Free Republic

The tea party, he says, consists of "people who are angry and upset at government—and I agree with them." But "I think, honestly, many of them have been misled. . . . They've been told the reason we can't get to better outcomes than we've gotten is not because the Democrats control the Senate and the White House but because Republicans have been insufficiently feisty. Well, that's just not true, and I think that the folks that I have difficulty with are the leaders of some of these groups who basically mislead them for profit. . . . They raise...

Erick Erickson, at Red State today, has this absolute gem:Good grief people! We can put men on the moon, and send spacecraft from the 70's into interstellar space, but in Barack Obama's America we can't even build a freaking website. For Pete's sake, we put more people on the moon than signed up for Obamacare in Delaware, Kansas,and Alaska combined!"

Josh Barry, of Camp Hill, Penn., wants to know why the president of the local teacher’s union thinks he’s a neo-Nazi after he complained about a classroom assignment that he believed to be biased. “I’m Jewish and my wife is half-black, half-white,” Barry told me in a telephone interview. “I am the furthest thing from a neo-Nazi.” Last week, his daughter’s eighth grade American History class at East Pennsboro Middle School was asked to analyze a New York Times story about the recent government shutdown. Barry, who said he is a registered independent, read the story and then read a...

Bill de Blasio’s wife opened up about falling in love with a man after years of identifying as a lesbian and their life as a “very conventional, unconventional couple” in a candid interview released Thursday. Chirlane McCray, 58, said her relationship with de Blasio was made possible “by putting aside the assumptions I had about the form and package my love would come in.” The interview, with Essence magazine, comes 34 years after McCray penned a groundbreaking 1979 essay for Essence entitled, “I Am a Lesbian,” about coming out as a gay black woman. A dozen years later, in 1991,...

The state website residents must use to sign up for Obamacare health plans is riddled with infuriating computer flaws that cut off people with hyphenated names and force others to falsely say they are prison inmates or mental patients before they can finish 
their applications, a Herald 
review found. The review comes just a week after President Obama came to Massachusetts — the birthplace of Romneycare, the model for the White House’s universal health care plan — to defend massive problems with the national website. The review of angry posts from scores of frustrated applicants on the Massachusetts Health Connector...

Hey, reader: have you ever noticed the lack of men in our culture nowadays? You haven’t? Well, then allow me to be the first to tell you that you’re either… a. Blind, undoubtedly deaf and you probably live in a van down by the river. b. You’re simply not paying attention. c. You are too young to have a historical reference point to when men were actually men and not giddy and roughed X-Factor hopefuls, or turkey-necked, unprincipled politicians, or earring sporting “ministers” of the “gospel”. d. All of the above. Now … please note that I didn’t say males...

“60 Minutes” correspondent Lara Logan apologized Friday for what CBS News is now acknowledging was a flawed report last month about the Benghazi attacks. “The most important thing to every person at ’60 Minutes’ is the truth, and today the truth is that we made a mistake, and that’s very disappointing for any journalist, it’s very disappointing for me,” Logan said on “CBS This Morning. “Nobody likes to admit that they made a mistake, but if you do, you have to stand up and take responsibility and you have to say you were wrong, and in this case we were...

The most alarming message for Democrats from Tuesday's elections was the near obliteration of Terry McAuliffe's lead over Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia. An October poll, conducted a week after the government reopened, had placed him 11 points ahead. On Election Day, Cuccinelli lost by only 2.5 points. McAuliffe's precipitous tumble was caused entirely by Obamacare. There was bad news for Republicans, as well. The government shutdown damaged Cuccinelli, possibly costing him the race. But there were other factors; the money gap (he was outspent 3 to 1), outgoing Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell's ethics troubles and Cuccinelli's dour mien all made...

Forget the shutdown: Job creation surged in October despite dimmed expectations from the impasse in Washington. There were a net 204,000 new jobs created for the month, though the unemployment rate rose to 7.3 percent. A separate measure that includes the underemployed and those who have quit looking also moved higher, from 13.6 percent to 13.8 percent

Complete Headline: Whopping 932,000 Americans Drop Out Of Labor Force In October; Participation Rate Drops To Fresh 35 Year Low The only two charts that matter from today's distorted non-farm payrolls report. First, the labor force participation rate, which plunged from 63.2% to 62.8% - the lowest since 1978! But more importantly, the number of people not in the labor force exploded by nearly 1 million, or 932,000 to be exact, in just the month of October, to a record 91.5 million Americans! This was the third highest monthly increase in people falling out of the labor force in US...

