Free Republic

Two days left on this weeks Outpost poll. This week's question: "What will Obama's public approval rating be on Labor Day, 2010?" Your options: Around 70% (all hail "The One"!) Around 60% (smooth sailin' for Dems in mid-terms) Around 50% (dicey mid-terms) Around 40% (ruh-roh!) Much less than 40% (Eject! Eject!) Click here to vote and comment

Dear Friend, It’s no small secret that for some time I’ve been giving serious consideration to running for Governor. This past weekend, after a great deal of thought and prayer, after talking things over with my family – with my wife, Natalie and our children Madison, Jeb, and Ross – and after seeking the advice of close friends, I‘ve made my decision. Today, I’m excited to tell you that I will seek the Republican nomination for Governor of the great state of South Carolina in 2010. We’ve put together a short video about why I’m running for Governor, and I...

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell offered words of inspiration with a twist of humor on Monday, earning waves of laughter and a standing ovation. Powell's talk at Memorial Auditorium drew alumni, students, faculty and staff, who filled every seat.... Powell said that during the recent presidential campaign he was impressed with then-candidate Obama's ability to bridge the gap between generations and to use modern communication to assemble hundreds of thousands of citizens. "I voted for Obama because he brought generational change into the political system and we needed that change," he said. Powell connected some of the leadership skills...

[video. You have to see the video to hear all her comments. She thinks Penn is an imbecile and a commie]Don’t invite Sean Penn and actress Maria Conchita Alonso to the same party. Especially if it’s the Community Party. The actress rolled her eyes and groaned when she was asked about her former co-star. Then she really unloaded. “It’s just that he has no clue at all what’s going on in Venezuela, praising Hugo Chavez who’s a dictator and a killer…” said Alonso, who was born in Cuba and raised in Venezuela. “I tried to put aside his being an...

ifty years ago, a young lawyer, Fidel Castro, promised to bring change to Cuba. His accomplishments are less than the problems he created. Cubans joke about the three successes of the Revolution: healthcare, education and sports, the three failures being breakfast, lunch and dinner. Ten presidents ago, the United States initiated a policy that was supposed to eliminate Fidel Castro. The embargo on travel and trade has not succeeded, but the effects of age and disease have caused Fidel to resign. Raul Castro is less rigid than Fidel, but not much has changed for the Cubans in Cuba. What has...

WASHINGTON -- President Obama's big-spending 2010 budget is filled with tax provisions that will stunt economic growth, job creation and new-business formation. It's bad enough that his soak-the-rich tax increases will have a negative impact on ordinary workers, but worst of all, he'll raise them when the U.S. economy will still be in a recession or in the difficult process of attempting to climb out of one. He intends to keep all of the Bush tax cuts except the two top tax rates, which he will let expire at the end of 2010, one year after the White House says...

Retired Bishop Thomas A. Tschoepe of Dallas, who died Jan. 24 at the age of 93. (CNS) There isnÂ’t much news out of Rome this week, because of the VaticanÂ’s annual Lenten retreat. But there is one item in todayÂ’s Vatican Information Service press release that caught my eye: A list of 19 bishops around the world who have died in recent weeks. WhatÂ’s interesting about the list is the average age of these bishops when they died. The average was a startling 86.3 years. Five of the bishops were in their nineties, with the oldest being Belgian Archbishop Jean...

Wednesday March 4, 2009 Abortion Worker Arrested, Jailed In Death Of Baby Born Alive During Botched Abortion MIAMI, March 3, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Unlicensed abortion worker Belkis Gonzalez was arrested today and jailed on two felony counts related to the death of a baby born alive during a botched abortion in Hialeah, Florida, in 2006. According to the arrest warrant obtained by Operation Rescue, Gonzalez was charged with the unlicensed practice of a health care profession resulting in serious bodily injury, a second degree felony, and with tampering with or fabricating physical evidence, a third degree felony. She faces...

What you’re now seeing is a profit and earnings ratios get to the point that buying stocks is a good thing if you have a long-term perspective on it,” he [Obama] said to reporters after meeting in the Oval Office with visiting British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Shouldn’t a President of the US know that “P/E Ratio” means “price-to-earnings ratio,” not “profit and earnings ratio?” There is a difference.

Using Engineering to Prove Evolution    March 3, 2009 — David Deamer smiling at a tide pool: is there an evolutionary connection?  The picture accompanies an article on Science Daily about Deamer’s latest thinking on the origin of life.  He’s going to share his ideas at a symposium in Oakland, California, organized by Eugenie Scott of the NCSE. According to Deamer, life began with complex systems of molecules that came together through the self-assembly of nonliving components.  A useful metaphor for understanding how this came about, he said, can be found in combinatorial chemistry, an approach in which thousands...

