Free Republic

FALLS CHURCH, Va.--Starting July 1, residents and drivers in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads will be taxed by regional governments in which they have little say or influence. It's all part of a tax hike the Republican-controlled Legislature enacted earlier this year. And it's a sharp break from what the state has allowed in the past.

Tony Blair, the British prime minister, could end up swapping Downing Street for a job as the first full-time European Union president, under a plan being actively touted by Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president. Mr Sarkozy is understood to have discussed the idea with other EU leaders ahead of next week’s European summit, Mr Blair’s last major international event as prime minister. His support for Mr Blair taking on a big European job is a remarkable sign of Anglo-French rapprochement since Mr Sarkozy replaced Jacques Chirac as president last month. German diplomats say Mr Sarkozy put his plan to Angela...

AUSTIN — Transportation officials on Thursday approved more than 80 toll road projects across the state, many of which probably would use some private financing. State lawmakers recently passed a two-year moratorium on some private toll road contracts. The law still allows local and state planners to move on the new toll projects — with a price range of more than $50 billion — although the rules have changed. Under these projects, local officials would get the first crack at development before the state steps in. And even if privately financed, the government would own and operate the roads and...

Heinsohn is not concerned with the absolute size of populations, but rather with the share of teenagers and young men. If this share becomes too big compared to the total population, we are facing a youth bulge. The problem starts when families begin to produce three, four or more sons. This will cause the sons to fight over access to the positions in society that give power and prestige. Then you will have a lot of boys and young men running around filled with aggression and uncontrollable hormones. And then we shall experience mass killings, until a sufficient number of...

SACRAMENTO, Calif., May 10 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Joined by Governor Schwarzenegger, Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez and Assembly Republican leader Mike Villines, business leaders from the newly formed Coalition to Advance Healthcare Reform (CAHR) today called for passage of market-based healthcare reforms to fix California and the nation's broken healthcare system. The group of business leaders said now is the time to bring all stakeholders together to achieve meaningful results that not only solve the cost and coverage problem, but build a healthier California. Launched at a press conference on Capitol Hill earlier this week, CAHR...

It is a common belief that socialism is rooted in the Bible; but this is not the case. The Bible is certainly full of social protest and animosity to the jabotinsky social order which enables the rich to live in comfort through the suffering of the poor. But socialism is not only a protest: socialism is a concrete plan to solve the problem of social inequality - and this plan is of a kind decidedly not contemplated by the Bible. On the other hand, the Bible does contain a concrete plan for social revolution (or rather, the blueprint for such...

The father of modern economics, Adam Smith, wrote more than 200 years ago about the all-powerful "invisible hand" of the market. It was tough, he said, but good for all. The late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman was the great champion of the invisible hand and free markets. Governments, he said, should just let markets do their work. Economist Duncan Foley, in his new book "Adam's Fallacy," says wait a minute. This is free market theology, he says, and it's producing a value-free society, an unequal society, an immoral society. This hour On Point: the author of "Adam's Fallacy"...

Nearly seven years ago, on the eve of his becoming interim president of Russia, Vladimir Putin published his Millennium Manifesto. Following the collapse of communism and the chaos of the Yeltsin years, this was a blueprint for restoring Russian greatness which traced a "third way" between discredited Bolshevism and Western liberal democracy. The key was the restoration of the power of the state, whose monopoly of violence had been challenged in the 1990s by a combination of mafiosi, politically ambitious oligarchs, media barons and regional governors. As he takes stock more than half-way through his second presidential term, Mr Putin...

The Prime Minister has unveiled the world according to 'Mr Tony' as he launched into a bizarre lecture on life, the universe and everything. Tony Blair left an audience of Arab female university students lost for words as he called for a 'global culture' based on common values of openness, tolerance, equality and fairness. And he revealed the 'theory of Mr Tony' - you cannot please everyone so just press ahead even if others think you are wrong. The oddly-worded remarks came during a tour of a women-only university in the United Arab Emirates. What began an earnest question and...

