Free Republic

Bold headlines are attention grabbers, and rarely does the substance of their supporting text prove them correct, but this is a rare moment when (albeit supported by my humble prose) the headline is true. Tomorrow night President Barack Obama will address Congress and the nation, and it will be one of the greatest speeches in the history of mankind. Now, how do I know that? Have I seen the speech? Have I spent the 3-day weekend listening to Churchill, Roosevelt, Kennedy, and re-reading the Gettysburg Address? Was I there were Herodocus debated with Namenicus on the floor of the Roman...

This weekend I was visiting friends in Northwest Connecticut. At an end-of-summer party on Sunday, I ran into an acquaintance, a very clever fellow who, like the vast majority of his confreres in that part of the world, had embraced Obama as a sort of savior of the world. Note the preterite. He followed Obama to the White House trailing clouds of glory. Now, seven months into the Obama Orgy of Debt, he is an older, wiser liberal. “Shades of the prison-house” have begun to close in upon him and the radiance he perceived around Obama has faded in the...

Jerry WeinbergerAmerica’s Food Revolution Urban revival, globalization, and some world-class chefs have created one of the world’s great culinary scenes. Summer 2009 In a 1769 letter to the naturalist John Bartram, Benjamin Franklin observed that while lots of people like accounts of old buildings and monuments, “I confess that if I could find in any Italian travels a receipt for making Parmesan cheese, it would give me more satisfaction than a transcript of any inscription from any old stone whatsoever.” Had Old Ben written this letter 50 years ago, in 1959, it’s doubtful that many Americans would have agreed....

A controversy has erupted over President Obama’s plan to address your children today in schools all over the U.S. Conservatives have rallied in opposition to the president’s address saying that the president’s agenda may not be one of education or inspiration, but of indoctrination. Those accusations have targeted the “Lesson Plan” that is to accompany the speech, rather than the speech itself. Following the conservative backlash, the White House issued a statement saying the “Lesson Plan” had been “inartfully worded” and the president and his people began to position the planned speech and lesson plan simply as a call from...

The terrorist release that has garnered headlines is Scotland’s release of the Pan Am Flight 103 bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi. On his return home, al-Megrahi was fêted as a hero by Libya’s President Moammar Gadhafi. Such merriment is a sad capstone to events unleashed on December 21, 1988, when the flight, full of 259 unsuspecting people from 21 nations, was blown from the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland. We have no ability to assess what dreams died that day. The families of these innocent victims have the right to be outraged. We also heard outrage from Washington, but we cannot help...

THR: What's the last movie you saw? The last book you read? Moore: A Norwegian film called "Troubled Water." Best drama I've seen this year. The last book was "The Coming Insurrection" (a French leftist call-to-arms manifesto that has been labeled a "manual for terrorism" by the French government). I'm also reading the daily newspaper religiously, considering how there won't be any to read a year from now.

Michael Moore solidified his position as one of the biggest phonies of our times while at a recent Venice Film Festival outing. He debuted his latest sham documentary called “Capitalism: A Love Story.” Thanks to the free enterprise system, Moore has become super wealthy himself, which makes the two-hour flick a case study in hypocrisy. “Capitalism is an evil,” Moore proclaims, “and you cannot regulate evil.” According to Moore, regulating capitalism doesn't work, so his prescription is, “You have to eliminate it and replace it with something that is good for all people and that something is democracy.” Guess it...

BEIJING — A woman in eastern China was allegedly beaten to death by five employees of a Wal-Mart store who accused her of shoplifting, a police report and state media said Tuesday. Police have arrested two employees from the store in Jiangxi province, while three others are being investigated, Jingdezhen city police said in a report on their website. According to the report, the woman was beaten outside her home near the Wal-Mart on August 30 and died in a city hospital on Wednesday last week from injuries suffered during the beating. Police said the five Wal-Mart employees had stopped...

''Watch what we do, not what we say'' -- Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell to reporters as Nixon Administration began. "Had enough?" -- Republican slogan in the 1946 congressional elections Had enough? Van Jones was not a vetting problem, he was a "getting caught red-handed" problem. As discussed on Friday in this space, Jones would never, ever have been allowed in the door of the White House with his nutty record -- much less be hired to work there -- unless people at the top thought of him in, an ideological sense, as one of their own. This episode has...

