Free Republic

Making Egyptian Aid Conditional   By Daniel MandelJewishPolicyCenter.org | Wednesday, September 24, 2008 Dear Mr. President,The United States has an important relationship with a foreign country that permits its territory to be used for the purpose of smuggling lethal and increasingly sophisticated weaponry to groups designated as terrorists by our State Department.This same country has repeatedly promised your predecessors that it will introduce multi-party democracy, but instead has cracked down on democrats and reformers. Meanwhile, it grants free rein to Islamist groups in tightly controlled and manipulated elections.This same country has played a leading role in blocking American efforts...

You don't have to listen long to politicians in Washington, D.C., to hear the rhetoric of class war. Both major party presidential candidates have used it at times with strategic purpose -- that is, when it advanced their ambitions. The expanding government bailout of institutions and individuals caught up in the national financial fiasco, however, points to a real class conflict in this country. It is not a conflict that divides Americans by wealth. It is a conflict that divides Americans by character. First, consider the phony class war -- the one both John McCain and Barack Obama have tried...

The Plight of Christians in Iraq   By Jamie GlazovFrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, September 24, 2008 Frontpage Interview’s guest today is William J. Murray, the chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition in Washington, DC. During the early 1980's, he served as director of Freedom's Friends, an organization which reached out to the victims of communism worldwide. In the 1990's, he founded the first commercial Bible publishing company in the Soviet Union. For many years his organizations operated evangelistic tours to the Soviet Union for Christians. From his office in Washington, D.C., Mr. Murray continues to work for the rights of Christians...

Economic crisis, low media focus blamed for scant storm relief gifts WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Destruction from the hurricanes and tropical storms that have devastated U.S. communities and Caribbean nations in the past few months has exceeded the damage Hurricane Katrina inflicted on New Orleans in 2005, but donations for relief efforts this time are drastically less. "I believe a combination of the recent economic crisis and the media attention, or lack there of, have presented challenges to us," said Patricia Hvidston, senior director of development for Catholic Charities USA. "We have gotten donations, and we're grateful to everyone who has...

What happened? What are we going to do? Both candidates want tax cuts and yet increased spending in some other areas of government. All this with an included 700 BILLION+ bail out. I know it’s the old “politician trying to win votes” concept but lets be realistic. Cutting taxes and increased spending all on top of a huge messy bail out does not make much sense to me. Ok…I am not an economics major but I do know how to run a house. Let us pretend this was my household budget. It would not make sense to me to find...

Joe Biden has blasted Palin on the Bridge to Nowhere. But what he fails to mention is that he actually voted to let Alaska have it. We'll explain that ahead. "Keeping Them Honest" tonight, we examine Joe Biden's record on earmarks and some bridges of his own. Biden has some other bridges of his own that he has to account for, however. Special investigations unit correspondent Drew Griffin is also Keeping Them Honest. GRIFFIN: But hold on, Senator Biden. Keeping him honest, we decided to check on 116 reasons in Delaware that one Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska may not...

The Open Carry Walk in support of OFCC member Ed Farbrother was a huge success! Over seventy people, ranging in age from 2-1/2 to 70 years old and from as far away as Cincinnati, showed up on a beautiful Saturday afternoon to support Farbrother and protest his poor treatment at the hands of the Northwood police department. After meeting up at Central Park, the group went for a walk around the block to the front of the police station and posed for pictures in front of a sign reading "Freedom is Not Free", highly appropriate for the situation at hand....

HOW did America wind up in its worst financial crisis in decades? Sen. Barack Obama explained it this way last week: "When sub-prime-mortgage lending took a reckless and unsustainable turn, a patchwork of regulators systematically and deliberately eliminated the regulations protecting the American people." That's exactly backward. Mortgage lending took that "reckless and unsustainable turn" because of regulation - regulation driven by liberals and progressives, not free-market "deregulators." Pushed hard by politicians and community activists, the regulators systematically and deliberately altered financially sound lending practices. The mortgage market was humming along just fine when, in the late 1980s, progressives decided...

Report from Gman: We have been busy around here my year to date is now 671. The Border Patrol are responding quick to my calls and apprehending approximately 80% of the groups that are trying to get through. The hard work is paying off and it feels good. If you could just see what I have been able to see it would send chills down your spine. These groups sneaking into our country in the middle of the night; they know it is illegal, you can tell by the way they move through the trails all crouched down and sneaky....