SACRAMENTO — Expect surprises. It's no longer politics as usual. Want to overhaul the Legislature into a single nonpartisan house? How about creating universal health care or a bullet train? Voters may soon get the chance. Californians are so tired of Sacramento and Washington that they are creating a "unique hybrid democracy" to dissolve political gridlock on key issues — a trend that could spread across the nation. That's the conclusion reached by California's two foremost pollsters, looking back to the Nov. 7 election and ahead to coming sessions of the Legislature and Congress. Californians are backing away from the...

Bill Whalen is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he follows California and national politics. STAR BILLING it's not: it's page 102 of the December edition of Men's Journal magazine, to be exact, where Arnold Schwarzenegger expounds on life and politics. California's governor admits that he's gained a girlymanish eight pounds since moving to Sacramento three years ago. Otherwise, the interview is notable for what it doesn't perpetuate: namely, a growing myth that Arnold's brand of bipartisanship can work in Washington. In the aftermath of last week's election, the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal...

What happens in Washington, D.C., can affect state and local elections. That's what happened on Election Day, when Republican voters stayed home in droves, discouraged from turning out to vote by media reports that the Congress was going Democrat, said Stephen Kinney, a partner with Public Opinion Strategy, a Republican polling company. "The Republicans stayed home because the election was nationalized," Kinney told a breakfast meeting of the San Gabriel Valley chapter of the Los Angles County Lincoln Clubs on Friday. Kinney said many statewide Republicans - from lieutenant governor candidate Tom McClintock to Secretary of State Bruce McPherson -...

After Arnold Schwarzenegger lost all four of the initiatives he sponsored in the California special election in 2005, he told the people of the Golden State that “I’ve heard you. I’m going to change.” He did. Since promising to change in his state of the state address in January, Schwarzenegger has become a better bridge builder and has showed an admirable willingness to work across the political aisle to accomplish important objectives. Yes, the governor has alienated some of my conservative friends in the process, but he has also gained quite a few Democratic friends. And as a result, while...

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — British Prime Minister Tony Blair acknowledged Sunday the West had changed strategy in the fight against terrorism, telling Pakistan's president that brokering a broad Mideast peace deal was now as crucial as using force to battle militants.Pakistani leader Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who switched his country's support from the Taliban in Afghanistan to the U.S. following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, said "the knot of terrorism will be untied through first resolving the Palestinian dispute."Musharraf also acknowledged that his government's efforts to cut off support for the Taliban in northwestern Pakistan had not achieved "100 percent success." Pakistan...

MEXICO CITY - California's Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, meeting with outgoing President Vicente Fox in Mexico City, hailed the Democratic takeover of Congress as healthy for democracy, saying "Washington was stuck." Schwarzenegger suggested that Washington follow his example in California where he has worked with Democrats to achieve bipartisan agreements, such as placing $37.3 billion in bond measures on the November ballot, which voters embraced and which are aimed at easing the state's traffic jams, aging schools and inadequate affordable housing. "I think this is good that we have new blood coming to Washington, that we have new people with...

As Washington insiders pore over the latest low job-approval ratings for George W. Bush, and as aficionados of British politics ponder the latest low ratings of Tony Blair, let's take a longer look at the political ebb and flow in America and Britain over the last quarter century or so. There is a certain parallelism.In the late 1970s, both countries experienced something like collapse -- a collapse of the Keynesian economics dominant in the post-World War II years, a collapse of the accommodationist foreign policy prevailing since the setback in Vietnam.From that collapse arose two improbable leaders on the political...

IT SHOULD be no surprise that Hugo Chávez prefers to dine with Ken Livingstone rather than Tony Blair on his trip to London: the Venezuelan President plays a similar role in global politics to that once played by his host in Britain. Mr Livingstone has revelled in tweaking the tail of powerful prime ministers in their own backyard while spending vast sums of money to promote his own agenda. Señor Chávez has similarly set himself up as irritant-in-chief to George Bush. Both have an unfortunate predilection for comparing their enemies to Nazis. If the London Mayor accuses a reporter of...

