Free Republic

For the second time in the past week, hundreds of laid off state workers rallied in the hot sun on the steps of Minnesota’s closed State Capitol to protest the state government shutdown. Wednesday’s rally again took aim at familiar theme: Taxing the state's wealthiest residents to help solve the state’s $5 billion budget deficit. One man held a sign that took his frustration a step further – he had changed it from “Tax the Rich” to “Eat the Rich.”

Daley: U.S. a 'country of whiners'By Rick Pearson, Tribune reporter 9:36 p.m. CST, March 3, 2011 Retiring Mayor Richard Daley on Thursday contended America is a "country of whiners" that's spent the last four decades fearing the impact of foreign governments on the nation's economy instead of showing the confidence and sacrifice to lead on a global stage. Daley also said he believed taxpayers can no longer finance the current level of government and suggested priorities need to be placed on municipal services that can be privatized or outsourced to cut costs. The comments by the veteran mayor, who is...

The 20th century adage that "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" is a myth, according to new research suggesting that our brains are wired exactly the same way when it comes to love. The self-help bestseller, published in 1992, suggested that when it came to relationships men and women thought and acted very differently -- in other words it was as if they came from different planets. But new scientific research shows we actually act very similarly when we are in love -- whether we are male, female, heterosexual or homosexual. Professor Semir Zeki and John Romaya at...

Ricky Gervais Was Only as Mean as We’d Hoped He'd Be It was such a refreshing treat watching Ricky Gervais go knives out during last year's Golden Globes, attacking the likes of Mel Gibson, Angelina Jolie and Sir Paul McCartney. Honestly, he didn’t say anything any worse then what is said by millions of viewers on their couches, but Ricky was in the room, looking right at his victims. It was a rush. So when it was announced that Gervais would be coming back for more, the conversation naturally turned to, “Can he top last year’s performance?” The press (guilty)...

Several House and Senate Democrats joined feminists at a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol on Thursday to push for the introduction and passage of a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women’s rights. The conference was timed to coincide with the reading of the U.S. Constitution on the House floor, as ordered by the newly elected Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio). “Recently, Supreme Court Justice (Antonin) Scalia stated his opinion that no provision in the Constitution, or the 14th amendment, would provide full and true equality to women and give them protection against sex discrimination,” Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) said....

“[Senators] want to go home,” Burr said. “When you got a process that has a definitive end, you use slippage backward. That’s why all of these things were orchestrated to come up at this time of year.” Burr would have preferred to see the debate continue next session, since “there is no compelling reason that this needs to be done right now.”

Election losers, welcome to Office Space. Some of the most senior and respected members of Congress are among the dozens of outgoing lawmakers whose offices have been crammed into tiny basement cubicles as their old offices are emptied and refurbished. And while nobody seems to be throwing fits about missing red Swingline staplers, the basement bullpen is quite a comedown for some of the most powerful members of Congress, who virtually overnight went from comfortable congressional veterans to homeless on the Hill. Rep. James Oberstar (D-Minn.), the transportation committee chairman who championed legislation to fix America’s crowded highways, faces an...

With a title like that, I'm sure I'll have every liberal pundit salivating at the idea of another diehard conservative writer taking the same route as the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan. Ms. Noonan recently referred to Palin as a "nincompoop" for a remark she made about Ronald Reagan's legacy. She has made no bones about how little she thought of Sarah Palin as a V.P. pick and she has been highly critical of Palin's decision to quit as governor of Alaska. I worked with Peggy Noonan for a short while at the start of the New York Sun and...

BELLEVUE, Wash., Oct. 13 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Acting on behalf of a Georgia resident and honorably discharged Vietnam War veteran, the Second Amendment Foundation today filed a lawsuit against Attorney General Eric Holder and the Federal Bureau of Investigation over enforcement of a federal statute that can deny gun rights to someone with a simple misdemeanor conviction on his record. The lawsuit was filed in United States District Court for the District of Columbia. SAF and co-plaintiff Jefferson Wayne Schrader of Cleveland, GA are represented by attorney Alan Gura, who successfully argued both the Heller and McDonald cases before the U.S....

VINALHAVEN, Maine — Like nearly all of the residents on this island in Penobscot Bay, Art Lindgren and his wife, Cheryl, celebrated the arrival of three giant wind turbines late last year. That was before they were turned on. “In the first 10 minutes, our jaws dropped to the ground,” Mr. Lindgren said. “Nobody in the area could believe it. They were so loud.” Lawsuits and complaints about turbine noise, vibrations and subsequent lost property value have cropped up in Illinois, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Massachusetts, among other states. In one case in DeKalb County, Ill., at least 38 families...

