Free Republic

Clearly immigration was why we lost in 2012. It had nothing to do with a milquetoast Republican candidate who had been on both sides of so many issues that a good portion of Republican voters just stayed home. No, forget the moderate candidate. It was the Hispanic vote that killed us! Also, I’ve got some unicorns in my back yard I’ll be glad to sell you on the cheap.

ReasonTV’s Remy new music video details his switch to a part-time “1-to-5″ work schedule because of Obamacare.

Forget about the 1 percent versus the 99 percent. It’s really more like the 0.000001 percent versus everybody else. A tiny group — mostly comprising the Obama White House, a bunch of Washington Democrats, progressive economists, and the media elite — continues to fixate on income inequality as America’s greatest challenge. Most everybody else, the 99.999999 percent, sees things differently. Surveys continue to show Americans most worried about jobs and economic growth, not the income gap between the top and bottom. It’s a rational view given new employment data from the government. The January jobs report showed only 113,000 net...

A group of US scientists have created the world’s smallest human liver which can survive for forty days and works like the real thing – using a 3D printer. The mini-livers, made by California-based medical research company Organvo, are just half a millimetre deep and four millimetres wide but can perform most of the functions that a real liver can. The printer builds up 20 layers of hepatocytes cells, which carry out liver functions, along with two major types of liver cell. It also adds cells from the lining of a blood vessel. This allows the liver cells to receive...

Tumultuous economy? What tumultuous economy? If you’re in one of America’s wealth creation epicenters – Seattle, Boston, Dallas or D.C. as examples – you might not be feeling the brunt of a brutal labor market. But most of us are keenly aware of the lack of job creation. There seems to be no end to Americans’ acceptance of destructive, job-killing government policies these days, so hoping for a quick course-correction in Washington is probably not realistic. But here are a couple of things we can all start doing – now – to help ensure a brighter future for ourselves and...

One of the funny things about electoral politics is that you can’t always have the coalition you want, or even the coalition you think you’ll get. When the Democratic Leadership Council was thinking about how to rebrand the party in the late '80s, most figured they’d win back white southerners, like Jimmy Carter and every prior successful Democrat. But the new Democratic coalition was built on disaffection with conservatives, which was most pronounced along the coasts. So while the Republicans can dream of whatever coalition they want, the next successful Republican coalition will be built by capitalizing on disaffection with...

ROME, April 30 (UPI) -- Israeli President Shimon Peres met with Pope Francis in the Vatican Tuesday, inviting him to Israel and seeking help restarting the Palestinian peace process. Peres told Francis he has a unique and potentially very helpful role in restarting the dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians, Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported. "The citizens of Israel see in you a leader of peace and good will," Peres said. "The sooner you visit the better, as in these days a new opportunity is being created for peace and your arrival could contribute significantly to increasing the trust and belief...

Hall of Fame basketball player Earvin “Magic” Johnson spoke out on behalf of President Obama’s healthcare law on Monday. “ObamaCare is working. I talk to a lot of CEOs of hospitals. It is working,” he said on MSNBC. Johnson was speaking on "NOW with Alex Wagner" about the NCAA basketball tournament, but he veered into politics at the end of the segment, lauding conservative Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) decision to accept the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. II’m glad that Gov. Scott down in Florida accepted ObamaCare because it will work,” he said.

It turns out we seriously underestimated the central nervous system. It's hard to say what's crazier: the fact that Tufts University researchers spent a year cutting out the tiny eyeballs of tadpole embryos and sticking them back on to the tadpoles' tails, or: the fact that, when they hatched, a few of the tadpoles COULD ACTUALLY SEE OUT OF THE EYES ON THEIR TAILS. As you know, this is not the way vision is supposed to work--your eyeballs are supposed to be connected to a big fat nerve that carries incoming signals back to your brain, which combines the information...

