Free Republic

The Washington Post recently hypothesized that you can gage the state of the economy by the state of men’s underwear drawers. That’s because we’re supposed to assume that men will purchase underwear at a relative steady and stable rate. The theory, as quoted in the Post article: “Sales of men's underwear typically are stable because they rank as a necessity. But during times of severe financial strain, men will try to stretch the time between buying new pairs, causing underwear sales to dip.” So apparently we are to believe that we got into this recession at the consumer level because...

In the last decade, we have witnessed the bursting of two bubbles, the stock market bubble driven by internet stocks with unsustainable business models and valuations, and more recently, the private debt bubble that has resulted in the destruction of credit along with real estate values. America is now engaged in the unprecedented growth in government accompanied with unprecedented debt at the federal level. The Federal Reserve in cooperation with both the Bush Administration in its final days and now the Obama administration is propping up the credit markets with over $1.0T including the TARP funds, and open market purchases...

"Very active." That's what White House aides say Barack Obama is going to be this month. That's probably an understatement. Obama faces September deadlines on three issues, on each of which he could get himself in political trouble, not only with those on the right and center but also those on the political left. Only one of those issues is domestic: health care. Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress, scheduled rather hastily for Wednesday night, gives him a chance to turn around public opinion, which has been going against his policies, and to generate something like the enthusiasm...

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Anthony Weiner, normally a supporter of President Obama, yesterday criticized his failure to display "presidential leadership" on health care. "We've been in a scrap through the month of August, but we really haven't had presidential leadership in the way we need it most," Weiner said Thursday night on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show." He said the president's health-reform address to Congress on Wednesday needs to make a strong case for including a public option to compete with private insurers. Obama supports the idea, but has been backing away from it amid fierce resistance from Republicans and conservative...

The first question we should be asking in the healthcare debate is: Why should anyone think that politicians would do a better job redesigning our healthcare than the free market? After all, politicians have helped create the problems (healthcare costs increasing at an unsustainable rate and a growing number of uninsured) that politicians now are in a hurry to try to fix. For example: Tax subsidies for employer-purchased insurance have encouraged the overconsumption of healthcare (because many employers have purchased insurance tantamount to prepaid healthcare), limited employees' choice of insurance plans to whatever the employer offers, and required employees to...

He enraged America's religious right with his portrayal of God as a senile old man in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and now Philip Pullman is set to court more Christian controversy – this time with a novel about "the Scoundrel Christ". The book will provide a new account of the life of Jesus, challenging the gospels and arguing that the version in the New Testament was shaped by the apostle Paul. "By the time the gospels were being written, Paul had already begun to transform the story of Jesus into something altogether new and extraordinary, and some of his...

As he makes a real impact in pushing conservative fringe attacks on Obama administration officials into the mainstream, Glenn Beck’s Twitter feed has become a must-read. In a message from last night, Beck told his followers to “FIND EVERYTHING YOU CAN ON CASS SUNSTEIN, MARK LLOYD AND CAROL BROWNER.” They are, respectively, the nominee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the Associate General Counsel and Chief Diversity Officer of the FCC, and the Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change. Browner was also administrator of the EPA for all eight years of Bill Clinton’s presidency.Beck’s...

Despite reports that "card check" is off the table, Congress is still considering a compromise to the job-killing legislation known as the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). There is nothing "free" about it for workers or businesses, and there is no room to compromise on a bill shown to cause unemployment. Continues...====================================================================== Here's your pink slip. Have a nice Labor Day! B. Hussein Obama famously told "Joe the Plumber" that his whole scam to 'revive' the economy rested on doing what liberals enjoy doing more than anything else in life (even more than having sex with interns): Spreading the wealth...

Top White House advisers deflected questions Sunday about former "green jobs czar" Van Jones, just hours after he submitted his sudden overnight resignation amid a growing furor over his previous statements and political associations. Politicians had been calling for Mr. Jones to resign after it was revealed in recent days he signed a petition supporting Sept. 11 conspiracy theories and called Republicans a series of vulgar epithets in a widely circulated video of a speech he made shortly before joining the Obama White House.

Van Jones, the President’s designated “Green Jobs Czar,” resigned his post after his ties to a 9/11 “truther” group and use of a vulgarity to describe Republicans began attracting unwelcome scrutiny. Fair enough. Barack Obama cannot condemn any lack of civility among his political opponents while he harbors a rhetorical bomb-thrower like Jones. But far more disturbing than the revelations about word choices or conspiracy theories that resulted in his ouster are Jones radical views – views that could not have been unknown to The White House. Simply put, Jones is a Marxist who, by his own admission, intended to...