Did Sarah Palin make a statement supporting Obama's speech to the kids? The local liberals have jumped on this claim, as well as crowing about Laura Bush's misguided remarks.

A San Antonio police officer fatally shot a suspected robber outside of a Northeast Side gas station early Tuesday morning, authorities said. Julio Molinar, 19, died at 3:15 a.m. at Brooke Army Medical Center, where he was taken transported he was shot by a probationary officer in the parking lot of a Valero gas station in the 2300 block of Northeast Loop 410 at Starcrest Drive, according to a police department press release. Officer Michael Ruiz, who graduated from the police academy five months ago, has been placed on administrative duty pending the shooting team's investigation of the incident, the...

What would John F. Kennedy have done? See below. Many people are scared. They are scared that Obama’s objective is to make this country into a socialist state with the government controlling more and more of our lives and with us having fewer and fewer personal liberties. Obama’s vision for America is not shared by many. How many? There are only two polls you can really believe. Rasmussen and PEW. These two polls have been right on the money for the last two election cycles while others, NBC, CBS, CNN, Time, FOX, etc. are not as reliable. http://www.rasmussenreports.com/ Get the...

Van Jones: On the 9/11 Attacks, Not Just a 'Truther,' a 'Deserver' By Tom Blumer September 7, 2009 - 23:49 ET The "resignation" shortly after midnight on Sunday morning of President Obama's "green jobs czar" Van Jones has generally been seen as a convenient holiday weekend move. By Friday, after White House Secretary Robert Gibbs would only say that he still was a part of the administration, it was obvious that Jones's resignation was only a matter of time. The 9/11 truther and other evidence accumulated by Glenn Beck, Gateway Pundit, WorldNetDaily, and others was simply overwhelming. But it seems...

No local news about 2009 MDA telethon.

Tuesday, September 08, 2009 Email a Friend Email to a Friend ShareThis Advertisement Quantcast The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows that 29% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty percent (40%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -11 (see trends). Forty-five percent (45%) of Americans believe that labor unions weaken America while 26% hold the opposite view. Rasmussen Reports will release new polling on health care over the next couple of days beginning at 10:30 a.m. Eastern today. Premium Members...

Much attention has been paid of late to whether the United States is trending toward socialism. Alleviating socioeconomic differences through the federal government's active intervention in the economy is a common aim of all socialist movements. Nonetheless, most champions of the less privileged have never made a practical effort to mitigate the social differences caused by the inequitable distribution of what, nowadays, is a factor with an enormous socioeconomic impact: beauty. It is unacceptable for physical attractiveness to be the birthright of a very small proportion of the population -- I estimate 10 percent worldwide at most -- when the...

Could this finally be it - 40 minutes of undisputed proof that we are not alone? Scientists at the Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing, China believe it is a real possibility that this footage of an unidentified flying object is the evidence we have all been waiting for.They have confirmed 40 minutes of footage of the object was captured during this summer's solar eclipse - and that research has already started on a year-long investigation to find out what it is. Is it what we think it might be? A still image taken during the sighting of what appears to...

So called "moderate" Muslim CNN host Fareed Zakaria, has helped influence Yale University to remove cartoons of Mohammad in an upcoming book. His reasoning was that the cartoons are "clear threat of violence and loss of life." Well Mr. Zakaria, are the 35 Islamic terrorist training camps in America a clear threat of violence? I don't see you complaining about them.

The night Van Jones resigned, Newsreal editor David Swindle emailed me and said: watch how long it takes them to use the “L” word. That’s not for liberal, mind you; it’s for “lynch.” Destruction of the enemy is always the agenda of the left. While conservatives prepare arguments, assemble evidence, leftists are busy looking into their quivers for a poison arrow, which always turns out to be a tainted label, and always pretty much the same label: racist (or sexist, or Islamophobe). So it wasn’t surprising to see the following post from Carl Pope the radical head of the Sierra...

AT LEAST six city building inspectors -- some with ties to a powerful crime family -- were videotaped taking bribes at construction sites, and some were seen dealing cocaine and prescription pills while on duty, The Post has learned. The corrupt Department of Buildings workers -- who lined their pockets by ignoring violations or expediting construction and building work permits -- will be arrested later this month, along with about two dozen Luchese crime-family captains, soldiers and associates, sources said.