Free Republic

The Senate Finance Committee's bipartisan negotiating team is expected to continue talks Friday on a health care reform plan that the vice president predicted would eventually pass the Congress. "As bleak as it looks, you know, always darkest before the dawn," Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said Thursday, after a speech at the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank. "The prospects of success are high. I think they are very high." The Finance Committee's "gang of six" -- three Republicans and three Democrats -- plans to hold its second teleconference call since the August break. The group was given...

What is so galling about Obama’s platitudes is not that they are hollow and made to sound sententious, but that they are flagrantly duplicitous. When he proclaimed in his inaugural address that “the question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works,” one could dismiss it as nothing more than empty rhetoric. But when every day thereafter is spent not addressing the question of whether it works but rather how government can be further and further aggrandized, the president’s platitudes can not be taken so lightly. The question of whether...

Perhaps the most fitting tribute to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy came not from President Obama, who correctly called him one of the greatest senators in U.S. history, but from the man who lost last year's election: John McCain, the Arizona Republican, who was often the political polar opposite of his colleague from Massachusetts. Hours after Senator Kennedy lost his battle with a brain tumor late Tuesday, a tearful Mr. McCain called him the most effective member of the Senate - and nobody spoke to disagree. Both Mr. McCain and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) agreed that health-care reform would be...

On Tuesday, September 8, the first annual Ride 2 Recovery eBay Charity Auction will begin and run for 10 days. The highlight of the auction will be a dinner experience with former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

Found this posted on Michelle Malkin's facebook.

BOSTON, September 2, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In an entry on his blog last night, Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley defended his participation in the grandiose funeral for Senator Ted Kennedy.  "There are those who objected, in some cases vociferously, to the Church's providing a Catholic funeral for the Senator.   In the strongest terms I disagree with that position," he wrote.The problem with that of course is that the leaders of the largest and most significant Catholic pro-life groups in the United States never criticized having a funeral per se, just a public one which would be made into a mass-media extravaganza.Fr....

An Aids-awareness advert depicting Adolf Hitler having unprotected sex has been condemned by mainstream health charities for stigmatising people infected with the virus. The provocative commercial, which ends with the tag-line "AIDS is a mass murder", aims to scare young people into using condoms by associating the deadly disease with the German dictator. But what appears to be a typical, if steamy, advert for perfume or underwear takes a macabre twist when the camera pans to man's face at the moment of climax - revealing him to be Adolf Hitler. "Of course there are many HIV organisations that run their...

Discussion of an article positing the question: "If we have the ability to remove the suffering of animals via genetic engineering do we not then have a moral obligation to do so?"

Summer is coming to an end as is evidenced by the return of children to school, the start of football season and the breezy hint of cooler temperatures to come. Looking at the political calendar, we are nearing the eight-month mark of the Obama administration and their allied, Democratically-led Congress. So, as Congress sits in recess and the nation braces for the upcoming national health care fight, I thought it an appropriate moment to talk about the future of Republican politics. Not just how we can defeat health care or win more congressional seats in 2010 -- but how we...

And it's not stopping. Add your own words...

Daniel Craig has become a laughing stock on the set of his new Broadway play — after he demanded 24/7 security.

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President Obama is having difficulty convincing most Americans that national health control will improve their lives and now has turned to the clergy to persuade the American public that upending our present system is necessary to fulfill, as he says, "the religious obligation of helping others.” Recently, he held a conference call with a group of liberal Jewish rabbis and he suggested that they use their pulpits and sermons during the upcoming Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, to convince their flocks that his national health control legislation constitutes the "moral and ethical thing to do." The President went on...

When Van Jones was tapped to serve as special adviser on green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality earlier this year, the appointment was heralded as a significant development for the green movement. And for good reason. A pioneer in fusing economic opportunity and social justice with environmentalism, Jones, 40, represents an important progression in our country's perception and thus our approach to combatting global warming. At the center of Jones' vision for socially uplifting environmentalism is the creation of "green collar" jobs, a phrase he helped extend beyond advocacy and policy circles into mainstream conversation. Jones...

He has been a voice in the wilderness for global warming realists, but now that he's taking on other issues put forth by President Barack Obama, some on the left's network, MSNBC, are suggesting Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., is putting the president's life at risk. Throughout the day of Sept. 3 on MSNBC, the place for liberal politics, a report from the Sept. 2 Tulsa World by Randy Krehbiel was cited and it was suggested Inhofe had gone too far with his criticism of Obama. Both MSNBC hosts David Shuster and Ed Schultz condemned Inhofe's comments that were very unfavorable...

The tendency of Democrats to try to destroy the CIA is nothing new. On December 23, 1975 a wonderful man and classical scholar named Richard Welch, who was a year ahead of me in high school, and who was the Harvard-educated CIA station chief in Athens, Greece, was shot to death on his front steps shortly after being outed by Senator Kennedy and Senator Church (of the Church Committee). Here we go again with another war on the CIA by liberal Democrats.

Woo hoo!! The Tea Party Express has a busy schedule today: 11:00 AM – Rally in Dallas, TX – Cape Buffalo Grille, 17717 Addison Rd, Dallas, TX 75287 2:45 PM – The Whistle Stop – Mile Marker 143; 1 hour and 45 minutes east of Dallas, TX; 170 miles east on Interstate 30; 4 miles west of Mt. Vernon, Franklin County, TX 6:00 PM – Rally in Little Rock, AR – State Capitol (North Grounds Near Liberty Bell) Woodlane & Capitol Ave, Little Rock, AR 72201 10:00 PM – Rally in Memphis, TN – Draper’s Catering (Parking Lot) 6116 Macon...

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is upset about abortion. Well, not abortion per se. But some abortions. Of girls. Apparently killing boys is okay. Abortion is one issue never likely to disappear. It sets protection of life and liberty in apparent conflict and raises challenging issues such as responsibility and privacy. But the issue can't be avoided. The bottom line of abortion is a dead baby. No amount of obfuscation and euphemism can hide the obvious. And if abortion is a legal right, beyond regulation by government, then motivation is irrelevant. If you have a right to kill all babies,...

Old jokes tend to hang around because they contain a large measure of truth. For example, everyone knows the punch line to “How can you tell that a politician is lying?” Of course, it’s “because his lips are moving.” There have been plenty of moving lips across the country this summer, as politicians in red states (Texas), blue states (New York) and violet states (Iowa, New Hampshire) held town hall meetings and heard from angry voters. Rep. Jim Moran, a Democrat from Virginia, managed to squeeze one two-hour meeting into his busy summer schedule, and my, were his lips ever...

Here is video of Sean Hannity last night saying he believes President Obama "is Jeremiah Wright," and that he "is Bill Ayers - not the terrorist, but the radical." Hannity was talking about Obama's pattern of surrounding himself with radicals, and how that points to the fact that Obama himself has radical views. . . . . (Watch Video)