On Fox News this am, author and media critic Bernie Goldberg declared -- as have I for months -- that the media elite, who have NO understanding of the REAL America out there in "flyover country" have predicted that if Obama loses, the ONLY reason will be racism by whites. Inexperience, character, political philosophy, etc. have NOTHING to do with this election: If Obama loses, it will be because white America is STILL RACIST. He went on to say, as some of us have been saying, that if the black community feels that they have been ROBBED of the first...

This Washington Post-ABC News poll was conducted by telephone September 19-22, 2008, among a random national sample of 1,082 adults, 916 registered voters and 780 likely voters. The survey includes additional interviews with randomly selected African Americans, for a total of 163 black respondents. The added interviews (commonly referred to as an "oversample") were completed to ensure there were enough African American respondents for separate analysis; the group was not over-represented in the reported results from the full sample. The results from the full survey have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points. Error margins...

KALAMAZOO, Mich. (AP) _ A judge has decided the best punishment for a man found guilty of stealing should be to take his son's words to heart — and wear them on his sleeve.

John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn't return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero people would logically imagine to be a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence...

CONGRESS and the Bush administration must address the underlying issue in the financial crisis - foreclosures. The only real solution is to restructure mortgages based on what the homeowners can afford. This solution can be achieved on scale with little or no taxpayer money. This unprecedented bailout of the predators is beyond comprehension. Wall Street and its advocates say the crisis is so complicated that no one could have predicted it. Yet now the administration is so sure of the solution that the American taxpayer must sign a blank check for $700 billion to purchase these "toxic" mortgages and bail...

Martin Peretz, the editor-in-chief of The New Republic, didn't make many friends with the hard core left which nowadays makes up a large part of Democrat activists with his latest article: "Red Dusk: The Rosenberg bombshell." It is about how many in the American left, despite the evidence that Julius and Ethel Rosenburg were indeed Soviet spies, still can't accept their guilt just as they can't accept the culpability of communists and communism in general (emphasis mine): In America and in other Western societies, however, there still remain coteries of intellectuals and other high-minded people who have trouble absorbing the...

Father to the Fatherless Today's Scripture “Father to the fatherless, defender of widows—this is God, whose dwelling is holy” (Psalm 68:5). Today's Word from Joel and Victoria So many people today carry hurt and insecurity because they didn’t have a relationship with their earthly father the way God intended. But no matter how you were raised or where you are in life today, you do have a wonderful Father, and you were born with a purpose and a destiny. God promises to meet all your needs, and He is the Father to the fatherless and defender of widows! Every...

This Washington Post-ABC News poll was conducted by telephone September 19-22, 2008, among a random national sample of 1,082 adults, 916 registered voters and 780 likely voters. The survey includes additional interviews with randomly selected African Americans, for a total of 163 black respondents. The added interviews (commonly referred to as an "oversample") were completed to ensure there were enough African American respondents for separate analysis; the group was not over-represented in the reported results from the full sample. The results from the full survey have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points. Error margins...

WASHINGTON (CNN) – Call it the overlooked election. An intense battle is going on right now for control of Congress, but it's overshadowed in the media by a historic race for the White House. So which party has the upper hand in the fight for Capitol Hill? The answer, according to a new national poll, appears to be the Democrats. In a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Tuesday, 56 percent of those questioned are backing the Democratic candidate for Congress, while 42 percent support the Republicans. That's a change from immediately after the GOP convention, when the Democrats had only...

A Santa Fe elementary school student has been suspended for the rest of the week after bringing a toy gun to school. Sheriff’s deputies say the fourth grader’s mother purchased the plastic BB gun for her son because he wants to be a cop when he grows up. But she says that she had no idea her son put the gun in his backpack and took it to school. Administrators at Agua Fria Elementary say even if it’s not a real gun, the policy for bringing it to school is very clear. “What we made clear to the student that...

The blame game has begun. To liberals, the financial meltdown results from recklessness by Wall Street’s “big banking boys” who, as socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) explains, were “empowered by the extreme economic views of [former] Senator Phil Gramm, President George Bush, Sen. John McCain,” and their ilk. Beginning in the 1990s, this narrative goes, free market, Republican extremists told government regulators to take a hike so the barons of high finance could indulge in an economic free-for-all, thus producing our current travails. Numbered among these extremists, it seems, is retired liberal Rep. Jim Leach (R., Iowa), who coauthored...