What is it about peace and prosperity and a two term Democratic Presidency that Democrats don't like?According to one of the leading liberal bloggers, Markos Moulitsas (or as he is known in the blogosphere - Kos), it is nothing that terribly significant. The head of the netroots high command suggests in Sunday's Washington Post, "Despite all his successes -- and eight years of peace and prosperity is nothing to sneeze at -- he never broke the 50-percent mark in his two elections. Regardless of the president's personal popularity, Democrats held fewer congressional seats at the end of his presidency than...

"WHO TODAY IS CALLED a liberal for strength and confidence in defense of liberty?" Harvey Mansfield asked this question almost 30 years ago in the preface to his Spirit of Liberalism, and the answer was almost self-evident. This was during the Carter administration, and things haven't gotten better since. There have been some exceptions to the rule of liberalism's weakness, but these exceptions have been fleeting, and the rule seems stronger than ever in the America of 2006.Not so in Great Britain. There, Tony Blair has shown strength and confidence in defense of liberty, and it turns out he is...

A week ago yesterday, Ferenc Gyurcsany, the man who would be Hungary's Tony Blair, led his socialist-liberal coalition to victory in the first round of parliamentary elections. He is poised to finish the job this Sunday and become Hungary's first post-communist prime minister to win re-election. It was, however, only his second most impressive triumph in the past two years. The more surprising win came in August 2004 when he was named prime minister. A battle had been brewing all that year within the Socialist party between the young party activists, led by Mr Gyurcsany, and the aging leadership. The...

What is Mr Lukashenko's background?He is a former prison guard and collective farm manager. In the early 1990s he was considered a bit of a reformer and even a democrat. He was part of a group of young politicians who helped to form an independent Belarus after the Soviet Union collapsed. The elections that brought him to power in 1994 were reasonably free and fair, and people genuinely thought he was going to be good for the country. He won on an anti-corruption platform, at a time when everything from the old Soviet Union was being sold off for...

As optimism poured into their hearts and knowledge crammed into their brains, more than 100 local residents peered with a wan smile into their collective future Friday during the first official smart growth educational workshop. Four erudite speakers presented a path toward a near-utopian life for Ukiahans -- full of walkable communities, slower traffic and more prominent greenscaping. But it was the far-reaching, more intimate impacts of smart growth that produced a series of gasps from the audience. A cross-sectional crowd of elected officials, public and private planners, contractors, builders and other concerned citizens took part of the workshop, co-sponsored...

IT'S THE SORT of behavior we have -- sadly -- come to expect from some in Congress. But when Gerhard Schroeder, the former German chancellor, announced last week that he was going to work for Gazprom, the Russian energy behemoth, he catapulted himself into a different league. It's one thing for a legislator to resign his job, leave his committee chairmanship and go to work for a company over whose industry he once had jurisdiction. It's quite another thing when the chancellor of Germany -- one of the world's largest economies -- leaves his job and goes to work for...

Joining the furious debate over withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., rejected calls for an immediate pullout while suggesting Iraq may not be stabilized until the new government is told that the U.S. troop commitment is not open-ended. Speaking to supporters in Rye Brook, N.Y., on Monday, Clinton recommended that a decision on U.S. forces be made after Iraq's Dec. 15 elections. "Then we have to tell this new government we are not going to be there forever, we are going to be withdrawing our young men and women and we expect you to start moving towards...

Let’s look at the basic numbers: since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, there have been more than 40 million abortions in America. According to the study, “one of every three American women will have an abortion by the time they reach 45.” Additionally, in a typical year there are 4.1 million live births, 1.3 million abortions and 900,000 miscarriages. The study found that “the average woman who seeks an abortion is 24 years old, unwed, earns a yearly income of about $25,000 and already is a mother…She has religious beliefs and is a Christian…the typical abortion is performed...

