Free Republic

C-SPAN continues its LIVE coverage of the 39th annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Saturday in Washington. The last of the 3-day conference wraps up today with speeches by Grover Norquist and Sarah Palin. Also speaking today, Chairman of National Republican Senatorial Committee Sen. John Cornyn. On Friday, the three top GOP candidates for the Republican nomination -- former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum -- addressed the conference. Rep. Ron Paul was invited to speak this year but instead stayed on the campaign trail. More than 10,000 conservatives are in...

< snip > ..... If Republicans have an opening this year, it is with the white working class, a crowd the Democratic Party has been hemorrhaging for decades. Barack Obama did better than John Kerry or Al Gore with these voters, though even he earned just 43% of their vote. ..... < snip > ..... The white working class will make up as much as 55% of the vote in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. ..... < snip > ..... And so at the heart of the Santorum agenda are policies designed to give special handouts to the working class,...

SNIP SNIP Local government planning should, first of all, protect the private property rights of its citizens. The legitimate function of local planning is to facilitate the safe and coordinated exercise of the free market in real estate and commerce. Social engineering, on the other hand, is the result of professional planners creating a vision of what they think a community should be in the future. What the landowners may want is not a factor in the design. What the planners think the broader community will want, such as open space and protected wildlife areas, outweighs private property rights or...

British viewers will see seven episodes, the last of which deals with global warming and the threat to the natural world posed by man. However, viewers in other countries, including the United States, will only see six episodes. The environmental programme has been relegated by the BBC to an “optional extra” alongside a behind-the-scenes documentary which foreign networks can ignore. Campaigners said the decision not to incorporate the episode on global warming as part of the main package was “unhelpful”. They added that it would allow those countries which are sceptical of climate change to “censor” the issue. ....It was...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Army 1st Lt. Ashley White died on the front lines in southern Afghanistan last weekend, the first casualty in what the Army says is a new and vital wartime attempt to gain the trust of Afghan women. White, like other female soldiers working with special operations teams, was brought in to do things that would be awkward or impossible for her male teammates. Frisking burqa-clad women, for example. Her death, in a bomb explosion in the Taliban heartland of Kandahar, underscores the risks of placing women with elite U.S. special operations teams working in remote villages.

Social policy often does more harm than good, says one of the last of the original neocons.The Obama administration is entering a field not cultivated on a major scale since the 1960s: social policy. Unlike safety-net entitlements, such as health insurance and cash welfare, social policy—or social engineering, to use the more critical term—uses government action to try to change and improve people and their neighborhoods. For instance, the Obama administration’s Promise Neighborhoods are supposed to replicate, in 21 cities, what the Harlem Children’s Zone has done in Manhattan—to “create plans to provide cradle-to-career services that improve the educational achievement...

The New York Times ran a banner front page headline on September 14, 2011 titled “U.S. Scrambles to Avert Palestinian Vote at U.N.” The Times headline should have read, “The Obama Administration Scrambles to Avoid Its Own Self-Fulfilling Prophesy.” Next week, the United Nations General Assembly will almost certainly approve an upgrade of the status of the Palestinian Authority from nonvoting “observer entity” to “observer state,” placing it on par with the Holy See. This will happen whether or not the Palestinians try for full UN member state status, which would first require approval by the Security Council. President Obama...

This video deconstructs the social engineering done by the NAZI's in their PR campaign in Germany and the sourrounding nations before and during WWII. The same tactics are being used today, primarily by liberals. Folks, we need to know how to recognize these insideous and disgusting tactics, and call on the carpet those who use them. Spread the word, help educate others about these tactics and how they are being used today. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23X14HS4gLk&feature=player_embedded#!

If Michael Crichton had lived to write a follow-up to State of Fear, the plotline might well have gone like this: at a top secret, state of the art laboratory in Switzerland, scientists finally discover the true cause of “global warming”. It’s the sun, stupid. More specifically – as the Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark has long postulated – it’s the result of cosmic rays which act as a seed for cloud formation. The scientists working on the project are naturally euphoric: this is a major breakthrough which will not only overturn decades of misguided conjecture on so-called Man Made Global...

Poverty rose significantly in America last year. That’s what the government says. Common sense, however, says something different. Common sense says that, compared to the standard of history and the rest of the world, there is no poverty in America. Don’t shoot me yet. I’m not saying people don’t have it hard. I’m not saying people don’t have financial catastrophes. I’m not saying there isn’t an economic underclass. I’m not saying people don’t go to bed wondering where they’re going to find the money they need. I know about financial hard times. And I know about doing without. But I...