Obama: 'Looks Like I'm Going to Be Spending New Year's Here in D.C.' Daniel Halper December 31, 2012 2:12 PM President Barack Obama tipped his hand today during a speech at the White House ... about how he plans to spend this New Year's Eve. "Democrats and Republicans in Congress have to get this done," Obama said, according to a rush transcript, referencing the ongoing "fiscal cliff" talks. "But they're not there yet. They are close, but they're not there yet. And one thing we can count on with respect to this Congress is that if there is even one...

HOUSTON -- Vice President Joe Biden rallied support for President Barack Obama before the nation's largest civil rights organization on Thursday, telling the NAACP that Obama has the "character of his convictions." Biden drew cheers as he credited Obama for championing a landmark health care law, launching the mission that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and stepping in to rescue the financial system and U.S. automakers General Motors and Chrysler. "He has put country first," Biden said. ... The vice president countered that Romney's policies would hurt black working families, and he outlined detailed differences between Obama and Romney...

Obama tailors election-year message to working womenBy Laura MacInnis Fri Apr 6, 2012 2:56pm EDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama, leading in the polls among women voters, said on Friday he wants to help working women fight discrimination and juggle the demands of motherhood but stopped short of making promises on gender equality if he wins re-election. At a White House event on women and the economy, Obama noted "there has been a lot of talk about women and women's issues lately," a nod to the emergence of contraceptive rights, working women and all-male establishments as heated issues in...

VINEYARD HAVEN, Massachusetts (Reuters) - President Barack Obama has taken heat for taking a vacation when the U.S. economy is struggling, but aides are striving to make clear he is not neglecting the country's finances during his break. On Monday, Obama met with a top economic adviser and spoke to investor Warren Buffett and Ford Motor Co. chief executive Alan Mulally about the economy, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. Earnest also announced that Obama will travel to Detroit in two weeks to discuss the economy on the U.S. Labor Day holiday on September 5, setting up a major address...

Maybe we can call this Generation U — for unemployed. Three decades ago, the US experienced a dramatic shift in culture and economics as women entered the workforce in record numbers, and our economy expanded to meet the labor supply. As USA Today reports, we have now returned to the same working percentage of the population as we had at the beginning of the expansion, an astonishing decline that doesn’t appear to be slowing much: The share of the population that is working fell to its lowest level last year since women started entering the workforce in large numbers three...

IS the gym passé? For all their ads promising to stir motivation, gyms have failed to do so. “Up until the last six years, it’s been relatively easy to sell memberships, and to replace people going out the back door with people coming through the front door,” said Michael Scott Scudder, a consultant who advises health clubs and conducts up to 15 industry surveys annually. “Not so anymore. We’ve come to a point that we can’t sell enough membership in the industry to cover the attrition rate.” Blame the gym’s now-ubiquitous flat-screen TVs and the fact that iPods are de...

Foreclosures, plant closings, offshored jobs, underwater mortgages, miserable rates of unemployment, stagnating incomes: Is there any end to the woes of the struggling American middle? Apparently not, because now comes news of a trend guaranteeing trouble ahead for the more than half of the nation that make up the moderately educated and moderately earning middle — even if the economy improves. That seismic shift, outlined in a new report from the National Marriage Project and the Institute for American Values, is towards more divorce, more out of wedlock births and, ipso facto, fewer kids with a hopeful future. Family breakdown,...

Celebrating LGBT pride month at the White House this evening, President Obama declared that the nation has never been closer to ending the “discriminatory policy” of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and promised to keep working until the bill is signed into law. “We have never been closer to ending this discriminatory policy. And I’m going to keep on fighting until that bill is on my desk and I can sign it,” Obama said in the East Room this evening. “That is a promise I made as a candidate. It is a promise that I reiterated as president. It’s one that...

BALTIMORE (AP) -- Disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff has landed a job at a kosher pizzeria in Baltimore soon after his release from prison. The owner of Tov Pizza, Ron Rosenbluth, said Abramoff began working there Monday. He is learning about the business and will eventually help with marketing. Abramoff is an orthodox Jew. He was released this month from a minimum-security prison camp in western Maryland after serving about 3 1/2 years for fraud, corruption and conspiracy. The former Washington power broker's activities led to the conviction of a congressman.