Free Republic

Back from their July 4 recess, congressional Democrats face crunch time on health care reform.The House and Senate are under pressure to pass legislation before a monthlong break in early August. After that, federal budget work will make reform much more difficult. Meanwhile, Senate Democrats have been scrambling since the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office scored Sen. Ted Kennedy's partial plan at $1 trillion over 10 years. Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., acting head of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in place of the ailing Kennedy, negotiated a revised — but still incomplete — plan that now costs only $600...

I have been debating this question for the last several days. As a Specter constituent, I am leaning in his direction, as the man who may have single-handedly destroyed the U.S.A. with his vote for the stimulus package. I have considered whether I should chastise myself for sending him too many emails before he switched parties, since he can now break a GOP filibuster. But I am firmly convinced he will be defeated when he runs next year. Franken, on the other hand, will be around for six more years. So perhaps he is the most dangerous. Let me know...

LANSING, Mich. - The campaign of former Rep. Joe Schwarz and a Republican group have paid $5,000 in civil fines to settle federal campaign finance violations. The Federal Election Commission said Tuesday that the Battle Creek lawmaker's campaign and the Republican Main Street Partnership PAC coordinated communications for radio ads during the 2006 primary. The FEC said coordinating the work meant the campaign accepted, but did not report, excessive in-kind financial contributions. The Schwarz campaign and GOP group each paid fines of $2,500. Tim Walberg defeated Schwarz in the August 2006 GOP primary and served one term in Congress. Democrat...

Big lies die slowly. After a claim by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that 90% of Mexican drug dealers' military weapons (machine guns, hand grenades and missiles) come from American gun stores was exposed as a lie several months ago, it's back — this time with the imprimatur of the Government Accountability Office.A June 21 CBS "60 Minutes" report by Anderson Cooper was clearly coordinated to coincide with release of the GAO report and a similar one by "activist" Josh Sugarmann. You are likely to soon hear and read that the GAO report commissioned by Rep. Eliot...

Local newsy sings off late night anchor duty in tearful "goodbye;" professes love for fellow anchor. It's a demotion in cost cutting move, but he tries to put a happy face on it. Oh, and he'll still work with her on the 6pm broadcast daily, so how self-indulgent is this? Here's the vid and you'll need to catch the last 60 seconds or so for the really cheesy stuff. Not for weak stomachs.

President Obama's economic recovery package will actually hurt the economy more in the long run than if he were to do nothing, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday. CBO...said the House and Senate bills will...[lead] to a lower Gross Domestic Product over the next 10 years than if the government had done nothing. (emphasis added)

Diplomatic hot spots are popping up everywhere, in spite of President Obama's "adopt an evil-doer" doctrine. We have real-live crises in Honduras, North Korea and Iran; things are dicey in Afghanistan, China is ever problematic and Mexico is a mess. Not to worry: the administration is on top of things. Joe Biden is trying to make Iraq's leaders play nice in their sandbox, President Obama is becoming the Russians' new BFF, Richard Holbrooke has been meeting with G8 foreign ministers in Trieste, and George Mitchell convened recently with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's last...

A new Quinnipiac poll shows President Obama’s approval rating has dropped 13 points over the last two months in Ohio, a key battleground state with plenty of critical Congressional contests in 2010. Obama now only holds a 49 percent approval rating, with 44 percent of voters disapproving. It’s his lowest approval rating in any Quinnipiac statewide poll taken since Obama’s inauguration. In May, Obama held a 62 percent approval rating in the Buckeye state. Meanwhile, a 48 percent plurality of Ohio voters disapprove of the way Obama is handling the economy, with 46 percent approving. Two-thirds of Ohio voters are...

NEW YORK, July 7 (Reuters) - U.S. stocks fell to their lowest level in 10 weeks on Tuesday as talk of a second government stimulus plan heightened fears that the economy is not yet on the path to recovery and that the corporate earnings season starting this week will be weak. A member of the Obama administration's economic advisory panel said the United States should plan to possibly provide a second round of stimulus funds to prop up the economy. The comments come as investors question earlier optimism for a quick recovery, which had driven stocks as much as 40...

Dems moonwalk the Jackson minefieldGlenn Thrush – 1 hr 17 mins ago At about 3 p.m. Tuesday, civil rights hero John Lewis (D-Ga.) rose in a nearly-empty House chamber to express his support for a resolution recognizing the slaves who toiled and died while building the Capitol. At almost the same moment, Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas) took the stage at the sold-out Staples Center in Los Angeles, where she vowed to bestow a similar honor on the King of Pop. Jackson-Lee’s 1,500 word resolution honoring Michael Jackson as a “global humanitarian” may be symbolic and heartfelt, but it’s causing some...

