Free Republic

With most of Washington concentrating on economic policies and health care, reforming immigration isn't a priority. Marchers at an immigration rights rally Monday in Chicago hope to change that and called on President Obama and Congress to act or face political trouble at election time. The march from the Near West Side culminated in a rally at Federal Plaza downtown, where speakers demanded that Obama end deportations that bust families. Longer term, they want Congress to legalize undocumented workers and their families currently in the United States. The Labor Day crowd of about 2,000 people was smaller than those in...

Dr. James David Manning says we need to have a trial now to investigate Obama if we are to save America.

We walked into a trap, a killing zone of relentless gunfire and rocket barrages from Afghan insurgents hidden in the mountainsides and in a fortress-like village where women and children were replenishing their ammunition. "We will do to you what we did to the Russians," the insurgent's leader boasted over the radio, referring to the failure of Soviet troops to capture Ganjgal during the 1979-89 Soviet occupation. Dashing from boulder to boulder, diving into trenches and ducking behind stone walls as the insurgents maneuvered to outflank us, we waited more than an hour for U.S. helicopters to arrive, despite earlier...

Here is a video report by Richard Engel with a U.S. Army Stryker Brigade in Afghanistan, showing the struggle they face in dealing with Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), which are the primary cause for increasing casualties in recent weeks. This Stryker Brigade has lost nine men in three weeks, all to IEDs. They are serving in a Taliban stronghold area south of Kandahar. . . . (VIDEO)

The current dust-up between Fox News and NBC News/MSNBC has put the focus back on GE and their historically overwhelming penchant for supporting socialism and some would say the destruction of free markets. Which brings me to General Electric or GE, GE under the tutelage of Jeffrey Immelt has not only brought the global giant to the brink of collapse but after doing business with Iran and Syria and receiving $139 Billion from the government to back up it’s debt, GE has positioned itself to be the government arm for both Cap-N-Trade and ObamaCare.

Russia has denied a cargo ship whose apparent disappearance sparked an international mystery was carrying S-300 anti-aircraft missiles bound for Iran. Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, on Tuesday dismissed a report in a British newspaper that the Arctic Sea was carrying a batch of the sophisticated Russian-made weapons when it was apparently hijacked by pirates. "Regarding the S-300s on board the Arctic Sea, this is absolutely untrue," Lavrov said. Russian investigators also announced they had begun inspecting the ship and so far had only found its official cargo of timber. Military officers The UK's Sunday Times, citing Russian and Israeli...

Soon to be up on their site. A radio station tower in Whitehall, PA toppled after cables were cut. Tower owned by clear channel and it was suggested it was an attempt to knock off the air a conservative talk station.

Moscow - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez will arrive in Russia to conduct a new arms deal Wednesday, according to the news agency Interfax. Venezuela is planning to buy three diesel-powered submarines, several armoured personnel carriers and type T-72 tanks and ten military helicopters, said the report, quoting officials from the Russian arms industry. Caracas also wanted to invest in coastal missile defences. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will receive Chavez on Thursday, according to the Kremlin. Chavez, a left-wing nationalist and opponent of the US, had talked about equipping several battalions at the beginning of August, though he did not give...

The media has been promoting Obama's Wednesday speech to a joint session of Congress as a major event that could shift the momentum in the health care debate, but I think it's important not to get too carried away. I have no doubt that Obama has the ability to make a great speech that could momentarily boost support for health care legislation just as Bill Clinton's speech did in September 1993, but no amount of rhetoric can change the fundamentals of the debate. The reason is that Americans may favor action on health care in the abstract, but get cold...

General Motors was not so long ago the largest motor company in the world, who would have thought one day would be taken over by the miniature Japanese autos. This documentary struggles to answer this very question.

Rosemary Munkenbeck says her father Eric Troake, who entered hospital after suffering a stroke, had fluid and drugs withdrawn and she claims doctors wanted to put him on morphine until he passed away under a scheme for dying patients called the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP). Mrs Munkenbeck, 56, from Bracknell, said her father, who previously said he wanted to live until he was 100, has now said he wants to die after being deprived of fluids for five days.

One of the clearest messages from the Town Hall forums during the August congressional recess was that people want Congress to be covered by the same health care reform plan they impose on the rest of us. Members of Congress presently get health insurance coverage through the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), which offers enrollees nearly 300 choices among a variety of plans, coverages and costs. The FEHBP covers federal employees and retirees, as well as Members of Congress, though the latter have additional perks of office that make their health coverage far better than that available - or...

Baucus presents healthcare overhaul plan The Montana Democrat who heads a key Senate panel unveils his proposal. It would tax high-end insurance plans and create nonprofit insurance cooperatives as an alternative to a government-run option. By Noam N. Levey and Janet Hook September 8, 2009 Reporting from Washington - Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) on Tuesday unveiled his long-awaited compromise blueprint for healthcare reform, proposing new taxes on high-end insurance plans and offering nonprofit insurance cooperatives as an alternative to a controversial government-run option. The unveiling marked an end to his marathon effort to win over substantial Republican...

They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. * * * Affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it's invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote "critical thinking," which...

I am using the Digital Text Publishing tool of amazon.com. I would like to upload, as a test, a short Word document that has a single image, along with text. I save the Word document as filtered html, and see that both image and text appear in the result. I then upload it, using DTP. However, when I preview, I find only the text. The image is missing. What is going on, and how can I upload the image? Thanks.

Snicker as long as it is not my son... When asked how they prepared for this and tested it, they responded, "We lost a lot of good men out there." (But really, this is awesome!)

U.S. actor George Clooney plays a New Age hippie soldier trained for psychic, peaceful combat in a comedy set during the war in Iraq. "The Men Who Stare at Goats" is based on a book by Jon Ronson about a secret unit created by the U.S. army in 1979 which, the author said, believed troops could become invisible, walk through walls and kill goats just by staring at them. Ewan McGregor plays a reporter who stumbles across a member of the unit as he prepares to enter Iraq, and he and Clooney's character Lyn Cassady go on an ill-fated journey...

Tens of billions of pounds will have to be raised through flight taxes to compensate developing countries for the damage air travel does to the environment, according to the Government’s advisory body on climate change. Ticket prices should rise steadily over time to deter air travel and ensure that carbon dioxide emissions from aviation fall back to 2005 levels, the Committee on Climate Change says. It believes that airlines should be forced to share the burden of meeting Britain’s commitment to an 80 per cent cut in emissions by 2050. The Times has learnt that it may challenge the Government’s...

Nowhere is the fallout from Obama’s healthcare proposals more evident than among the elderly, and nothing is more dangerous permanently for the Democratic Party than their increasing disaffection. A Wall Street Journal poll taken last week reflects a gain by Republicans in party identification, closing the gap from 40-33 in April in favor of the Democrats to a Democratic margin of only 35-34. The data reflects that one-third of this six-point closure of the partisan gap comes from a major shift among the elderly — the only demographic group to have moved dramatically. In April, the elderly broke evenly on...

Recently ABC Nightline news aired an inaccurate report which made false claims about a company trying to help people struggling in today's economy. The piece, “Deal or No Deal”, aired on July 24th. The report covered Credit Solutions, a debt settlement company working on behalf of struggling Americans seeking debt relief. Rather than confirm or check the claims made in the report, the Reporter (Elizabeth Leamy) and the Producer took the side of big political donors and supporters, mainly, credit card companies and big banks. Many of the same companies which were recently bailed out with your tax dollars. Luckily,...