Free Republic

Charles Krauthammer seems to be encouraging President Barack Obama to continue to forget that the government is the employee and that “We the people” are the employer (“Breathing life into ObamaCare,” Aug. 30). Any business owner worth his salt will say that if you want a successful business, you don’t put the employees in charge because they don’t always have the company’s best interest at heart. So what do “We the people” not want from our health care? We don’t want it to be managed by an unaccountable government monopoly, we don’t want the country to become bankrupt paying for...

My wife Diane seldom gets upset about politics. But President Barack Obama’s recent demonstration of megalomania in insisting on beginning the school year by simultaneously addressing all public school kids in the United States elicited a concise response: “it’s sick.” In addition to her Ph.D. in psychology, Diane holds an M.A. in Education, and both primary and secondary teaching credentials in California. She has raised and educated our three kids, each of whom received some combination of home schooling, parochial education, and public schools. What bothers her (and many courageous teachers across the country) is the crude attempt by the...

NLPC has uncovered a plan by the White House New Media operation to hire a technology vendor to conduct a massive, secret effort to harvest personal information on millions of Americans from social networking websites. The information to be captured includes comments, tag lines, emails, audio, and video. The targeted sites include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and others – any space where the White House “maintains a presence.” In the course of investigating procurement by the White House New Media office, NLPC discovered a 51-page solicitation of bids that was filed on Friday, August 21, 2009. Filed as Solicitation...

Surprise. It's not just the Obama administration and the left that's using intimidation tactics to malign and suppress WorldNetDaily. Now a few Republican bloggers are using the same bullying tactics in an effort to put WND out of business by calling on Americans to, and I quote, "boycott any of those organizations that will not renounce … support for WorldNetDaily."

Your head will explode when you read this. From NewsBusters: The Huffington Post explains that "Melissa Lafsky is the deputy web editor at Discover magazine, where she writes the Reality Base blog. She was previously the editor of the New York Times's Freakonomics blog, and is a former associate editor at HuffPo's Eat The Press." So she's a major-media-certified pundit when she wrote about Chappaquiddick drowning victim Mary Jo Kopechne on Arianna's pages today:Mary Jo wasn't a right-wing talking point or a negative campaign slogan. She was a dedicated civil rights activist and political talent with a bright future....We don't...

On the last day of August, scientists spotted a teeny-weeny sunspot, breaking a 51-day streak of blemish-free days for the sun. If it had gone just a bit longer, it would have broken a 96-year record of 53 days without any of the magnetic disruptions that cause solar flares. That record was nearly broken last year as well. Wait, it gets even more exciting. During what scientists call the Maunder Minimum -- a period of solar inactivity from 1645 to 1715 -- the world experienced the worst of the cold streak dubbed the Little Ice Age. At Christmastime, Londoners ice-skated...

Roman Catholic couples are being encouraged to pray together before they have sex. A book published by a prominent Church group invites those setting out on married life to recite the specially-composed Prayer Before Making Love. It is aimed at 'purifying their intentions' so that the act is not about selfishness or hedonism. The prayer, which appears in the Prayer Book for Spouses, implores God 'to place within us love that truly gives, tenderness that truly unites, self-offering that tells the truth and does not deceive, forgiveness that truly receives, loving physical union that welcomes'. It adds: 'Open our hearts...

Speaker Nancy Pelosi will let Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) keep his chairmanship despite his failing to report hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets on federal disclosure forms, according to Democratic aides. The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee’s latest misstep has received strong media scrutiny and prompted good-government watchdog groups to call for a special counsel investigation. Growing ethics turmoil surrounding Rangel has prompted calls for Pelosi to yank Rangel’s gavel. But Democratic aides say that Pelosi will not pressure Rangel to resign his post or censure him publicly unless the House ethics committee finds him guilty...

I’ve been warning people for years. In literally hundreds of columns I’ve argued that the liberals who run our institutions of higher learning are literally bankrupting our states. My columns have been filled with more than hollow assertions. They’ve been backed with evidence. And, now, every prediction I’ve made is coming true. My office phone (here at UNC-Wilmington) was cut off over the summer because the department couldn’t pay the phone bill. Workers have been laid off. We didn’t get a pay raise this year. In fact, we got a pay cut. The room I teach in is boiling hot...

Like a big lump of clay, Teddy Kennedy is being worked and reworked into an immortal. The mainstream media and other liberal apologists are seeing to the handiwork. They even want us to believe that Kennedy was squared with his Catholicism. But how could he be? He was unapologetically pro-abortion. Time magazine gave it go, though. It published an article last week about Kennedy's "quiet Catholic faith." For a man so vocal about many things, he certainly did keep quiet about his faith. And with good reason. Egregious apostasy was Teddy's way. On every major abortion vote, the late Senator...

