Free Republic

A few years after Mitt Romney graduated from Harvard Business School, he returned to share a simple, timeworn lesson in an unusual way. Invited to give a presentation on balancing work and family, he began by telling students that they were like multinational corporations, recalled Clayton M. Christensen, who organized the event. “You have the same question as General Electric,” said Mr. Romney, then a young father and a management consultant. “Your resources are your time and talent. How are you going to deploy them?” He drew a chart called a growth-share matrix with little circles to represent various pursuits:...

New York Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal, better known as James Taranto’s punching bag at Opinion Journal, has a new blog at nytimes.com, “The Loyal Opposition.” On Tuesday Rosenthal posted the provocatively titled “Herman Cain and the ‘Liberal Media,’” where he broadcasts his alarm at how “quickly the right wing jumps on an issue almost in unison,” blames Republicans for injecting racial fears into modern-day politics with Willie Horton, and even claiming the phrase "community organizer" is racist when applied to Obama.

Efforts to repeal the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act are in full swing, as a major lawsuit advances, another lawsuit is filed, and a Senate panel meets soon to consider legislation to overturn the law. “We are working hard to strike the blow that will end DOMA,” said Mary Bonuato, civil rights project director at Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) and lead attorney in Gill v. Office of Personnel Management. Gill is one of several lawsuits filed by gay spouses who say their lives have been injured by DOMA, which defines marriage, for federal purposes, as the union...

Rick Santorum has a new target in Iowa - Herman Cain. Santorum, who is trying to appeal to social conservative voters in the Iowa caucuses, seized on the new frontrunner's comment on "Meet the Press" that he wouldn't push for a federal amendment banning same-sex marriage during a Radio Iowa interview: “The idea that this is issue should be left to the states is the position Barack Obama takes and it’s not the right position...There needs to be a uniform definition of marriage in this country.” Continue Reading (snip) “Leaders should be out there advocating for what is in the...

LEDYARD, NY, September 29, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Another town clerk in New York may lose her job for refusing to sign marriage licenses for same sex couples, the New York Times reports. Fifty-seven-year-old Rose Marie Belforti has been the town clerk in the small rural town of Ledyard, New York for ten years. When the state of New York legalized homosexual “marriage” this past summer, Belforti decided that she could not reconcile signing same-sex marriage licenses with her Christian faith. Instead, she decided to delegate the task to a deputy, who would issue such licenses by appointment. Now, a lesbian...

Rose Marie Belforti is a 57-year-old cheese maker, the elected town clerk in this sprawling Finger Lakes farming community and a self-described Bible-believing Christian. She believes that God has condemned homosexuality as a sin, so she does not want to sign same-sex marriage licenses; instead, she has arranged for a deputy to issue all marriage licenses by appointment. But when a lesbian couple who own a farm near here showed up at the town hall last month, the women said they were unwilling to wait. Now Ms. Belforti is at the heart of an emerging test case, as national advocacy...

(Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul.) ... It is not class warfare to suggest that the richest 1 percent of people in society pay one-third of their income to the federal government, as they did under Ronald Reagan. Keep in mind that dividends were taxable as ordinary income every year of his administration, and in the Tax Reform Act of 1986 he supported taxing capital gains as ordinary income as well. Higher effective tax rates on the rich...

One of the few issues on which opinion has moved left over the last few years is same-sex marriage. In 1996, Gallup found that Americans opposed it by a 68 percent to 27 percent margin. Last May, Gallup found Americans in favor by 53 percent to 45 percent. That's a huge change in 15 years. Other polls have shown similar movement. Pew Research reported last week that 45 percent favored same-sex marriage and 46 percent were opposed -- a dead heat. Pew polls in 2008 and 2009 found only 35 percent to 40 percent in favor. This is an issue...

This is a scary economic moment. The response we need is not easy, but it is totally obvious. We need a Grand Bargain between America’s two parties — and we need it right now. Until you read the following news article, we’ll be stuck in a world of hurt. Washington (AP) — It was a news conference the likes of which the White House had never seen. President Obama stood in the East Room, flanked by the House speaker, John Boehner; the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell; the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid; and the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi....

Latest dispatch from the Department of Dissent Is No Longer Patriotic: because they won't raise taxes, Republicans are more dangerous to US national security than al Qaeda. That is the view of Nicholas Kristof in his column, "Republicans, Zealots and Our Security", in today's New York Times. View excerpts here.

