Free Republic

snip Unfortunately, this has not been the case. Over the past decade, racial groups have become more polarized, not less. A simple example will suffice. A personal friend, a white man who teaches at an inner-city school in Los Angeles County with an almost entirely Hispanic population, polled his students shortly before the 2008 election regarding their parents' presidential preferences. Every hand in the classroom went up for Obama. After class, my friend approached one of the students. "Why are your parents voting for Obama?” he asked a 10-year-old Hispanic girl. She answered him in four words: "Because he's not...

South Bend, IN (LifeNews.com) -- Now that the University of Notre Dame has chosen to honor pro-abortion President Barack Obama, the fallout appears likely to begin. One key Catholic writer says Notre Dame will become the symbol of pro-life Catholic dissent following the Obama scandal.Notre Dame was deluged with opposition as soon as the announcement reached the public that it would not only invite Obama to give its commencement speech but bestow upon him an honorary degree.Its president, Father John Jenkins, as Deal Hudson notes in a new editorial, "defended the choice with arguments that should make a freshman...

Barack Obama's offer of a hand of friendship to Iran after 30 years of hostility may have met with a sceptical public response from Tehran. But now a rapprochement of sorts may be under way amid evidence thatthe US president's can-do electioneering tactics have struck a chord with his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Obama's signature campaign slogan, Yes We Can, has been replicated by the Iranian president in a promotional video issued for Iran's presidential poll on 12 June, when Ahmadinejad is seeking re-election. The video features a cover picture of Ahmadinejad wearing his trademark white jacket and pointing to...

Obama’s choice for Treasury secretary disclosed publicly Tuesday that he failed to pay tens of thousands of dollars in federal taxes from 2001 to 2004. Senate Democrats tried to brush aside the last-minute complication as a minor bump on an otherwise smooth path to confirmation for Timothy Geithner, who has been president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. After the underpayments were detected, Geithner paid back taxes and interest totaling $43,200.

In my exclusive interview with Barack Obama airing tomorrow on This Week, the president-elect told me that fixing our economy over the long term will require sacrifice from every American and scaling back some of his campaign promises. "Our challenge is going to be identifying what works and putting more money into that, eliminating things that don’t work, and making things that we have more efficient. But I’m not suggesting, George, I want to be realistic here, not everything that we talked about during the campaign are we going to be able to do on the pace we had hoped,"...

Politically active Barack Obama supporters in Michigan have tried to silence criticism of the president-elect on a talk program at a community radio station by cutting its air time, the program host says. Officials with radio station WRHC told WND the dispute involved talk show host Martin Dzuris' coverage of local issues as well as national issues. But Dzuris explained in a lengthy interview with WND he attended at least one meeting where radio station officials discussed specifically how to reduce Dzuris' criticism of Obama, which has linked Obama's statements taken directly from his speeches to Marxism. Dzuris said one...

Obama's Plan to Rejoin the World Communityby Phyllis Schlafly (more by this author) Posted 12/23/2008 ETUpdated 12/23/2008 ET When Candidate Barack Obama declared himself a "citizen of the world" before thousands of cheering German socialists and later pledged to "rejoin the World Community," those weren't just his usual platitudes about "change." Those words sounded the trumpet for his specific and far-reaching globalist agenda. Obama plans to use his presidential power to get the Democratic-majority Senate to ratify a series of treaties that would take us a long way toward global rule over our money, our laws, our military, our...

Having been inspired by reading the President-Elect's biography to her daughter, Letrice Titus personally contacted Obama's publishers for copies of the book for Syracuse students. Some Syracuse students have something new to read in the upcoming school year. "This is really an inspiring story about a mother who [has] read about Obama to her daughter, and then trying to take that experience through the Syracuse City School District," says former City Councilman Mike Atkins. Atkins joined Letrice Titus and Onondaga County Executive Joanie Mahoney at Bellvue and Lincoln middle schools Monday morning. "It's relevant to their lives...it's not often that...

There's nothing like a little Guilt-by-Association Red Meat to bring the anti-Obama crowd back to the comment boards. Hundreds of posts have found their way to various articles on washingtonpost.com and elsewhere about the dramatic arrest yesterday of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich for, among other things, allegedly trying to sell the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Obama. Federal prosecutors said without equivocation that there is no evidence of Obama's involvement in the matter, but the noisy anti-Obama comment crowd stirred from its post-election silence to fire away. Because, as Michael D. Shear and Chris Cillizza wrote, "the conspiracy allegedly dreamed...

A record one in 10 American homeowners with a mortgage were either at least a month behind on their payments or in foreclosure at the end of September as the source of housing market pressure shifted to the crumbling U.S. economy. The Mortgage Bankers Association said Friday the percentage of loans at least a month overdue or in foreclosure was up from 9.2 percent in the April-June quarter, and up from 7.3 percent a year earlier. Distress in the home loan market started about two years ago as increasing numbers of adjustable-rate loans reset to higher interest rates. But the...

