Free Republic

The Democrats -- and the Republicans too -- may find the next stage of Sarah Palin's public career uncomfortable. True to form, Sarah Palin, her Governorship behind her, clearly and forthrightly declared her intent: to take up arms against the forces dedicated to tearing down our Constitution, destroying our principles of government, disparaging our history of defense of democracy and free enterprise, weakening our military, and saddling generations to come with oppressive debt and entitlement programs. She did so in the same inspirational, forceful manner that won her immediate and enthusiastic acclaim when she joined John McCain on the Republican...

The Democrats -- and the Republicans too -- may find the next stage of Sarah Palin's public career uncomfortable. True to form, Sarah Palin, her Governorship behind her, clearly and forthrightly declared her intent: to take up arms against the forces dedicated to tearing down our Constitution, destroying our principles of government, disparaging our history of defense of democracy and free enterprise, weakening our military, and saddling generations to come with oppressive debt and entitlement programs. She did so in the same inspirational, forceful manner that won her immediate and enthusiastic acclaim when she joined John McCain on the Republican...

We’ve finally found the cop Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has been looking for. Boston Police Officer Justin Barrett, the overachieving 36-year-old with two years on the force, was caught engaged in the kind of uber-stupidity we’ve come to expect from drunken teenage pop stars, not police officers. If you missed the Herald story yesterday, Barrett is the Boston cop who sent an electronic message to The Boston Globe - then forwarded it to his fellow National Guardsmen - calling the Harvard professor a “banana-eating jungle monkey.” He also said the paper’s reporting was “jungle monkey gibberish,” and wanted to “ax”...

Joy in His Presence Today's Scripture “You have made known to me the path of life; You will fill me with joy in Your presence, with eternal pleasures at Your right hand” (Psalm 16:11). Today's Word from Joel and Victoria Do you need more joy in your life today? God promises that joy is found in His presence, and if you’ve accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior, then His presence lives inside of you! That joy manifests when you focus your mind and heart on the Father and begin to praise Him for what He’s done in your...

Here is video of CNN's Don Lemon reading a letter by Sgt. Leon Lashley, an African-American police officer who was present at the scene along with Sgt. James Crowley the night Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested. Lashley has backed Sgt. James Crowley 100% in the controversy. Lashley reportedly wanted Crowley to share the contents of the letter with President Obama and Professor Gates, but there is no indication whether or not the message was actually shared. Lashley says in the letter that he has been branded an "Uncle Tom" as a result of the controversy, and his standing...

Becoming Entirely His "Let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing" —James 1:4 Many of us appear to be all right in general, but there are still some areas in which we are careless and lazy; it is not a matter of sin, but the remnants of our carnal life that tend to make us careless. Carelessness is an insult to the Holy Spirit. We should have no carelessness about us either in the way we worship God, or even in the way we eat and drink.Not only must our relationship to...

President Obama's $787 billion stimulus plan is having little effect on job creation within the general-construction industry, the trade association for the sector said Thursday.

Here is video of conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham on The O'Reilly Factor last night where she said it was ridiculous the way the media has covered Obama's "Beer Summit" as if it was the "Yalta or Potsdam Conferences." Ingraham noted that some networks even used satellite imagery to set the scene for the "Beer Summit," and a "Countdown Clock to the Beer Summit." Ingraham said the whole thing was a "cover-up for Obama," to cover for his huge mistake in saying the police had "acted stupidly." . . . . . (Watch Video)

A Briton wanted in the United States for breaking into NASA and Pentagon networks in "the biggest military hack of all time" lost an appeal against his extradition Friday, making a U.S. trial more likely. Gary McKinnon, 43, has fought a three-year battle to avoid extradition, including going to the European Court of Human Rights, but he appeared to have run out of options as Britain's High Court ruled against his latest appeal Friday. The court rejected arguments by McKinnon's lawyers that extraditing McKinnon, who was recently diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism, would have disastrous consequences for...

The Justice Department's decision to drop an already-won voter-intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party merits multiple, independent investigations. On Tuesday, Rep. Frank R. Wolf, Virginia Republican, officially asked Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to refile the case. Mr. Holder should comply. So far, the Justice Department has stonewalled legitimate inquiry. It has yet to provide records sought by this newspaper back in May. It has yet to answer a July 22 letter from Mr. Wolf that asks 35 questions on 17 different subjects relating to the Black Panther case. Justice has claimed, falsely, that the...