Students at Eastern Michigan University pursuing teaching degrees are not happy with a union promoted boycott of their services. The Washtenaw County Education Association, which is an affiliate of the Michigan Education Association, sent letters to each of the eight districts its members represent urging them not to accept student teachers from EMU because of the university affiliation with the Education Achievement Authority, MLive reported. Gov. Rick Snyder started the EAA, which is a special borderless district the state's most severely under-performing schools are placed in. Six of the eight districts in Washtenaw County support locking student teachers from EMU...

On the surface, Bradley Byrne’s victory over tea party firebrand Dean Young in Alabama’s 1st District GOP runoff boosted business’s battle for control of the Republican Party. But a deeper dive into Tuesday’s results reveals this was not as clear-cut a win for business groups looking to send friendlier conservatives to Congress following last month’s government shutdown. Byrne captured the GOP nomination in the runoff to replace former Rep. Jo Bonner by 4 points over Young. It’s a stunningly slim margin given Byrne and other outside groups outspent Young by 10-to-1. Young also had virtually no help from outside groups...

Could someone with Photoshop skills help place the "Scarlet Letter", a bright red "O" for Obamacare, on the foreheads of members of congress that voted for Obamacare? I'd like to propose this for the advertising campaign for the Tea Party in the 2014 elections. Call it the "New Scarlet Letter".

...On Wednesday, the NCDOT sent out an alert which reads: “A High severity incident has been Added for I-40 Eastbound in Wake County in Raleigh,” before going on to list the incident as “Vehicle Accident: Women Drivers, Rain, Obama Care.” ... According to the transportation officials, the systems were being analyzed at the time of the incident and messages were only supposed to be sent internally. The IT contractor reportedly did not follow protocol, and the alerts were sent to the public mistakenly... “The individual violated procedures by failing to turn off the external feed while testing and for the...

SPRINGFIELD— — A contingent of black lawmakers blocked a vote on Mayor Rahm Emanuel's watered-down proposal to impose tougher penalties for illegal gun possession, the latest example of a rift between the mayor and the African-American community. The reversal came after the stage appeared to be set Thursday to approve one of Emanuel's top legislative priorities of the fall session. Sponsoring Rep. Mike Zalewski, D-Riverside, held a news conference where he predicted the latest incarnation of the bill involving mandatory minimum prison sentences would pass. As the Illinois House came to order, the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. gave the morning...

The other day I was at Gunnews.com HQ when the owner, Manny DelaCruz, came out of his office and asked me this question; “If you had to make a list of your top 10 must-own guns what would be on it?” So we started a lively discussion about which guns should be on this list. We came to the conclusion that making such a list is more difficult than it would seem. On my drive home, I started to think that this topic would make a good article, because it would allow you, the reader, a chance to post your...

The GOP's No. 2 in the Senate, John Cornyn, is facing electoral trouble as virtually half of Texas voters say they want someone more conservative in the Upper Chamber. The survey, by Public Policy Polling found 49 percent of Lone Star State Republicans want a candidate further to the right than the Senate Minority Whip. Just 33 percent say they want Cornyn to be given the chance to seek a third term when he faces the voters next year. A total of 62 percent said they have a higher opinion of the state's junior, Ted Cruz, than they have of...

Don't you believe that President Obama's lies that people could keep their health insurance plans and doctors were his only lies about Obamacare or that these and the other lies were not demonstrably false when he uttered them. In my book "Crimes Against Liberty," I chronicled Obama's multitudinous lies about Obamacare and many other subjects, from earmarks to tax increases. Please allow me to revisit some of my reporting on the Obamacare lies in light of the recent furor over Obama's dissembling concerning health care. Let's start with the particularly galling declaration Obama made after Congress' partisan passage of Obamacare...

A panel of Florida legislators on Thursday easily defeated an effort to repeal the state's controversial "stand your ground law" Thursday following hours of passionate testimony. The vote by a committee of the Republican-controlled House, which seemed unlikely just a few months ago, comes after the trial of George Zimmerman renewed scrutiny of the self-defense law that was first passed in 2005. Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin after claiming self-defense. While "stand your ground" was not directly mentioned in the trial, the law was included in the jury instructions and sparked a monthlong...

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Francis will receive Russian President Vladimir Putin on November 25, an encounter that could help mend strained relations between the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church. Russian-Vatican relations have been fraught since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, with Moscow accusing the Roman Catholic Church of trying to poach believers from the Russian Orthodox Church, a charge the Vatican denies. But Putin is the first Kremlin leader since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to publicly profess religious faith - to the Orthodox church - and has several times advocated ending the long feud between the...