Andrew Breitbart wasn’t supposed to be sitting here in a television studio makeup chair. But when he heard that Anthony Weiner was about to announce his resignation, he dropped everything. Mr. Breitbart, the conservative author and blogger who first published Mr. Weiner’s suggestive self-portraits, had ditched his book-signing in central Illinois and hopped on a flight earlier than planned to the Twin Cities, where he was booked as a marquee attraction at RightOnline, a conservative bloggers conference. “To put myself in Decatur, Ill., without a satellite connection would have put me in a bad situation,” he explained as a woman...

Massachusetts Democrats are using New York’s adoption of gay marriage to tweak Republican U.S. Sen. Scott Brown for his continued opposition to same-sex marriage. Massachusetts Democratic Party Chairman John Walsh said all the declared Democratic candidates challenging Brown in next year’s election support gay marriage. A Brown aide said Monday that the senator still opposes gay marriage and supports the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibits federal recognition of gay marriages.

What good are they? The Majority in the Senate but the pass Homosexual Marriage with a joke of an exemption for Religious Organizations.

ALBANY — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Friday that he expected same-sex marriage legislation to be approved before the end of the legislative session next week, and indicated that to win passage of the measure he is prepared to yield to Republican concerns for greater protections of religious groups. “I am a proponent of marriage equality, and I’m working very hard to make that a reality in New York,” Mr. Cuomo told reporters on Friday as lawmakers prepared to go home for the weekend. “I am also a proponent of religious freedom, and separation of church and state, so these...

... Until this year, questions about race on most college applications were much simpler. A student who was white with a distant American Indian ancestor , for instance, would most likely have identified himself as white. But students can now choose from a menu of new boxes of racial and ethnic categories — because the Department of Education started requiring universities this past school year to comply with a broad federal edict to collect more information about race and ethnicity. The change has made it easier for students to claim a multiracial identity — highlighting those parts of their backgrounds...

In late spring 2005, Mitt Romney gathered with a dozen top policy and political advisers in a conference room near the governor’s suite on the third floor of the State House. For two years, they had grappled with the abstruse complexities of health care reform, sifting data, evaluating input from experts, and testing theories to craft a plan that would expand coverage to nearly everyone in the state and not break the bank. This was a bold move for a first-term Republican governor, some of whose more conservative advisers doubted the wisdom of a foray deep into policy turf long...

In recent weeks, the issue of who gets to define marriage -- Minnesota citizens or a handful of judges or legislators -- has been on the front burner. The debate has generated lots of heat but not much light. Now that the Legislature has endeavored to let the people vote on a constitutional amendment defining marriage, I suggest a few ground rules to ensure a fair and open exchange of views. First, we must reject the name-calling that has marred the debate to this point. Same-sex-marriage supporters' constant mantra has been that Minnesotans who support one man-one woman marriage are...

Old friend Mitt Romney understands that if the occasion should ever arise, he’s not actually allowed to use a PowerPoint presentation during a presidential inaugural address — right? Mitt, right? After his performance in Michigan last week, you’ve got to wonder what form his marriage proposal took to Ann. “Listen, Sweetie, as you can see from the bar chart on this next slide, the genetic risk of me ever losing my hair is incalculably low.’’ Romney’s use of a projector and overhead screen at least week’s health care speech — billed as the most important event of his young campaign...

Last August, I wrote the following about Mitt Romney’s odds of winning the Republican nomination: In a sense, the stronger President Obama looks next year, the better Romney’s chances of being nominated. He needs the prospect of an uphill general-election battle to keep his potential rivals for establishment support safely on the sidelines. And then he needs that same establishment to rally around him once the primary voting starts — not out of love or admiration, but out of fear of the populist alternative. Six months later, this is almost exactly how things are playing out. In many ways, Romney...

Executive Editor Bill Keller and Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet were interviewed at the National Press Club Monday night by Marvin Kalb for “New York Times Behind the Scenes,” which aired on C-Span. As reported Monday night by Keach Hagey of Politico, when Kalb asked what Keller thought of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who has launched a New York edition of the Wall Street Journal, Keller impishly replied “Who?” before saying he thought Murdoch’s greatest impact in the United States comes through Fox News. After hesitantly giving Murdoch credit for investing in journalism, albeit tabloid-style journalism, Keller criticized Murdoch’s “most...