The miami herald describes Citizens' this way: that Citizens, the largest insurer of homes and condos in Florida Yet when Citizens was first envisioned: was established as insurer of last resort. So what happened? I was unable to find it at present time, but Citizens has apparently become biggest in two key areas: (1)Incredibly high risk areas.(waterfront most notably) Private insurers won't bother with it if they don't have to. (2)Incredibly low value areas.(think ghettos and manufactured homes) Private insurers don't have any incentive to bother with this either.

By far the movie’s gravest insult to posterity, however, is its treatment of the Texas Ranger captain, Frank Hamer, who may (or may not) have been instrumental in bringing them down. As seen in the movie, Hamer (played by Denver Pyle in an uncharacteristically dour performance) is a kind of harsh Puritan ideologue, so righteous that when Bonnie (whom Dunaway has made us love) flirtatiously poses for a funny snapshot with him, he spits savagely in her face. He considers her so morally tainted that he is sickened by her. Then later, like a serpent in a garden, he coos...

Barack Obama was a rock star on the campaign trail and his aura went undimmed in his first few months of office. But then he began taking too many curtain calls. The applause subsided, but he kept coming back to center stage to try harder to wow us. He forgot what every star must learn, that you've got to know when to get off that center stage. If you don't have anything new to say, shut up. This applies even to presidents. He's reaching for applause lines with the same ol' same ol'. So his poll numbers begin to shrink....

Yesterday, Barack Obama was God. Today, he's fallen from grace, the magic gone, his health-care reform dead. If you believed the first idiocy -- and half the mainstream media did -- you'll believe the second. Don't believe either. Conventional wisdom always makes straight-line projections. They are always wrong. Yes, Obama's aura has diminished, in part because of overweening overexposure. But by year's end he will emerge with something he can call health-care reform. The Democrats in Congress will pass it because they must. Otherwise, they'll have slain their own savior in his first year in office. But that bill will...

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (July 31, 2009) — Sgt. 1st Class Darwin Johnson, of Stanberry, is a Missouri National Guardsman who is among the first in the nation to work with a new maintenance diagnostic system for military vehicles. “We’re kind of the guinea pigs,” said Johnson, of the 35th Special Troops Battalion in St. Joseph. “We’ve got to find any flaws and report them.” Johnson was one of 32 soldiers from across the state who recently trained with the Maintenance Support Device-Version 2 for two days at the Combined Surface Maintenance Shops in Jefferson City.

Charles Murray, no slouch among public intellectuals, described him as the most underrated public intellectual in America today. Murray offered this assessment of George Gilder at a recent American Enterprise Institute colloquium to discuss Gilder's newest book, "The Israel Test." Murray explained: From Gilder's national debut with "Sexual Suicide" (later reissued as "Men and Marriage"), to his seminal "Wealth and Poverty," to his farsighted "Microcosm," Gilder makes being ahead of his times look easy. And, Murray noted with admiration, Gilder has always been right. Is Gilder underrated? Yes, because his gifts and contributions deserve more or less full-time celebration. After...

Good morning to all of you gardeners. The last day of July and I am wondering what August has in store for us weather wise? One thing I do know is the weather will continue to do what it wants and the only thing you can do about it is to accept it or move somewhere else. Of course once you move the weather there will change.

WASHINGTON -- In the venerable tradition of summer, my wife and I sent our two children -- a tween and a young teen -- off to camp last week. Both boys had butterflies, evidenced by their distracted silence in the car to the airport and the pained, nervous wave from beyond security. But this year there were no tears. At camp, they gain many pointless, essential experiences -- of unfiltered starlight, and outdoor showers, and musty cabins, and spiders in odd corners, and the morning mist off a lake, and belligerent mosquitoes (my youngest claims to have once counted 40...

Spurgeon's Morning & Evening - July 31 -------------------------------- Morning Devotional "I in them." - John 17:23 If such be the union which subsists between our souls and the person of our Lord, how deep and broad is the channel of our communion! This is no narrow pipe through which a thread-like stream may wind its way, it is a channel of amazing depth and breadth, along whose glorious length a ponderous volume of living water may roll its floods. Behold he hath set before us an open door, let us not be slow to enter. This city of communion hath...

By this time, I’m sure we’ve all heard more than we care to about Professor Henry Gates. Still, I can’t let it go without tossing in my two cents. Admitting he didn’t know the facts of the case didn’t prevent President Obama, allegedly our first post-racial chief executive, from siding with the black professor and admonishing a white Cambridge policeman. Nothing too surprising about that, inasmuch as he appears to be far more concerned with the health and comfort of the Islamic terrorists down in Gitmo than he is with America’s elderly citizens. My own field of study is liberals....