American Vision received a phone call from an NPR station yesterday (3.3.2009) asking me to appear on one of their shows to answer the charge by the Southern Poverty Law Center that our organization is a “hate group.” (For the record, I don’t do interviews with media outlets that are subsidized by tax dollars.) The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has listed American Vision as a “hate group” under the “other” category on their website because we are “anti-gay.’[1] I guess the majority of people in California who voted to outlaw homosexual marriage are also “haters.” Of course they are....

I just heard Michael Steele on the Laura Ingraham show today respond to the DL Hughley's comment on 'the Republican Convention looking like Nazi Germany' by saying that there were only 36 black people at the convention, thereby implying that Hughley's comment was accurate and right on. Then Steele went on to dismiss the comment and say that he didn't want to concern himself with the past and that he wanted to move forward. Mr. Steele, there are certain comments that invoke the past that nobody should ever dismiss. Allowing any idiot to compare what you are paid to represent...

Four of Google Inc.'s top executives each received 2008 bonuses of more than $1.2 million for helping the Internet search leader eke out modest earnings growth during a recession that battered much of corporate America. The Mountain View-based company's market value plunged by about $120 billion, or 56 percent last year, reflecting concerns that the weakening economy will eviscerate the online advertising market that generates virtually all of Google's revenue. Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt gave investors little hope Tuesday. Speaking at a technology conference, Schmidt described the conditions in the economy as "dire" and predicted things were unlikely to...

What we need is a new drought vocabulary in California. It seems that every type of shortage of water in California is called a drought. And logically speaking, if everything is called a drought, nothing is. Typically, we associate the word drought with a water shortage condition of natural origin. But not every "drought" is a drought. Some water shortages we call drought are thought mostly to be natural, some climatological, some judicial, some demographic, and some regulatory. But they all end up being called drought. When in doubt, call everything a drought seems to be the rule. So a...

Jerusalem, Israel, Mar 4, 2009 / 06:24 am (CNA).- In preparation for Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Israel, the country’s Catholic schools are preparing 500 hours of classes to explain the Pope, the history of the Catholic Church and the Vatican to their students.Father Ibrahim Faltas, a parish priest in Jerusalem who is an assistant in the Catholic school system, told Italian bishops’ news agency SIR that the lessons are aimed at Catholic school students, many of whom are Muslim.There are 44 Catholic schools attended by 24,000 students in Israel, where the Melkite Greek Catholic Church constitutes the largest...

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration kicked off a new program Wednesday that's designed to help up to 9 million borrowers stay in their homes through refinanced mortgages or loans that are modified to lower monthly payments. The Treasury Department released detailed guidelines designed to let the lending industry know how to enroll borrowers in the program announced last month. "It is imperative that we continue to move with speed to help make housing more affordable and help arrest the damaging spiral in our housing markets," Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said in a statement. The administration, launching what it calls the...

Top Democrats believe they have struck political gold by depicting Rush Limbaugh as the new face of the Republican Party, a full-scale effort first hatched by some of the most familiar names in politics and now being guided in part from inside the White House. The strategy took shape after Democratic strategists Stanley Greenberg and James Carville included Limbaugh’s name in an October poll and learned their longtime tormentor was deeply unpopular with many Americans, especially younger voters. Then the conservative talk-radio host emerged as an unapologetic critic of Barack Obama shortly before his inauguration, when even many Republicans were...

So goeth the myth of Washington, D.C. having the best and the brightest. The current Democrat intelligentsia is picking a fight they can't win, and many of us will just sit back and watch them crash and burn. Top Democrats believe they have struck political gold by depicting Rush Limbaugh as the new face of the Republican Party, a full-scale effort first hatched by some of the most familiar names in politics and now being guided in part from inside the White House. Soon it clicked: Democrats realized they could roll out a new GOP bogeyman for the post-Bush era...

An abortion clinic owner is accused of delivering a live baby during a botched procedure and then throwing the infant away. The teenage mother, Sycloria Williams, has filed a lawsuit alleging that Gonzalez knocked the infant off the chair where she had given birth, and then scooped the baby, placenta and afterbirth into a red plastic biohazard bag, and threw it out.

...While Obama seems like a nice young man, kind of like a young Sidney Poitier, is handsome and polite, seems well educated and articulate, and even brought Republicans candy and flowers, Limbaugh was not fooled for a minute. If Obama succeeds, who knows what kind of man America's daughters will bring home to dinner next? Since Obama is trying to seduce Americans by giving them hope, Limbaugh knows that we Republicans must have our own message of optimism and hope. So here are some of the things that we are hoping for: ( ... ) We hope Obama fails to...