Recent developments in Central Asia – with Russian geopolitical influence again rising, while U.S. power in the region wanes – stand to invigorate a long-running debate over the philosophical foundation of the Kremlin’s foreign policy. The turn of events could breathe new life into so-called Eurasianists, who argue that Russia has a unique identity and should thus embark on a development course apart from the West. Since the Soviet collapse in 1991, Russian academics and policy-makers have struggled to develop a concept that could guide Russia’s revival. Westernizers and Eurasianists have played prominent roles in the ongoing debate. Eurasianism as...

The Democratic think tank Third Way -- run by the same strategists who moved the party to the center on the gun issue -- is crafting new message and policy ideas to help Democrats appeal to Red State voters on abortion, Newsweek reports in the current issue. And the pro-choice groups themselves have begun tinkering with their approach, even considering whether to abandon the framework of "choice" itself. Last week Democrats signaled that abortion -- or at least the general topic of "privacy" -- will be a major issue at Supreme Court nominee John Roberts' confirmation hearings. "We've gotten a...

A Pox on Both Your Houses by Yashiko Sagamori In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman (Click here to enlarge) In the former Soviet republic of Moldova, there is a totally unremarkable town whose name, Beltsy, means “swamps”. Before 1940, when the town belonged to Romania, there was a thriving Jewish community there. Romania officially restricted access of Jews to higher education. Local Jews were forced to send their kids to colleges in countries that didn't have such restrictions. The result was a vibrant colony of Jewish provincial intelligentsia that bragged degrees from the best European schools. Then...

-snip A centrist group of Democrats called Third Way recently issued a report explaining the Democrats' 2004 election debacle. It concluded that voters with incomes between $30,000 and $75,000 a year, or almost half the electorate, delivered "healthy victories" for President Bush and Republicans in Congress. The report concludes: "Rather than being the party of the middle class, Democrats face a huge crisis with middle-income voters." Why is that? One reason is that the party of FDR and JFK no longer seems to have a moderate wing; they have become doughnut Democrats with no middle. This point is best exemplified...

IF IT QUACKS LIKE A DUCK... The Capitol Hill newspaper, Roll Call, reported on May 2, on an upstart "centrist" advocacy (read: lobbying) group known as "Third Way." The group's co-founders, Matt Bennett, Jonathan Cowan, and Jim Kessler should be familiar to readers of the Grassroots Alert. All previously worked for "Americans For Gun Safety" (AGS), an organization that was founded in 2000 under the guise that it too would be a "centrist" group on gun issues. A little more background on each may give those who believe they are centrists a bit of pause (at least on gun issues)....

Thursday, April 28, 2005 THE NEW WORLD DISORDER Free-trade pact a threat to U.S. sovereignty? Activists hammers idea to expand NAFTA throughout Americas Posted: April 28, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern By Ron Strom © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com Opposition is fierce, at least online, to the creation of the Free Trade Area of the Americas, with detractors saying such an agreement between Western Hemisphere nations would mean an end to U.S. sovereignty. First proposed in 1994, the pact would enlarge NAFTA, the North America Free Trade Agreement, to include all of the nations of the Americas except Cuba. FTAA supporters say the...

WASHINGTON – Life in the political wilderness can be tough. Some Republicans here still know what that's like - though at this point, 10-plus years after Newt Gingrich & Co. swept the Democrats out of power on Capitol Hill, a majority of House GOP members have no firsthand experience of being in the minority. Democrats, in fact, are counting on those dwindling numbers to help them as they look for that right combination of message, candidates, infrastructure, and opposition stumbles - with a dash of opposition hubris - to win back their mojo in 2006, if not 2008. So far,...

