Free Republic

Imagine a day President Obama enters Oprah Winfrey's public confessional: Oprah: As you know Mr. President, I was one of your supporters. This is a difficult interview for me. Americans have many questions. Let's begin by going back to the start of your second term. It was a time of partisan division--the fiscal cliff and the debt limit fights. The economic recovery was anemic at best. Your calls for unity in confronting those challenges were fervent. You talked about a "balanced" budgeting approach but, as we came to see, your "balanced" cuts weren't cuts at all. When the unfunded off-budget...

Following a public policy meeting of African-American leaders, National Urban League president Marc Morial and National Action Network president Al Sharpton called for a new national assault weapons ban, saying the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution should be regulated. “The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are not absolute. One cannot yell fire in a crowded theater and hide behind the First Amendment,” said Morial when asked by TheDC if he supports California Democratic Sen. Diane Feinstein’s assault weapon ban bill. “And we absolutely think that the idea of banning a military style assault weapon, a weapon that I...

A former Ms. Washington has accepted a plea bargain, one week before she was scheduled to stand trial on a first-degree murder charge. Peggy Sue Thomas, 47, pleaded guilty Thursday to a charge of rendering criminal assistance in the first degree. “My children are the most important thing to me and the thought of being wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life in prison and never being able to touch them or see my grandchildren in person was too big of a risk,” Thomas said. The beauty queen, who has traded her crown and sash for a prison-issued orange jumpsuit, could...

After four months of playing hide and seek with the American people, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton honored the Congress with her presence long enough to duck and deceive the American people regarding the worst incident of terrorism against Americans since 9/11. Those who are fans of Mrs. Clinton must have been delighted with her tap dancing around questions addressed to her by House and Senate Committee members. Those fans consider all this as just stagecraft created by political hacks that have no right to question “his eminence” --the President -- or his esteemed Secretary of State. Yet there are...

Who knew? My parents are cool. Homeschooling is becoming hipster. Celebrity parents like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie proudly discuss their homeschooling lifestyle. But pioneers like my parents set the trend of educational freedom. The plan was to send me to public school. My mother enjoyed her job as an R.N. and was not bored. She was simply a creative rebel. And my father encouraged her to pioneer—because he believed in freedom. My mother is a rebel with her own style. She once told me: “I never wanted to be like anyone else. I always did my own thing....

It has been said that to identify a liar, look for contradiction, because it's hard keeping lies straight. It's no revelation that leftists would like to effect gun confiscation (except for themselves and their bodyguards, of course), but they generally maintain plausible deniability so that the world's Dirty Harry Reids can convince the flyover-country bitter clingers that they believe in the Second Amendment. And they certainly do - the way the Devil believes in God. Nonetheless, leftists sometimes tip their hand, and such is the case with a recent New York Post editorial. The paper posits the idea that the...

Journalist Bill Moyers, who worked as an assistant to President Lyndon Johnson, shared memories in a column last year about how his old boss thought about our entitlement programs. It was under Johnson, who championed the "Great Society" in the 1960s, that a good portion of the runaway government spending we are trying to get under control today originated. Johnson signed into law Medicare, Medicaid, the War on Poverty programs, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Moyers recounted that for Johnson, Social Security and Medicare "were about a lot more than economics." He recalls a time when the Johnson administration...

Obama: Fox News And Rush Limbaugh Are Why Washington DC Is Such A Mess Brett LoGiurato January 27, 2013, 6:00 PM In a sit-down interview with The New Republic released today, President Barack Obama cast blame on Fox News and Rush Limbaugh for shaping compromise as a "dirty word." Obama talked about the recent deal to avert the fiscal cliff, saying he thought House Speaker "genuinely wanted" to come to a deal sooner but felt he was vulnerable to attack from the right. Here's the relevant excerpt: I think if you talk privately to Democrats and Republicans, particularly those who...

Mikey wrote: I wrote earlier about Ransom’s hypocrisy and have not yet had a good response. When he first wrote this recycled piece (April 2012) I asked him why he did not also condemn the person who stole the emails from the East Anglia. As the NYT link shows, there was condemnation of Gleick's action from those on all sides of the political spectrum.- Caught Red-Handed on Climate ChangeDear Comrade Mikey,Why not admit that instead of Gleick making a "serious ethical error," that he committed a crime? Stealing is always wrong.The irony is that you ask me to condemn both...

