Free Republic

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama's Treasury secretary is defending proposed tax increases on the wealthy, saying they are necessary to limit future budget deficits. Timothy Geithner responded on Wednesday to Republican criticism that the administration wants to increase taxes during a recession. Geithner noted that tax increases on couples making more than $250,000 per year would not take effect until 2011.

Atlas is done with merely shrugging. Atlas is raging. The Ayn Rand novel, "Atlas Shrugged" is much in the news this week because of the absolutely fantastic rant on CNBC the other morning by on-air editor Rick Santelli. I happened to be watching CNBC when this all took place, although I suspect this may become one of those thinks like Woodstock which, over the years, seven million baby boomers have proclaimed they were in attendance. This was the morning after President Obama had announced his plan to save the housing industry by helping bail out people who weren't making their...

Feb. 27, 2009 -- When NASA began thinking about missions to look for life beyond Earth, it realized it had a problem: how to recognize life if it were found. Scientists came up with a definition for life -- a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution -- but remained understandably fuzzy on the details. It is still not known how life on Earth took hold, what happened to a bunch of chemicals that made them capable of supporting a metabolism, replicating and evolution. But a new field of science, called synthetic biology, is aiming to find out. One of...

HARRISBURG -- Efforts to legalize thousands of video poker machines to generate tuition relief funds for certain college students are on the fast track. Rep. Katie True, R-Lancaster, said today she's been getting a lot of calls from students and parents inquiring when the tuition relief funds would be available. "Many students expect tuition relief for this fall," she told state Education Secretary Gerald Zahorchak at a budget hearing. Gov. Ed Rendell, who came up with the idea, has talked about having some tuition relief money available by fall. To have money available that soon, she said, "We would have...

Lawyers dispute it can't be undoneHILLSBOROUGH -- More than 200 taxpayers packed the Central Orange Senior Center, and sheriff's deputies turned away dozens more who came to protest the recent countywide revaluation. Hillsborough lawyer Cynthia Shriner countered County Attorney Geoff Gledhill's claim that the county can't rescind the revaluation because Jan. 1 has come and gone. She said all the commissioners have to do is overturn a decades-old decision to revalue Orange County's properties every four years and take advantage of the state law that requires it only every eight years. At least three other counties scheduled to implement revaluations...

The European divisions of General Motors (GM) could collapse within weeks without European governments' help, GM's top executive has warned. Chief operating officer Fritz Henderson said governments should step in immediately to ensure GM Europe does not run out of money by April or May. It could help prevent some 300,000 jobs from being lost, Mr Henderson said. He wants governments to put up 3.3bn euros ($4.2bn, £2.9bn) to finance the separation of Opel and Vauxhall. Mr Henderson said during the Geneva motor show that Opel and Vauxhall should become a separate division that can then be opened up for...

Want a baby with blonde hair and green eyes? Get your wallet out. A Los Angeles fertility clinic is offering a new service that would allow couples to choose their baby's physical traits, including eye and hair color. The LA Fertility Institutes said it has already received half a dozen requests for the service and expects the first designer baby to be born next year. "I would not say this is a dangerous road," Dr. Jeff Steinberg, the director of the clinic said. "It's an uncharted road." [Snip] In a recent U.S. survey of 999 people who sought genetic counseling,...

CANTON, Miss. (AP) -- Nissan will invest $118 million to retool its Mississippi auto plant to produce its first commercial vehicle made in the United States. Dan Bednarzyk, vice president of manufacturing at Nissan in Canton, said Wednesday that modifications at the plant have begun and production will start in 2010. Bednarzyk said Japan's third-largest automaker, which last month announced 20,000 job cuts globally amid an industrywide downturn, reached the decision after seeing commercial vehicle sales grow by 8 percent in overseas markets. Nissan's concept commercial vehicle was unveiled Wednesday at a national truck show in Chicago. The Nissan NV2500...

Now that the DOW seems to have recovered today I thought we could have some fun, my only question is, what do dogs dream about, here is proof that dogs dream, and even run into walls while dreaming, hmmm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2BgjH_CtIA&NR=1

Limbaugh, Cramer, Santelli. Has any president since Nixon created an Enemies List and then gone on to try and destroy any reporter that disagrees with the White House? Has any other president -- ever -- been as petty, vindictive, and vicious as Obama, and so soon?