The wacky dishonest left wants you to believe that their crowd yesterday matched the Glenn Beck rally last month. Well, here’s an overhead shot from yesterday’s astroturfed One Nation rally posted at the left-wing Huffington PostAnd, here is a crowd shot from Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally in late August.So who are you going to believe? The leftist media or your lying eyes?

On Oct. 24, 1996, Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole got up at a campaign rally and promptly lost it: "I wonder sometimes what people are thinking about, or if people are thinking at all," he shouted. "Wake up, America!" Those words -- an unmistakable harbinger of the humiliation Dole would experience by losing to Bill Clinton in a landslide 12 days later -- seemed to echo painfully like Taylor Swift singing without the benefit of an auto-tune machine in the bewildering comments made over the last couple of days by President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. It's odd, to...

According to the preview offered by Vanity Fair: [Todd] Purdum spends a day inside the West Wing and talks to Obama’s top aides, who tell him about the challenges of playing the Beltway game, ugly as it has become, even as their boss insists they find a way to transcend it. “There’s a relentlessness to this that’s unlike anything else, especially when you come into office in a time of crisis,” says Obama senior adviser David Axelrod. “We did not exactly ease into the tub. The world is so much smaller, and events reverberate much more quickly, and one person...

... Maybe you fooled around with a guy 30 years ago and have spent the rest of your life as a celibate priest. Maybe you've been in a faithful same-sex marriage for 40 years. Maybe you've passed an HIV test. It doesn't matter. You can't give blood, because you're in the wrong "group." On the other hand, if you're in the right group—heterosexuals—you can give blood despite dangerous behavior. If you had sex with a prostitute, an IV drug user, and an HIV-positive opposite-sex partner 13 months ago, you're good to go. This kind of group-based screening is a long-standing...

June 09, 2010|By Dan Tracy, Orlando Sentinel Angry bicyclists are hoping to strike back and repeal a law taking effect in September that would force them to ride in bike lanes or hug the right side of the road. They've even enlisted the help of state Sen. Andy Gardiner, R-Orlando, himself an avid bicyclist and tri-athlete. "I'm one of them. … I'm open to just about anything," Gardiner said, including filing a bill next year. And the bikers might not stop with just the law. Another possibility they are considering is doing away with bike lanes altogether. That could result...

They gather on statehouse steps with signs and bullhorns, risking arrest. They attend workshops on civil disobedience and personal storytelling, and they hold sit-ins and walk out of class in protest. They're being warned that they could even lose their lives. Students fighting laws that target illegal immigrants are taking a page from the civil rights era, adopting tactics and gathering praise and momentum from the demonstrators who marched in the streets and sat at segregated lunch counters as they sought to turn the public tide against racial segregation. "Their struggle then is ours now," said Deivid Ribeiro, 21, an...

According to Gallup, "White single women, unmarried, widowed, divorced, and separated" voted "overwhelmingly" for Obama. On this Memorial Day, this crucial slice of Obama's base of support without whom he would have been elected owe this nation an apology. Blacks; Hispanics; and Moslems voted tribal politics. But this group was more than liberal, it included a large segment of conservatives and independents who had soured on Bush. Today with $13 trillion in debt- almost $12 trillion of it accumulated in the last six months alone, a burgeoning government; a foreign policy in tatters from Iran, to N. Korea to the...

PEORIA - Caterpillar Inc. and other large companies are being criticized by the Obama administration for reporting now that they will take millions of dollars in hits to their earnings because of one portion of the new health care legislation. Caterpillar and Deere were accused of being “premature and irresponsible” by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke for saying a change to Medicare Part D laws would hurt their earnings in the present quarter. Those companies are also being questioned about the amounts they are claiming — amounts that seem to get larger with every company that makes a report...

DNC to Republicans: 'Hands off our health care' Posted: March 26th, 2010 10:47 AM ET Democrats have finally passed the top issue on their legislative agenda - health care - but with Republicans already pushing for a repeal, it's time to sell it. The Democratic National Committee will run ads condemning ten Republicans who voted against the health care bill and touting the merits of twenty-five Democrats who supported it, the organization announced Friday The radio ad campaign, called "Hands off our Health Care" targets several Republicans who support the bill's repeal, including Louisiana Rep. Joseph Cao - the lone...

Leftists who decried the War on Terror now use the same terminology to describe center-Left members of their own party. On last night’s episode of MSNBC’s The Ed Show, Ed Schultz interviewed Katrina vanden Heuvel about President Obama’s “sellout” on the health care bill. Katrina complained Obama’s is “a White House which has emboldened the conservadems, people like Joe Lieberman” who “is now holding hostage” socialized medicine. She repeated the elocution moments later while appealing to “citizens who don’t want to be held hostage by the insurance companies.” Schultz thanked her for appearing, adding, “Always the truth coming from you...