Appears to be Jaycee's captor driving down the road on Google Earth's street view. Creepy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abs9pKEDbo4

If Rep. Jan Schakowsky hoped to use Monday night's town hall meeting as a pep rally for the "public option," she failed. It wasn't for lack of trying. Her staff arrived more than three hours before the event, with boxes of literature and a marked-up version of H.R. 3200 for their boss to use as a prop during the meeting. The HCAN crowd arrived soon afterwards with their manufactured signs and rolls of stickers. As the line grew outside the high school, HCAN organizers began handing out signs to sneak into the auditorium, and instructing supporters to block opposing views...

Four years have elapsed since one of the most amazing cases of Republican-bashing media bias in the television era began. The media elites laugh when preachers say immorality causes God to send hurricanes, but they suggested with straight faces that Hurricane Katrina was a death sentence President Bush and his cronies brought to the less fortunate. In the early spin, race-baiting rapper Kanye West and "objective" anchors like Brian Williams were in rhetorical sync: George Bush didn't care about black people. On "The Daily Show," Williams said "everyone" knew Bush would have done better if white people were endangered: "Everyone...

THE Supreme Court seems poised to reshape cam paign-finance law, affirm ing fundamental First Amendment rights by overturning restrictions on corporate political speech when it rehears Citizens United v. FEC next Tuesday. At issue is whether the government can ban distribution of a political documentary, "Hillary: The Movie," produced by Citizens United, a conservative group that received some corporate funding to make the film. The government argues that it can -- relying on a 1990 case, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, that upheld a state law banning corporate political spending, and McConnell v. FEC, the 2003 case that upheld...

Childhood Obesity Report Calls For Government Regulations to Limit Access to ‘Unhealthy’ Restaurant Chains Wednesday, September 02, 2009 By Penny Starr, Senior Staff Writer (CNSNews.com) - A newly released report by the Institute for Medicine and the National Research Council details strategies for local governments to combat what it calls an epidemic of childhood obesity, including enacting zoning and land-use regulations that would “restrict fast food establishments near school grounds and public playgrounds.” The report, “Local Government Actions to Prevent Childhood Obesity,” was compiled by the Committee on Childhood Obesity Prevention Actions for Local Governments, a committee of health care...

Has he no shame? Of course not. He's Charlie Rangel, head of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee -- who can't be bothered to tend to his own tax returns, but now intends to punish ordinary folks for making arguably minor mistakes on their forms. The Post's Charles Hurt reported yesterday that Rangel's committee seeks to reduce legal defenses and increase fines and penalties on taxpayers undergoing IRS scrutiny for what they assert are innocent errors. Among other things, Rangel's bill would even prohibit the IRS from forgiving taxpayers who erred in good faith -- though that would be...

I AM AN AMERICAN. That is the beginning and the end of it. Not a hyphenated American. Born here. Reared here. And I do love my country so very much that nothing, and I MEAN NOTHING, rises above it except for GOD Almighty, and an unwavering belief that this same GOD has given us all the weapons we need to stop this abomination. We have the brains. What has happened to our guts? This isn't about some damn government. Government, by its very nature, exists for its own perpetuity and becomes, to a man and woman, mad. One need only...

BRITAIN'S release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi -- the Libyan terrorist whose bomb blew up a plane over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, killing 270 people -- is galling enough. But it's even more troubling as a sign of a larger, growing mood: The West is surrendering on the installment plan to Islamic extremists. The late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put his finger on it when he said: "The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles." This administration epitomizes the "concessions and smiles" approach to our implacable...

Welcome to Mendota, Calif. Its population is 10,000. Most of its families work in farming; the town used to be called the "cantaloupe capital of the world." Today, unemployment hovers around 41 percent. The town is now known as "the food-line capital," says Mendota's mayor, Robert Silva. This is the Dust Bowl, circa 2009. Mendota is located in Fresno County, where July unemployment stood at 15 percent. And even that staggering number is artificially low because of all the temporary employees hired to pick the seasonal vegetables like squash, carrots, tomatoes and peppers. Why are the communities of Fresno County...

Some of the most prominent Republican woman will be in Orlando for the Republican Women's 35th Convention, but arguably the most famous of them all is not making an appearance. As some of the most prominent Republican women across the country gather next week in Orlando, arguably the most well-known of them will not be in attendance. Despite an invitation to speak at the conference, Sarah Palin, former vice presidential candidate, and until recently Alaska governor, decided not come to the National Federation of Republican Women's 35th Convention, according to the organization. An estimated 1,200 Republican women leaders will attend...