About 11 months ago, the Bush Administration saw a financial tsunami headed its way. The Great Housing Bubble - built upon easy credit engineered by the then Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan - had popped. As the debt balloon imploded, it sucked in the banks, insurance companies, stock brokers, automobile manufacturers, retailers and housing manufacturers. AIG, GM, Circuit City, Linins ‘N Things, Lehman Brothers, Countrywide Mortgage, Wachovia, Merrill Lynch… It almost swallowed the US itself.

Unions across the country are campaigning hard for Obamacare over Labor Day weekend. The AFL-CIO has made creating a government run “public plan” their top priority. Yet polls show that most Americans strongly oppose this. So why have the self-proclaimed advocates for America’s workers made government-run health care their top priority? Union leaders say they are fighting to win “win secure, high-quality health care for all” against greedy and self-interested corporate defenders of the status quo. Many union activists sincerely believe this. But altruism does not explain why the labor movement is spending tens of millions of dollars on this...

After an adventurous and, at times, treacherous August recess, lawmakers return to Washington, D.C. this week. Liberals hope to jumpstart the President’s agenda, which has stalled because public support for his big-ticket initiatives has crashed. The swing in public sentiment can be seen in President Obama’s approval rating, which is hovering around 50 percent. Despite a steady diet of mainstream media news stories cheerleading for Obama Care and cap-and-tax energy policy, the liberal agenda is on life support. Obama now intends to launch a counter-offensive that will begin with an address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday. That...

Afghanistan Czar: Richard Holbrooke AIDS Czar: Jeffrey Crowley Auto recovery Czar: Ed Montgomery Border Czar: Alan Bersin California Water Czar: David J. Hayes Car Czar: Ron Bloom Central Region Czar: Dennis Ross Domestic Violence Czar: Lynn Rosenthal Drug Czar: Gil Kerlikowske Economic Czar: Paul Volcker Energy and Environment Czar: Carol Brower Faith-Based Czar: Joshua DuBois Great Lakes Czar: Cameron Davis Green Jobs Czar: Van Jones Guantanamo Closure Czar: Daniel Fried Health Czar: Nancy-Ann DeParle Information Czar: Vivek Kundra International Climate Czar: Todd Stern Intelligence Czar: Dennis Blair Mideast Peace Czar: George Mitchell Pay Czar: Kenneth Feinberg Regulatory Czar: Cass Sunstein...

College for $99 a Month The next generation of online education could be great for students—and catastrophic for universities. by Kevin Carey Like millions of other Americans, Barbara Solvig lost her job this year. A fifty-year-old mother of three, Solvig had taken college courses at Northeastern Illinois University years ago, but never earned a degree.< snip > Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math....

SAN DIEGO — San Diego Chargers star outside linebacker Shawne Merriman was arrested Sunday and accused of choking and restraining his girlfriend, reality TV star Tila Tequila, as she tried to leave his suburban home.

Morning Devotional "And when they could not come nigh unto him for the press, they uncovered the roof where he was: and when they had broken it up, they let down the bed wherein the sick of the palsy lay." - Mark 2:4 Faith is full of inventions. The house was full, a crowd blocked up the door, but faith found a way of getting at the Lord and placing the palsied man before him. If we cannot get sinners where Jesus is by ordinary methods we must use extraordinary ones. It seems, according to Luke 5:19, that a tiling...

Dutch prosecutors said Wednesday they would charge an Arab-oriented cultural group under hate speech laws for publishing a cartoon that suggests that the death of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust is a fabrication. The public prosecutor's office in Utrecht in the Netherlands said the cartoon insults Jews as a group and is therefore an illegal form of discrimination. T Advertisement he chairman of the Dutch arm of the Arab European League says it published the cartoon on its website to highlight a double standard in freedom of speech rules in which anti-Muslim cartoons are permitted but anti-Jewish cartoons are...

BOSTON, Mass. (CNN) - She was called "the littlest refusenik," one of the many Soviet Jews denied permission to leave the Soviet Union because her father had been exposed to government secrets. But the case of Jessica Katz was special because she was a baby born with a nutritional deficiency that stopped her from growing. She was a tiny baby dying in a Moscow hospital, getting weaker by the day. It was U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy who, her parents say, eventually saved her life. Jessica was born in Moscow in 1977 with malabsorption syndrome, which prevented her from digesting food...