Free Republic

A noteworthy update to President Obama's light schedule this week, considering the rumors about his religion that lingered throughout the 2008 campaign. From the White House guidance for Tuesday: In the evening, the President will host a dinner celebrating Ramadan and highlight the contributions of American Muslims in the State Dining Room. The President's remarks will be pooled press.

DAMASCUS -- Syria is accelerating its economic opening -- boosting U.S. hopes that its tight relationship with Iran might be weakened. For decades, Syria has been defined by its rigid socialist economy and its military ties to Iran against Israel and the West. Trade sanctions have taken a heavy toll: More than half the 16 jets in Syria's state airline can't fly for lack of spare parts. But President Bashar Assad -- heir to his family's political dynasty -- has started unshackling the economy by permitting private banks and insurers to open shop and by letting Syrians hold foreign currency...

    ~The FReeper Canteen Presents~ Road Trip: Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota Ellsworth Air Force Base is a United States Air Force base near Rapid City in Meade County and Pennington County, South Dakota, United States. It is home to the 28th Bomb Wing of the Air Combat Command (ACC), operating the B-1B Lancer.As host wing, the 28th Bomb Wing includes an operations group, a maintenance group, a mission support group, and a medical group. The base controls all air space 40 miles (64 km) around its area, including all landings at nearby Rapid City Regional Airport,...

Decades of data confirm a simple truth: If we want to lower health costs, we need to put consumers back in charge.Many people now feel like second-class citizens when they enter the doctor's office. That's because everyone in the office knows that the patient isn't really the payer — that the patient doesn't hold the purse strings. The greater the percentage of medical costs that patients pay to their insurance company in premiums, the more insurers are in charge. The greater the percentage that patients instead pay directly to their doctor out-of-pocket, the more patients are in charge. Whether it's...

Sweden is a country of about 9.1 million people on the Scandinavian Peninsula of Northern Europe. Geographically, it is slightly larger than California. It is by any measure a first world country, with a labor force working primarily in industry or the service area, a GDP per capita of about $31,600 and an unemployment rate of 5.6 percent.1 For much of the 20th century, Sweden had a single-payer system of health care in which the government paid almost all health care costs. Like other nations with a single-payer system, Sweden has had to deal with the problem of ever-growing health...

Demand for power from homes and businesses will exceed supply from the national grid within eight years, according to official figures. The shortage of supplies will hit the equivalent of many as 16 million families for at least one hour during the year, it is forecast. Industrial strikes 1972: workers playing cards in candlelight Not since the early 1970s when the three-day week was introduced to preserve coal has Britain faced the prospect of reationing energy use. The gap between Britain’s energy needs and demand throws fresh doubt on Government’s assertion that renewable energy can make up for dwindling nuclear...

More Hope and Change... New From the Obama Website-- "Critics of Obamacare are Heirs of Bin Laden"

Originally introduced and passed in Montana, the FFA declares that any firearms made and retained in-state are beyond the authority of Congress under its constitutional power to regulate commerce among the states. Since its passage in Montana, a clone of the Firearms Freedom Act has been enacted in Tennessee, and has been introduced in the legislatures of Alaska, Texas, South Carolina, Minnesota and Florida. Legislators in many other states have announced that they will introduce FFA clones when their legislatures next convene.The FFA is primarily a Tenth Amendment challenge to the powers of Congress under the “commerce clause,” with firearms...

JERUSALEM – President Obama's environmental adviser, Van Jones, was the main speaker at an anti-war rally that urged "resistance" against the U.S. government, WND has learned. The rally was sponsored by an organization associated with the Revolutionary Communist Party, which calls for the overthrow of the U.S. government and its replacement with a communist dictatorship. WND previously reported Jones, special adviser for green jobs, enterprise and innovation to the White House Council on Environmental Quality, is an admitted black nationalist and radical communist. In 2002, Jones was a keynote speaker at a rally at People's Park in Berkeley, Calif., to...

AP

Japan’s historic election Sunday gave the Democratic Party an overwhelming victory over the Liberal Democrats that have dominated Japan’s government for 55 years.  The Liberal Democrats oversaw Japan’s industrial policy that supported Japan’s dominant firms during Japan’s rise as a major economic power during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.  Indeed, many American economists argued the U.S. should do more to emulate Japanese industrial policy and have the government actively involved in supporting dominant corporations to enhance their international competitiveness.American support for industrial policy, where the government actively picks the winners in economic competition, died off in the 1990s when the...