An explosion deep within Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility has destroyed much of the installation and trapped about 240 personnel deep underground, according to a former intelligence officer of the Islamic regime. The previously secret nuclear site has become a center for Iran’s nuclear activity because of the 2,700 centrifuges enriching uranium to the 20-percent level. A further enrichment to weapons grade would take only weeks, experts say.

As a futurist, you are famous for making predictions of when technological innovations will actually occur. Are you willing to predict the year you will die? My plan is to stick around. We’ll get to a point about 15 years from now where we’re adding more than a year every year to your life expectancy. To clarify, you’re predicting your immortality. The problem is I can’t get on the phone with you in the future and say, “Well, I’ve done it, I have lived forever,” because it’s never forever. You have described microscopic nanobots of the future that will be...

Video at link.

These days, our political parties are defined by their presidents. Their policies and their programs tend to become their respective parties' orthodoxies. And the perceived success or failure of those policies and programs tends to determine how the parties' candidates, even those who don't support many of them, do at the polls. This has been especially true in the past two decades, in which fewer Americans have been splitting their tickets or changing their minds from election to election than was the case from the 1950s to the 1980s. For years, white Southerners voted Republican or for a third-party candidate...

President Barack Obama and, for that matter, most of America seem woefully ignorant about a scandal unfolding at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. As hard as it is to believe, outgoing Administrator Lisa Jackson actually appears to have had agency personnel create a fictitious employee by the name of “Richard Windsor” so that Jackson could appropriate the Windsor’s email address for her own purposes. We’re not talking about some alias to be used for personal correspondence but a totally false identity in whose name official business was allegedly conducted created specifically to avoid federal record-keeping and disclosure requirements. And none...

I would like to rebut the Jan. 13 Guest Opinion, "Rebutting the arguments of gun-control advocates." The writer cites supposed minimal gains from gun legislation in Britain. Yet according to Britain's Piers Morgan, last year Britain had 30 gun murders, compared with approximately 20,000 in the U.S. And they had no mass murders. The author cites absurd statistics of all the thousands of crimes that were supposedly prevented by guns. What's the source of that data? Then, we were "treated" to a pedantic interpretation of the Second Amendment. We don't need an English lesson, sir, just rational thinking. Remember, when...

With a basis in § 31 of the Weapons Law of 18 March 1928 (Reichsgesetzblatt I, p. 265), Article III of the Law on the Reunification of Austria with Germany of 13 March 1938 (Reichsgesetzblatt I, p. 237), and § 9 of the Fuhrer and Chancellor's decree on the administration of the Sudeten-German districts of 1 October 1928 (Reichsgesetzblatt 1, p. 1331 ) are the following ordered: § 1 Jews (§ 5 of the First Regulations of the German Citizenship Law of 14 November 1935, Reichsgesetzblatt 1, p. 1332) are prohibited from acquiring. Possessing, and carrying firearms and ammunition, as...

... “we have always understood that when times change, so must we; ...fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges: ...preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.” ...New Labour trick of claiming that something can only be safeguarded by embracing its opposite: individual freedom requires submitting to the collective will. ...we can afford to support both the old and the young...our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it. ...Warning to America: it didn’t work out. Obama made no attempt to explain how support at both these...

The hopelessly biased Carol Costello was rattled to the core today when South Carolina sheriff Al Cannon gave her a lesson in Constitutional law. He also exposed Costello for the blithering hypocrite that both she and most of the media are. More on that after the video: (VIDEO AT LINK) My guess is that Costello and her producers forgot that country doesn’t mean dumb. Cannon's demeanor, intelligence, education, and command of the facts ran circles around the left-wing morning anchor. But why is Carol Costello, of all people, upset with what Cannon is doing? All he's doing is following President...

6 Part interview, each approx 10 minutes. He forsaw the disaster that was GATT

I once took a coworkers phone apart and swapped the wires for column 1 and 2. He could still dial 9 for an outside line, but all calls with most numbers went to wrong numbers. Also super glued a full cup of coffee on his desk. One that did not work on me....I left my office and my office mate thought I went to the bathroom and thought I was in a stall. He soaked a hand full of paper towels and threw them over the door and splat onto "my" head. He was laughing when he ran into the...