the Democratic swing votes Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) needs to win final passage. Here they are: 1) More tax credits for small business to buy health insurance. The issue is a consistent theme for Ms. Landrieu, who is chairman of the Senate Small Business Committee. The bill already includes some credits at a cost of $27 billion...

In Indiana, practice for 'civilian surge' in Afghanistan State Dept. enlists Afghans to help prepare Americans for mission CAMP ATTERBURY, IND. -- Outside a scruffy, two-story building, armed and flak-jacketed U.S. soldiers stood watch under a sagging Afghan flag. Inside, the provincial governor, a Hamid Karzai look-alike in a striped robe and Karakul cap, pleaded with two tribal elders to get along. Only the Taliban would benefit from their dispute, the governor's aide said with a nervous click of his worry beads. An American at the table asked to speak. If they couldn't settle their differences over landownership, he gently...

According to a report in The Consumerist, Apple is telling some customers that smoking near a product covered under the AppleCare program voids the warranty. However, try to find that limitation in the policy wording. It doesn’t seem to be in there. Two different readers of Consumerist reported that Apple had said that second hand smoke traces in the returned equipment voided the warranty because it exposed workers to secondhand smoke, and that nicotine was on OSHA’s list of hazardous substances.

I am among the thousands of women every year who discover between the ages of 40 and 49 that we have breast cancer. We find out after we undergo mammograms. We find out after we examine ourselves for lumps that may signal the presence of a malignancy. And we are the women who would go without both of these routine screenings under the task force's proposed guidelines. And every day that passed without treatment would have brought me that much closer to death. As it is, I have survived only through aggressive chemotherapy and radiation, along with a double mastectomy....

It’s not every day you see a politician extend a rhetorical middle finger to his constituents, so enjoy this. It’s no mere hypothetical, either. His numbers in Colorado have been weak for months; meanwhile, The One’s approval rating there slipped below 50 percent as far back as April. Bennet’s facing a tough primary challenge, where he’ll be hammered if he votes no, and then what’ll no doubt be a tough general election, where he’ll be hammered if he votes yes. He might as well vote his conscience and prepare for the firing squad. Besides, Democrats aren’t really concerned with voters...

The leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit indicate an astonishing conspiracy of the world’s leading warmist scientists, involving collusion, rigged evidence, suppression of dissent, the possibly illegal destruction of evidence under FOI request, and the smearing of sceptical scientists. now there’s also an Australian link which shows just how closely activists and these scientists, as well as possibly the CSIRO, worked together to present the most alarmist scenarios. In private, the consensus within this “team” of warmist scientists seemed to be tearing apart as the world refused to warm. Money, money, money. Global warming is...

The five men facing trial in the Sept. 11 attacks will plead not guilty so that they can air their criticisms of U.S. foreign policy, the lawyer for one of the defendants said Sunday. The five men facing trial in the Sept. 11 attacks will plead not guilty so that they can air their criticisms of U.S. foreign policy, the lawyer for one of the defendants said Sunday, Nov. 22, 2009. Scott Fenstermaker, the lawyer for accused terrorist Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, said the men would not deny their role in the 2001 attacks but "would explain what happened and...