[I know that most of you have heard this story, but this article has three videos all lined up to tell the story. Cramer's original story, Gibb's response, and Cramer on NBC discussing it. It's a great trio of videos you can send to someone to tell the tale.] Criticize the president, his programs, or even the pattern on the White House china and suffer the wrath of thin-skinned Obama Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. CNBC host Jim Cramer has now joined Rush Limbaugh and reporter Rick Santelli in the esteemed ranks of those personally criticized by Gibbs. On his own...

A House panel is expected to approve today sweeping tobacco regulation that would put the bill on pace for House passage far earlier in the congressional session than in the last Congress. The House Energy and Commerce Committee vote, expected this afternoon or evening, would give the Food and Drug Administration the power to police the tobacco industry. The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (H.R. 1256) is nearly identical to a bill the House passed by a wide margin last summer. The Senate did not take action last year. Health advocates -- comfortable their bill will pass the...

Any of this sound familiar? This is the exact same thing Our Dear Leader wants to do! Totalitarianism is a concept used to describe political systems whereby a state regulates nearly every aspect of public and private life. Totalitarian regimes or movements maintain themselves in political power by means of an official all-embracing ideology and propaganda disseminated through the state-controlled mass media, a single party that controls the state, personality cults, control over the economy, regulation and restriction of free discussion and criticism, the use of mass surveillance, and widespread use of terror tactics. You mess with the bull, you...

For the first five weeks of Barack Obama’s presidency, congressional Republicans sought to avoid direct confrontation with the popular president. (See here.) No longer. At a meeting of the Republican conference this morning, House Minority Leader John Boehner said that his party has an obligation to challenge Obama in a clear, unambiguous manner. “There's no point in ‘triangulation’ when it comes to this budget. It's the President's budget. His name is on it. It's a bad budget, and we have a responsibility to tell the country that. We can do it respectfully - but we can do it, and we...

Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 7:18 pm The Budget and Charitable DonationsPeter Orszag, DirectorIs our budget proposal uncharitable?Over the past 24 hours since we debuted the President’s FY 2010 Budget, some non-profits have argued that the Administration’s plan to limit the amount that high-income families (those with income of more than a quarter million dollars a year) can deduct from their taxes for charitable contributions will hurt these organizations – and do so at a time when these organizations’ resources are stretched because of the recession we inherited.First, the proposed tax change would not be imposed during a recession (see my previous post on...

Grab the Listen Live or turn on your radios! She's on the Roe Conn Show

Boehner: White House trying to distract with Limbaugh By Molly K. Hooper Posted: 03/04/09 02:14 PM [ET] White House efforts to highlight Rush Limbaugh as the face of the Republican Party are an attempt to divert attention from the administration’s massive budget proposal, GOP House leaders said Wednesday. They said Americans are more concerned about the economy and President Obama’s budget than Limbaugh, under White House fire for saying he hoped Obama would fail because of his policies. “This is nothing more than a distraction created by the administration to take people’s attention away from the fact that they’re going...

Praising someone for being “politically incorrect” has, alas, become a tiresome cliché. That’s a shame, because we need eloquent critics of that pernicious worldview now more than ever. Yet we toss the phrase “politically incorrect” around as easily as a Nerf ball, and thereby render it about as effective. So when I call Jamie Glazov’s new book United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror “politically incorrect,” please refrain from hitting your mental snooze button. Besides the usual celebrity suspects — Susan Sontag, Che Guevara, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Mary McCarthy, Oliver Stone — Jamie Glazov sets his...

The parents of Harlem have been given the wonderful benefit of school choice-and they're taking full advantage of the ability to select the best educations for their children. Long trapped in dead-zone local schools,Harlem's mothers and fathers are figuring out that they now have a remarkable range of options.That's because charter schools have blossomed in the community,making the neighborhood a national epicenter for reform. The demand for better was on full display over the weekend, when 5,000 people turned out for the first Harlem Education Fair, an event at which parents got to consider the merits of 50 schools. And...

Iran said on Wednesday that its much-delayed nuclear power plant, where testing began last month, would start generating electricity by September 2009. The 1,000-megawatt Russian-built plant in the southern port city of Bushehr will first generate around 500 megawatts, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told parliament, the official IRNA news agency reported. "Since the fuel for the power plant is in Iran, the project will be operational in the summer (the quarter ending September) and generate 500 megawatts of electricity that would be transmitted to the national grid." The plant will achieve full capacity in the second half of the Iranian...