Free Republic

On the old Mary Tyler Moore Show, pompous anchorman Ted Baxter once ran for the Minneapolis City Council. After his not-unexpected drubbing, he gave a concession speech in which he proclaimed, “The voters have spoken, and if that’s what they want — the hell with them.” With a Democratic electoral debacle looking more and more likely this fall, Democrats and their apologists in the mainstream media appear ready to steal a page from the Baxter playbook. For a long time, the media assumed that the problem was the Obama administration’s inability to communicate its accomplishments. If only the president could...

Traditionalists the world over will be pleased to hear the news that has just come in that Pope Benedict XVI plans to bring back the sedia gestatoria during his upcoming visit to Britain. Twelve Anglican bishops dressed in scarlet will carry his chair into the Houses of Parliament where he will give a speech to the assembled houses. The peacock fans will be carried by Princes Charles and Andrew with the train of the Pope's cappa magna being borne by heirs to the throne-- Princes William and Harry. Her Majesty the Queen and her consort the Duke of Edinburgh will...

Once again, Islam has been in the news recently. And, as is typically the case, the circumstances surrounding this state of affairs are not positive, and the behavior of the Muslims involved provides yet another public relations nightmare for a socio-religious system already laboring under a mountain of self-inflicted wounds. First, we have some crazy nut of an imam in New York City who wants to build a triumphalistic "community center" (really, a mosque), just two blocks from Ground Zero. As it turns out, this imam has a history of doing all kinds of typically nutty Islamic things, such as...

Washington — While the administration of Barack Obama attempts to portray the Tea Party as a "fringe" movement that doesn't share America's "mainstream" values, it is working concurrently to erase many of these values from our society. Lurking beneath the unconstitutional mandates of "ObamaCare," the reckless deficit spending and the draconian new regulations and taxes being imposed on our free-market economy, Obama and his radical allies are moving in numerous, more subtle ways to erase America's identity. Take the U.S. Department of Justice Web site, which according to the American Spectator recently shed its red, white and blue banner in...

With the heating season soon to begin I thought I would re-run this blog post from January of this year. For those of you still using home heating oil to heat your houses, read up. Coming soon to an oil tank near you: bio-oil. I'm really glad we changed over to propane to heat our house and here is why. Starting this year I believe, Massachusetts is changing over from standard home heating oil to something they call "bio-oil". I've done some research on it. Not only will it be more expensive (because of the bio-mass added to it) but...

Torture sanctioned by President George W. Bush to fight terrorists was illegal and wrong and America has yet to confront the topic to avoid future abuses, the U.S. Solicitor General for President Ronald Reagan argues in a new book. "Because it is Wrong: Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror" by Harvard Law scholar Charles Fried, a Republican, and his son Gregory Fried -- a Suffolk University philosophy professor who votes Democrat -- asks if it is permissible to torture in order to safeguard Americans. Despite the differing politics of the father-son authors, they agreed it was...

Younger troops have grumbled for years that America trusts them to carry a weapon and fight for freedom overseas, but until age 21 they can't be trusted with a bottle of beer. Now a Georgia lawmaker is looking at changing that. Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., introduced legislation recently which would allow servicemembers as young as 18 to enjoy alcoholic drinks at restaurants or clubs on any stateside military base. The bill would not allow anyone under 21 to buy carry-out cases of beer from base stores or allow younger troops to keep beer in their barracks.

Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), the Senate's only Hispanic member, pledged Wednesday to introduce a comprehensive immigration reform bill in the chamber. Sources familiar with the announcement said the bill would be introduced before the Nov. 2 midterm elections, and would closely resemble the reform framework proposed by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) earlier this year.

Is the recession's great irony that government spending killed Keynesianism? With economists, bankers and investors perplexed over the economy's continued funk, we cannot be blamed for looking in odd places for answers. Could it possibly be that continuously increasing spending over eight decades has left little ability for government spending to affect the economy? How could increased overall government spending have priced stimulative spending out of the market? To understand what has happened, we must look back to the 1930s. The New Deal was a concerted effort for government to take up the economy's slack. In 1930, federal government spending...

Efforts to tame America's ballooning budget deficit could soon confront a daunting reality: Nearly half of all Americans live in a household in which someone receives government benefits, more than at any time in history. At the same time, the fraction of American households not paying federal income taxes has also grown—to an estimated 45% in 2010, from 39% five years ago, according to the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research organization. A little more than half don't earn enough to be taxed; the rest take so many credits and deductions they don't owe anything. Most still get hit with...