Enough with the Lincoln analogies; Reagan is the president that Barack Obama is most closely modeling himself after. Ronald Reagan inherited stagflation, a defeat abroad and a nation at its nadir in morale. Through the sheer force of his personality as much as his policies, four years later, it was "Morning in America," the theme of his 1984 re-election campaign when he won 49 states. Obama isn't president yet, but his determined calm and orderly transition pace appear to be soothing the financial markets, producing the first sustained gain in stocks since the mid-September meltdown. On Jan. 20, Obama will...

x-Fed Chief to Lead New Economic Panel of Outside Experts Who Will Brief Obama President-elect Barack Obama appointed former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker on Wednesday to be the chairman of a new White House advisory board tasked with helping to lift the nation from recession and stabilize financial markets. University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee, one of Mr. Obama's longest-serving policy advisers, will serve as the board's staff director, along with his duties as a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Members of the panel will be drawn from a cross-section of citizens outside the government,...

A former New York college instructor may proceed with a claim that he was denied tenure because school administrators disapproved of his conservative politics and support for President George W. Bush, not for deficiencies as an educator, a federal judge has ruled. Michael Filozof has presented sufficient evidence of a possible First Amendment violation ... on his free speech claim, Western District Court Judge David G. Larimer has determined. Filozof contends the tenure track he was on as a political science instructor at the Rochester, N.Y., community college was suddenly derailed in 2003, during a period of hot debate among...

In Sarcelles, a northern suburb, I walked through a crowd of black children yesterday who were arguing about which of them was "le plus Obama" -- the most like Obama. As it has done all over Europe, the election of a US president called Barack Hussein has given a lift to minorities who feel marooned outside the mainstream. This weekend, the imminent arrival in the White House of someone with an African Muslim name has prompted a new campaign for racial integration, supported by Carla Bruni, President Sarkozy's wife. Yazid Zabeg, an Algerian-born millionaire and the JDD Sunday newspaper have...

Clinton faced the same dilemma in November of 1992. So he called a summit that confused everything During CNN’s broadcast of Barack Obama’s first press conference on Friday, a corner of the screen flickered with a live feed of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. As Obama spoke, the Dow average lost more than 100 points. In his brief statement and question session, the president elect of the United States said next to nothing about anything. There were no signs of the Yes We Can positivism of the campaign in his low-key, even halting manner. What little he did say may...

Inspired by Barack Obama, the French first lady and other leading figures say it's high time for France to stamp out racism and shake up a white political and social elite that smacks of colonial times. A manifesto published Sunday urges affirmative action-like policies and other steps to turn French ideals of equality into reality for millions of blacks, Arabs and other alienated minorities. "Our prejudices are insidious," Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, a singer and wife of President Nicolas Sarkozy, said in an interview with the Journal du Dimanche newspaper, which published the manifesto. She said she hoped the "Obama effect" would...

-snip- I was in Washington DC the night of the election. America’s beautiful capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially divided city in the world, with 15th Street – which runs due north from the White House – the unofficial frontier between black and white. But, like so much of America, it also now has a new division, and one which is in many ways much more important. I had attended an election-night party in a smart and liberal white area, but was staying the night less than a mile away on the edge of a...

Plans are being made to promote a national holiday for Barack Obama, who will become the nation's 44th president when he takes the oath of office Jan. 20. "Yes We Can" planning rallies will be at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. every Tuesday at the downtown McDonald's restaurant, 1100 Kansas Ave., until Jan. 13. The goals are to secure a national holiday in Obama's honor, to organize celebrations around his inauguration and to celebrate the 200th birthday of President Abraham Lincoln, who was born on Feb. 12 1809. At 7:30 a.m. on Inauguration Day, Obama Cake will be served at...

Obama's defeat of the heir apparent in his own party and his victory over the much-vaunted Republican machine is a remarkable achievement that owes a lot to his instinct for marketing When the book is written on this election, it should not be titled "The Making of a President," but "The Marketing of a President." Barack Obama's campaign is a case study in marketing excellence. True, it was always going to be a Democratic year. An unpopular war, an incumbent Republican president with rock bottom approval ratings, and many Republican incumbents retiring from Congress as a result all meant that...

Posted 5 :56 PM ST. LOUIS -- For many people outside of the political world Rahm Emanuel is not a household name, but that is about to change as President-elect Barack Obama has tapped him to be his White House chief of staff. “Rahm is exactly the right person at the right time for that job” said John Lapp who served as executive director under Emanuel in his role as chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, (DCCC). “What people don’t understand about him is, yes he is a great political strategist and statistician, but he is also a thoughtful...