"I am a modern man. I am part of the rock and roll generation—the Beatles, colour TV, that's the generation I come from."        —Tony Blair, in a speech a Stevenage, 22 April 1997 IntroductionA Modern Man The Prime Minister did not realize how significant these words were when he blurted them out in the middle of the most puzzling and mysterious general election campaign in modern British history. He may have known that they were important, but did he know why? For they offer the best explanation for his victory, and a convincing reason to believe that the Tories...

The Strange Death That No One Cares About (Orrin C. Judd, 1/27/05, Tech Central Station) There was a death in Washington recently that received far less attention than it deserved: the New Democrat philosophy of Bill Clinton is dead. This is a truly extraordinary development; one that should not be allowed to pass so quietly.

Clintonism, R.I.P. How triangulation became strangulation by Chuck Todd ..... With the 2004 election past and the losing party's ritual period of self-appraisal about to yield to George W. Bush's second term, the Democrats appear to have learned two small lessons and to have missed a much larger one. Of the two small lessons, one follows naturally from the other: first, the election demonstrated that the Democrats are becoming less competitive in much of the country, and second, it suggested that they cannot hope to regain the presidency or control of Congress until that changes. The reason they've lost ground,...

A Little Secret About the NazisThey were left-wing socialists. Yes, the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany, otherwise known as the Nazi Party, was indeed socialist, and it had a lot in common with the modern left. Hitler preached class warfare, agitating the working class to resist ``exploitation'' by capitalists -- particularly Jewish capitalists, of course. Their program called for the nationalization of education, health care, transportation, and other major industries. They instituted and vigorously enforced a strict gun control regimen. They encouraged pornography, illegitimacy, and abortion, and they denounced Christians as right-wing fanatics. Yet a popular myth persists that ...

Laws that discourage spending may be holding back European economic growth, writes Marcus Walker of the Wall Street Journal. Generally, European governments use a myriad of red tape to induce savings and reduce consumption. For example, shops are required to close early to save staff from long hours; businesses are required make a comfortable profit on each item, limiting price competition; sales are allowed only during January and July. The result is a continent that is characterized by high prices, short store hours, and very little consumer spending: Residents of the 12 nations using the euro save 10.5 percent of...

Third Way Plans to Focus On 'Moderate Majority' As Democrats continue to stagger from last week's election losses, a group of veteran political and policy operatives has started an advocacy group aimed at using moderate Senate Democrats as the front line in a campaign to give the party a more centrist profile. Third Way is the latest in a series of organizations aimed at rescuing Democrats from the perception that they have lost touch with middle-class voters, particularly in the heartland states that voted overwhelmingly for President Bush over Sen. John F. Kerry. The group, which has enlisted the support...

Thursday, July 1, 2004 Could your kids be given to 'gay' parents? Posted: July 1, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern By Stephen Baskerville © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com In the debate over gay marriage, strikingly little attention has been paid to the impact on children. Some question the wisdom of having children raised by two homosexuals, but the best they can seem to argue is that serious flaws vitiate the literature defending it. Almost no attention has been devoted to what may be the more serious political question of who will supply the children of gay "parents," since obviously they cannot produce children...

Kerry’s Dogs of War By M. Bozinovich Recent Albanian violence against the Serbs in Kosovo appears to have been a screaming success. Aside that UNMIK has made no convictions of the arrested Albanian suspects, the fact that NATO inflicted no reprisal to counter its exposed military impotence leaves the Albanian militants in a confident position that, if repeated again, the violence will drive NATO out of Kosovo. In fact, it appears that the Albanian militants have also set the NATO drive-out date. "I'm not a fan of setting dates,” said Hasim Taci, the leader of the Albanian paramilitary in Kosovo...

http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=128&subid=174&contentid=1926 DLC | Key Document | August 1, 2000 The Hyde Park Declaration: A Statement of Principles and a Policy Agenda for the 21st Century Publisher's Note: Last May, at the invitation of the Democratic Leadership Council, elected officials from across the country met at Franklin D. Roosevelt's estate in Hyde Park, N.Y. Their goal was to begin drafting a statement of New Democrat principles and a broad national policy agenda for the next decade. This manifesto, The Hyde Park Declaration, is the result of their work. The Hyde Park Declaration has a historic antecedent. At their 1990 annual meeting,...

