Free Republic

In the opening months of 2011, Republican budget-cutters had to play on a small field. Instead of being able to tackle the structural issues of the massive deficit while planning the FY2012 budget, the House instead had to finish the work left undone by Democrats for the current fiscal year. Under pressure to keep defense and security spending in place, the entire spending pool available to cut amounted to less than $300 billion when the first continuing resolution expired in March, and the GOP forced Democrats to eventually cut almost $50 billion from that discretionary spending in the end.Boehner writes...

I am steaming mad at the moment. I am starting a new course at at online university on marriage and family issues and just read the first chapter of the text, a book called "The Expanded Family Life Cycle" by McGoldrick, Carter and Garcia-Preto. This is not my first course at this institution, and in the past couple of years I have been subject to the socialist agenda that permeates the texts of all the courses, but this particular one is really blatant. Here are a sampling of its views: "But it is important to realize that sexism, classism, racism,...

Barack Obama has belatedly discovered that Americans want to see reductions in government spending. How else to explain David Plouffe’s appearance on a series of talk shows yesterday announcing that the President would unveil a new proposal this week to counter Paul Ryan’s roadmap on entitlement reform? However, it seems as though Obama still hasn’t figured out the scale of the problem: In an effort to go on the offensive in the battle over government spending, Obama will look for cuts in “all corners of government,” senior adviser David Plouffesaid on several Sunday talk shows.Although Obama’s health-care law is projected...

I miss Barrack being anonymous!

Good News Found • What made God’s news “good” and “new” was that it declared the opposite of human law demands and punishment. It proclaimed salvation from tyranny. And his news became the power behind encouraging a difference in human behavior. God’s way to get humans to behave humanely was the opposite of man’s way. God’s way was through love, forgiveness, and acceptance, not through fear and threats of punishment. • Expecting his children to have no other God than the One who saved them from tyranny and honoring his name accordingly was not too much to ask. Most of...

Washington is busy anointing winners and losers in the 11th hour spending deal struck late Friday to avert government shutdown, but meanwhile the staffs of the House and Senate appropriations committees are busy at work negotiating the fine print. “The agreement was on overall funding levels and some of the more controversial policy riders,” said Jennifer Hing, spokeswoman for House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers, “the rest of the policy riders and funding levels for individual programs are still under negotiation.” The issue is important because the House-passed spending bill, H.R. 1, included scores of policy riders – issues that...

In the United States, the media's interest has been focused on who won the game that was the potential government shutdown.  As usual the reporting is based on a sporting event and not the importance of the change of direction the shutdown represents.  At the moment there is no winner or loser; that will be decided if and only if spending is dramatically reduced and government begins to shrink appreciably.   Many of us have repeatedly called attention to the financial markets and international uncertainty precipitated by American monetary, fiscal and foreign policies by focusing on bell-weather commodity prices, particularly...

Donald Trump found out last week that he polls second after Mitt Romney as the choice that Republicans would select to nominate to be president of the United States. That notwithstanding the one thing that strikes fear in the hearts of Liberals above everything else is that Trump articulates better than Romney or any other Conservative the fact that Liberals or “Obama Birth Believers” support and have allowed a possible ineligible constitutional deconstructionalist to be president of the United States. Progressive Liberals, the MSM and Democrats know that if the president is proven a fraud they will all be blamed.

Ordinary Americans could be forgiven for believing that the Democrat political effete elite and the main stream media (MSM) have been working in parallel to dismantle the Constitution and create a permanent left-wing, multicultural majority in the United States. (snip) By electing Obama without an Amendment, the Constitution has been undermined and a precedent has been established to eliminate the term “natural born” from Article II, Section I. (snip) It is interesting to note that those who questioned McCain’s eligibility were not called derogatory names like “birther”. They were deemed serious people asking valid questions related to the Constitution.

Moscow, April 11, Interfax - Hegumen Iov (Talats), patriarchial metochion's rector of Transfiguration Church in Zvyozdny Gorodok (Star City), gave evidence that neither Yury Gagarin, nor Sergey Korolev were atheists. "Yury Gagarin baptized his elder daughter Yelena shortly before his space flight; and his family used to celebrate Christmas and Easter and keep icons in the house," Father Iov said in an interview to the April issue of Foma magazine. He also recalled that Gagarin urged the authorities to reconstruct Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow. "Sergey Korolev lost faith for some time but eventually regained it through suffering and...