General Motors CEO Dan Akerson said his company and his industry would be helped, not hurt, if consumers paid higher gas taxes. In an interview published in Tuesday's Detroit News, Akerson floated the idea of a $1 a gallon increase in the gas tax as a way to encourage buyers to purchase smaller, more fuel efficient cars. Greg Martin, spokesman for GM's Washington office, confirmed that the quotes reflect Akerson's and GM's view. Akerson said he would support a jump in the gas tax if it came instead of tighter fuel economy regulations that GM (GM, Fortune 500) and other...

California students are not required to know about the World Trade Center attacks. Or President Barack Obama's election as the nation's first African American president. Or the fight over gay marriage, or fallout over foreclosures, or Gov. Gray Davis' recall, or the 2001 energy crisis. California's academic content standards for history and social studies have not been revised since their adoption in 1998 – but there's a push by lawmakers to change that. Assemblyman Mike Feuer has crafted legislation aimed at updating the aging standards, developed before the war on terror, iPhones or the state's energy crisis. "You can't have...

Newt Gingrich had plenty of people on the Right scratching their heads after his attack on Paul Ryan’s budget plan as conservative “social engineering,” but Republicans weren’t the only ones mystified. The attack also puzzled Jay Newton-Small at Time. Two weeks ago, Gingrich told her that he would have voted for the plan offered by the “brave” Republican Representative: The former speaker sang Ryan’s praises for being a “brave” “man of ideas,” like Gingrich himself.“But would you have voted for Ryan’s plan?” I pressed.“Sure,” Gingrich replied.“Do you think it would actually save the health care system?”“No, I think it’s the...

MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn.

Recently a former Ramapo High School teacher ran afoul of the law by giving a sexually explicit book to a high school girl. The ex-teacher was arrested and charged with endangering the welfare of a child, among other things. Meanwhile, Clarkstown high school students are reading a book that contains all kinds of sexually explicit episodes, including graphic depictions of heterosexual and homosexual encounters, forced oral sex, masturbation, and bestiality. But there is no outcry from the masses in Clarkstown, because this book (which I will not name, to deny it undeserved publicity) is part of the high school English...

During her first foreign trip in 2011, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) slammed President Obama's green energy policy as a "social engineering" project that hurts the U.S. economy. Palin -- a potential 2012 presidential candidate -- said that she favors an "all of the above" energy plan that includes domestic oil drilling and nuclear power. Without mentioning it by name, she criticized the Obama administration for restricting domestic drilling and said that his green jobs agenda is fatally flawed. This push for green energy at the expense of conventional, reliable sources is not a credible energy policy," Palin said...

With all the bad press the TSA has received recently, we can't be sure if the acronym stands for Transportation Security Administration, Touches Sensitive Areas, or Truly Scandalous Attention. But, for sure, its pat-downs and sci-fi radiation screeners give many of us another good reason to avoid the increasingly unfriendly skies. Yet while the TSA right now has supplanted the IRS as the bureaucracy we most love to hate, its policies are merely part of a longstanding cultural trend: the failure to recognize that the good of the many outweighs the good of the few. It's the same reason why...

Is the American Dream getting smaller? Are we defining down the tools of opportunity and the pleasures of prosperity? President Obama's flippant dismissal of American Exceptionalism last year stirred a lot of criticism because it suggested he did not believe the United States held a special place in the world. It also suggested America's unique history is, to the President, no big deal. Now with fellow travelers exercising power at all levels of government, progressives can do more than just belittle the idea of American Exceptionalism. They can enact policies to make America unexceptional -- diminishing our quality of life...

The latest Senate energy bill, quietly unveiled last week, looks like sweet compromise on radical measures like cap and trade, but buried within is a bitter poison pill that will could be swallowed in a vote that may come this week. Unlike the 1,200-page House of Representatives energy bill, which passed last year, this scaled-down proposal does not call for an 83-percent reduction in greenhouse gases (or any reduction in greenhouse gases) and contains no mention of a cap-and-trade scheme. Also contrary to the House bill, this one does not provide a family of four earning up to $55,000 with...

Attempt to end the “old boy network” Equality Minister wants businesses to be ordered to disclose what they are doing to improve gender equality in the ranks of senior management. Her move, which is backed by Gordon Brown, comes on top of provisions in the controversial Equality Bill that allow employers to give jobs to women in favour of men with the same qualifications. However, it is likely to be resisted by business leaders who resent more Government interference in their recruitment practices, and who argue that women are under-represented among executives because they value their families more than their...