Rewriting History: Did Proposition 13 ruin California? Yes, says a now-popular myth, which explains the state's budget crisis as punishment for keeping taxes too low. But statistics are stubborn things. There are only two ways to get into a fiscal mess on the scale seen in California right now: You either spend too much or tax too little. The state's Democrats want a tax increase, and they're being egged on by cheerleaders such as Time magazine, which recently opined that California is paying the price for tax-cutting fever. At the "root of California's misery," says Time, "lies Proposition 13, the...

BEIRUT -- The three top leaders of Iran's opposition joined forces on Tuesday and their supporters began a three-day national strike, signaling a resurrection of protests even as Iran's president announced to the nation that the postelection turmoil was over. Opposition candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, joined by former President Mohamad Khatami, met to plot strategy and issued their first-ever joint statement, calling for an end to the government's arrests and what they called "savage, shocking attacks" on their advisers and supporters. Meanwhile, hundreds of opposition supporters quietly flocked to mosques or retreated to their homes to begin...

"Will the Baptist conventions come back together?" my father-in-law asked over Sunday lunch.Not in his lifetime.Most likely, not in my lifetime.And probably not until the Consummation of Time.Good question My father-in-law had a solid reason for his question. He had read my editorial about this year's Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting. It describes the generation gap within the SBC and tells how the youngish leadership walloped the old guard.This is significant because the old guard comprises the remnants of the hard-line fundamentalist leadership that wrested control of the SBC from so-called moderates in a struggle that lasted from the late 1970s...

Two major wire services- AP and Reuters- cherry picked excerpts from Pope Benedict XVI’s latest encyclical (a teaching document of the Catholic Church) on Tuesday to support left-wing economic and political positions, and all but ignored the pontiff’s traditional stances on the family, bioethics, and the environment. The AP also went so far to bring up “the state of the Vatican’s own [financial] books.” Both Philip Pullella, who regularly writes about the Pope and the Vatican for Reuters, and the AP’s Nicole Winfield zeroed in on paragraph 67 of the encyclical, which is titled “Caritas in Veritate,” or “Charity in...

Cap And Trade: Al Gore has likened his crusade against global warming to the world's struggle against Nazis. He said this while speaking in a country that is organizing a team of environmental storm troopers.Gore didn't come right out and call global warming skeptics Nazis while addressing an audience at Oxford University in England. But then, he didn't have to. By simply violating Godwin's Law — which essentially says that an argument dies the moment someone makes a comparison to Nazis — in the way he did, Gore labeled anyone who opposes his agenda a fascist. While the former vice...

Senate Republicans see a new agreement forged between President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev as an opportunity to force Democrats’ hand on a major security issue: missile defense. Sixty-seven senators, or two-thirds of those present, must agree to ratify any deal seeking to reduce nuclear weapons between the two nations, giving Senate Republicans, who only control 40 seats, rare leverage. The high bar for ratifying treaties will put pressure on Obama to finish construction of a missile shield in Eastern Europe. At the very least, it will make it very difficult for the president to limit that shield in...

Supreme Court: The media are treating the American Bar Association's top rating for Judge Sonia Sotomayor like a dispassionate report card. The record shows that the ABA applies a politicized double standard.The ABA's Canons of Judicial Ethics have a lot of high-minded language. Such as: "To ensure impartiality and fairness to all parties, a judge must be objective and open-minded." And: "A judge shall not . . . by words or conduct manifest bias or prejudice," including but not limited to "bias . . . based upon race, sex, gender, religion, national origin, ethnicity . . . ." And why...

More than eight months after Barack Obama was elected president, the mystery surrounding his precise birthplace is deepening as the myth-busting website Snopes.com – along with several news agencies and an Obama community blog – directly contradict the president's own claim regarding the hospital in which he was born. In an official letter signed by Obama on White House stationery, the president celebrates his birth at the Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu, Hawaii. The facility has posted that letter on its website, along with video of the letter being read in public. But according to Snopes,...

<p>Roger Stone . . . believes the only way Sarah Palin could remain a viable presidential candidate in 2012 or beyond was to leave the governorship of Alaska.</p> <p>“First of all, her administration is mired down by these nuisance lawsuits and ethics complaints from every garden variety left-wing nut paralyzing the state government,” Stone says, noting Palin is governor at a time when the drop in oil prices is contracting her state economy.</p>

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