Under pressure from a barrage of bad midterm-election polls, President Obama has gone on the campaign trail to blame Pres. George W. Bush for all our economic problems, and to bash House Republican leader John Boehner as nothing more than a Bush retread. In Friday’s dreary news conference, Obama acknowledged that economic progress is “painfully slow,” and that voters may blame him for the economy. Yet he nonetheless continued to finger Bush “for policies that cut taxes, especially for millionaires and billionaires, cut regulations for corporations and for special interests, and left everyone else pretty much fending for themselves.” “Millionaires...

My friend, writer Diana West has blogged about a breaking New York Daily News story which captures (or should, even for those who remain willfully blind to the burgeoning phenomenon) how local US state institutions are obsequiously imposing Sharia norms. New Jersey Transit worker Derek Fenton was summarily fired -- an 11 year career coming to a sudden end -- for his peaceful act of First Amendment protected protest (see the video here): The protester who burned pages from the Koran outside a planned mosque near Ground Zero has been fired from NJ Transit, sources and authorities said Tuesday. Derek...

Red headline just appeard on the drudgereport, "CASH POURS IN FOR O'DONNELL; CAMPAIGN WEBSITE CRASHES..." Link was directly to Christine's website, which is now up and runnning. Her goal of $200,000.00 has been met and revised upwared to 350k.

Anxiety was pretty high in the heat of battle with the race for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate. However, a lot of that tension exists beyond the state of Delaware and there have been self-proclaimed conventional wisdom wizards critical of how the electoral process in Delaware has worked itself out. One of those has been former embattled Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel, who in a Slate.com post dated Sept. 14, took a few shots at conservative talker Mark Levin, calling him a "creep" for his criticisms of The Weekly Standard John McCormack, author of an unfavorable story about Delaware...

Two of the nine mortar shells fired from the Gaza Strip at southern Israel on Tuesday were actually phosphorous bombs, the Israel Defense Forces confirmed. Militants in the coastal territory also fired two Qassam rockets into Israel, yielding an Israel Air Force strike in response that led to the death of one Palestinian working in a smuggling tunnel on the border with Egypt.

<p>Taxes must rise while fiscal stimulus needs to be wound down in order to reduce the U.S. budget deficit and allow private investment to expand, said former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan on Wednesday.</p> <p>He warned that the deficit, swollen by massive stimulus spending, was crowding out capital investment. We "must find a way to simmer down fiscal activism and allow the economy to heal," he said, adding that that stimulus spending had been far less successful than anticipated.</p>

Islam and the American Public By J.R. Dunn Questions are flying hot and heavy as to why anti-Muslim fervor is appearing now, nine years after 9/11. Observers note correctly that there was no backlash following the attacks. (The sole victim was an unfortunate Sikh, Balbir Singh Sodhi, murdered by an ignorant cowboy in Arizona. Other claimed incidents actually involve robberies and the like.) Why should the threat arise today? There's no real mystery. The same, identical process occurred in the 1940s regarding the communists. The blame lies not with Americans in general, and not with everyday Muslims, but with incompetent...

RALEIGH, N.C. - Piqued by their national political momentum, Republicans seeking to regain control of the U.S. House have expanded their focus in North Carolina to target at least three congressional seats held by Democrats. The movement, backed by large advertising buys, marks a new expansion into districts that Democrats handily won just two years ago. A pro-business group allied with the GOP will begin airing ads this week in an effort to bring down North Carolina Reps. Larry Kissell, Bob Etheridge and Heath Shuler.

The former head of the Federal Reserve said fiscal stimulus efforts have fallen far short of expectations, and the government now needs to get out of the way and allow businesses and markets to power the recovery. “We have to find a way to simmer down the extent of activism that is going on” with government stimulus spending “and allow the economy to heal” itself, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan told a gathering held at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Wednesday. Bloomberg News Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan At this point, “we’d probably be better off...

CONCORD, N.H. — New Hampshire has certified former state Attorney General Kelly Ayotte (AY'-aht) as the winner of the Republican primary for U.S. Senate. Ayotte was endorsed by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and won a narrow victory over Ovide Lamontagne (LAH'-mohn-tayn). His conservative credentials and courting of the tea party pulled him close in the final days of the campaign. Lamontagne has until 5 p.m. to decide whether he'll seek a recount because the margin of victory fell within 1.5 percent of the total votes cast. The secretary of state's office says Ayotte's official margin of victory was 1,667...