1st Amendment: Mark Lloyd, a disciple of Saul Alinsky and fan of Hugo Chavez, wants to destroy talk radio and says free speech is a distraction. The new FCC diversity "czar" says Venezuela is an example we should follow.When Mark Lloyd was appointed July 29 as the chief diversity officer at the Federal Communications Commission, a nation focused on ObamaCare and a deteriorating economy took little notice. But as angry constituents flood town hall meetings and call in to talk radio, a man dedicated to silencing them sits at the right hand of the president. They share a common hero...

THE White House on Monday dismissed former vice president Dick Cheney's attacks on a probe into alleged CIA abuses of 'war on terrorism' detainees and sharply questioned his foreign policy judgment. 'This is the same song and dance we've heard since literally the first day of our administration,' spokesman Robert Gibbs said after Mr Cheney blasted the investigation as politically driven and harmful to national security. Mr Gibbs said Mr Cheney 'clearly had his facts on a number of things wrong' and highlighted Republican Senator John McCain's denunciation of CIA use of interrogation techniques widely seen as torture. 'I would...

This recession — our generation’s Great Depression — will profoundly transform the way we live, think, and work. I’d like to encapsulate four of the effects of this recession I think we’ll see over our lifetimes. Whether you agree or disagree, please write your own blog post (and link back to this one) or comment here with your own thoughts on how our world will change. 1. America’s birth rate will continue dropping, and will eventually get below the replacement rate. A common statistic is that it takes 2 births per woman to sustain a population. America, so far, has...

Michael Steele today on ABC's blog, saying what needs to be said, and I'm glad he did, Democrats want to play the Kennedy card, this is their stopper...(Video)

MEL MARTINEZ TOWN HALL FROM OBAMA'S E MAIL IN HIALEAH ON TUESDAY SEP.1 AT PALMETTO HOSPITAL Outside of Health Care Forum with Sen. Mel Martinez Where: Palmetto General Hospital Meet at the corner of the hospital that faces the Palmetto Expressway at the NW 122nd St. Exit 2001 W 68 Street Hialeah, FL 33016

Japan's leader-in-waiting has a delusional vision for his country and its relationship with the rest of Asia. Yukio Hatoyama dreams of an Asian union, a utopia free of rapacious American capitalism, a region bound together by fraternity and a common currency. Were Hatoyama a soapbox orator his fantasizing could be dismissed as twaddle, but he isn't. He's about to become the next prime minister of the world's No. 2 economy, following his party's victory Sunday in a general election. In an op-ed piece, "A New Path for Japan," that ran in The New York Times recently, the leader-in-waiting revealed his...

The most transparent White House in the history of the world still hasn't answered the questions we asked last week. You know, tough questions like: "Why does the president have so many Marxists, socialists, radicals and self-proclaimed communists advising him?" I'm still hopeful there is a simple explanation. Maybe President Obama just wasn't aware of their radical beliefs. After all, he sat in Reverend Wright's pews for 20 years and didn't catch on to the fact that Wright isn't too fond of America. But here's The One Thing: This isn't an accident. Obama's radical advisers are there for a reason:...

In times of economic crisis, the temptation for public officials to do something is both overwhelming and tremendously dangerous. UCLA’s Dr. Lee Ohanian makes that point plain in his latest research on the Great Depression and its primary causes, in which Herbert Hoover’s reputation as a free-market politician gets serious revision. Hoover’s deal with manufacturing giants to keep wages high turned what should have been a deep but temporary recession into an economic disaster: Pro-labor policies pushed by President Herbert Hoover after the stock market crash of 1929 accounted for close to two-thirds of the drop in the nation’s gross...

Brent Dewar, Chevrolet vice president, told reporters the company expects "to see a modest recovery in 2010 and a better recovery in 2011." The recovery is based on that projection that smaller cars will surge to overtake trucks and SUVs as GM's best sellers. That means the remaining GM dealers will have to get used to promoting and selling smaller cars if they want to survive. Last week GM decided to ax a new Buick compact SUV—just days after it was deemed essential to the success of the brand. So it comes as no surprise that many GM dealers, who...