CIA Fact book on Uruguay and Puerto Rico site there, too. The story of the Puerto Rican flag. I'm wondering where is Hugo Chavez?

At the opening cerimony of the XXII Congress opf the da organisation, Guterres, president of the International Socialist (IS), claimed that the IS must be the engine for the NEW WORLD ORDER. Among the parties that form the IS are : British Labour, german SPD and the french Socialist Party.

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Zell Miller, the Georgia Democrat who often votes with the GOP, says he wrote a new book criticizing his party because he got tired of people questioning his politics. Miller said "A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat," is intended as an explanation for those who continually ask why he supports tax cuts and the Bush administration's efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. "Whenever I was governor, I cut taxes three times and nobody raised an eyebrow," Miller said in an interview Thursday. "I passed not just a 'three strikes and you're out' bill...

WorldNetDaily / Commentary The Third SectorHenry Lamb Posted: August 9, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com A new mechanism of governance is emerging. Georgetown University calls it "The Third Sector." The United Nations calls it "Civil Society." The President's Council on Sustainable Development calls it "a new, collaborative decision process." Whatever it's called, it is a process to formulate public policy by non-elected individuals, unencumbered by the legislative process. The process was developed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and the United Nations. As the IUCN developed its land-management policy proposals, a network of "civil society" organizations, called...

There´s good news, and not so good news. First the good news. When it comes to foreign policy, unlike his predecessor, William Jefferson Clinton, President George W. Bush stands up like a man and declares America first. That is good news and amen. For speaking like a man on that issue, and for that matter an American man, Mr. Bush has deservedly received hallelujah praise from the conservative right, and hellfire and damnation from the malevolent left. Now for the bad news. Bush´s definition of America first does not translate from Third Way middle-speak into plain old American English as...

<p>Prime Minister Tony Blair received the impassioned support of his close friend Bill Clinton in his battle to redefine left-wing politics.</p> <p>The ex-US President echoed Mr Blair's warnings that unless politicians of the left embraced change they would face losing power to the resurgent right.</p> <p>Speaking last night at a lavish dinner in the City of London's Guildhall at the opening of a conference on the future of centre-left politics, Mr Clinton thanked the Prime Minister for proving that the "third way" could be a success.</p>

American influence in Brazil has been massive. Brazilian president recent trip to Europe was a way to counterbalance this influence. At the Progressive Governance Summit in London, Brazil, Chile and Argentina announced they would present a united front at the next WTO meeting. During a week, president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was greeted in Portugal, Spain and England by European leftists and union leaders, as he visited the continent in an effort to obtain a greater role for Brazil in international affairs. The effort included 20 speeches, 4 award ceremonies, 10 press conferences, 7 official dinners and lunches, plus...

Tony Blair's plans for a new world order in which advanced nations would take armed action to remove brutal or failed regimes were blocked yesterday by fellow centre-Left leaders. Mr Blair had argued that world leaders could not "walk by on the other side" if people were being brutally downtrodden. At a conference attended by 14 Social Democrat heads of state or government at Bagshot, Surrey, several leaders refused to sign up to a far-reaching statement paving the way for military action to protect the world from repressive governments. Brazil and Argentina were said to have led protests from those...

British Prime Minister Tony Blair and a host of world leaders will on Monday plot the future path of center-left politics in a bid to give the "Third Way" brand of the 1990s a much-needed makeover. Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair (R) and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder greet as they pose forphotographers at the Progressive Governance Summit in Berkshire, July 13, 2003. The summit was attended by 14 world leaders including Blair The summit comes as center-left governments battle growing public disillusionment with their achievements that has already ushered in the Right in some countries and is forcing Third Way...