NY, NY: A 23-year-old former Greenwich (CT) woman was stabbed to death inside her Lower East Side apartment early Sunday morning. Police said she was nearly decapitated and they have arrested her boyfriend. Police found Sarah Coit in the living room of her third floor apartment at 63 Clinton St. shortly after 2:30 a.m., suffering from multiple stab wounds. Detectives arrested Raul Barrera, 33, who lived with the her and charged him with second-degree murder.

Are the rich really getting richer? That’s a pretty standard line from the Left, a lament usually cited in the course of calling for higher tax rates. Robert Reich is particularly fond of this mode of attack: A recent post of his was headlined, “For 70 years, the wealthy have grown wealthier.” Professor Reich probably doesn’t write his own headlines, but it’s a common enough sentiment for him, and his prose is rich with phrases such as “the super-rich got even wealthier this year.” He isn’t alone in employing this mode. Take this from an April 7 Salon article: “And...

Our society closes off-shore drilling, eschews nuclear power, yet imagines that mankind's machines will never stop. As I wrote in part I of our series, Americans have become bubble-conscious and bubble-shy. A tech bubble in the nineties, a housing bubble in the aughts, and fear of a massive fiscal bubble soon to come have temporally darkened the horizons of the worldÂ’s most optimistic people.Not that bubbles are anything new. Black Friday popped the stock market. Eighteenth century bubbles burst on the Mississippi and in the South Seas. Tulips even made one bloom in Holland. Whenever greed and mania combine, bubbles...

NEW YORK — Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is launching a national TV ad campaign Monday highlighting its renewed focus on low prices and its price match policy in a bid to bring back customers who no longer trust it has the lowest prices. The campaign bears the slogan "Low Prices. Every Day. On Everything." "We have lost our customer confidence ... in having the lowest price," said Duncan MacNaughton, chief merchandising officer at Wal-Mart in an interview with The Associated Press. "Our company is determined to create the best one-stop shopping experience and low prices on the right products backed by...

A dazzling blond former Hunter College student was fatally stabbed and nearly decapitated Sunday after battling with her live-in boyfriend, cops said. The yelling between Sarah Coit, 23, and Raul Barrera, 33, inside their third-floor lower East Side apartment grew so loud that it woke neighbors around 2:15 a.m., witnesses said. Cops would later find Coit on the living room floor of the Clinton St. flat, blood spilling from her wounds.

Enjoy!

Ben Bernanke needs to wake up and listen to gold’s message.Late in 2010, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke was confident that inflation would remain low, and that the Fed could “remove policy accommodation” at the appropriate time. But rising food and gasoline prices are forcing him to start changing his tune. Here is a sampling:“Overall, inflation remains quite low.” February 3, 2011“The most likely outcome is that the recent rise in commodity prices will lead to, at most, a temporary and relatively modest increase in U.S. consumer price inflation.” March 1, 2011 “I think the increase in inflation will be transitory.”...

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows that 19% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Thirty-nine percent (39%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -20 (see trends). Today’s numbers reflect the lowest level of Strong Approval yet recorded for this president. There has been a sharp decline in enthusiasm among liberal voters. Currently, just 37% of liberals Strongly Approve of the president’s performance. That’s down from 63% a year ago, 57% at the beginning of 2011, and 52% a week ago....

WASHINGTON — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who was relieved of command in Afghanistan after a magazine profile quoted his subordinates as disparaging senior civilian leaders, has been invited back to public service by the Obama administration to help oversee a high-profile initiative in support of military families, White House officials said Sunday.

California in the Balance. We calibrate CaliforniaÂ’s decline by its myriad of paradoxes. The nationÂ’s highest bundle of gas, sales, and income taxes cannot close the nationÂ’s largest annual deficit at $25 billion. Test scores are at the countryÂ’s near bottom; teachersÂ’ salaries at the very top. Scores of the affluent are leaving each week; scores of the indigent are arriving. The nationÂ’s most richly endowed state is also the most regulated; the most liberal of our residents are also the most ready to practice apartheid in their Bel Air or Palo Alto enclaves.We now see highway patrolmen and city...