Free Republic

Am I an old fart or am I right to be pissed that some jackass is skateboarding down the halls of the White House while all this Iranian shit is going down? We truly have succumbed to the idiocy of the MTV/Mountain Dew/Road Rules backward hat and baggy short culture. Did I miss something, or is the White House the future set for the next Real World? Where are the wallet chains? Is Hot Topic handling our foreign policy? Obama should be grounded for a week for letting Tony Hawk play in OUR house. Where in hell are the adults?...

They hopes to win the keys to the White House. Instead, they got tickets to Yankee Stadium. Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose presidential aspirations collapsed in humiliating defeat in Florida last year, and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the failed GOP veep pick, enjoyed a game at Yankee Stadium on Sunday. The GOP political duo and their spouses exchanged laughs, smiles and small talk as they watched the Yanks take on Tampa Bay. At one point, Giuliani snapped a photo of his wife, Judith, with Alaska's First Couple. Giuliani invited the Palins to the game when he learned they would be...

A new poll of the potential 2012 GOP primary field from CNN/Opinion Research Corp. shows a log jam of three candidates at the top. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, and current Alaska Governor Sarah Palin are in a statistical dead heat according to the survey conducted May 14-17 with a 4.5% margin of error: Huckabee 22 Palin 21 Romney 21 Gingrich 13 Jeb Bush 6 Someone Else 10 In related news, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, who announced today he would not be seeking a third term, dodged questions today about running in 2012 while adding...

Greg Gutfeld takes the challenge: Can Fox produce a show that anticipates a SNL parody of Fox? The panel discusses the question: should the US invade Canada… and produces something almost as hilarious as the old Half Hour News Hour. UPDATE: The clip in question is a sequence of goofs about the feebleness, uselessness and absurdity of the Canadian Armed Forces. Why would I call that dumb? Here's why, courtesy of CanWest News. Sorry I disrespected your show, RedEye fans - but you disrespected the dead. --David Frum

You can’t help but admire Rush Limbaugh’s talent for publicity. His radio talk show is probably—reliable figures only go back to 1991—in its third decade as the number-one rated radio show in the country. And here he is in the news again, trading verbal punches with the president of the United States. Limbaugh remarked on Jan. 16 that to the degree that Obama’s program is one of state socialism, he hopes it will fail. (If only he had said the same about George W. Bush.) The president riposted at a session with congressional leaders a week later, telling them, “You...

They are down and out in the United States and homesick for Guatemala. And El Salvador. And Honduras. And Mexico. And they would go back without even an American penny in their pocket if only they had enough to get home. They are the discouraged and disillusioned Central American and Mexican day laborers who, in a sign of how hard times are in this economy, find themselves so broke they can't send much, if any, money back to loved ones they haven't seen for years. "We have lost our reason for being here," laments Jose Perez, 42, a Guatemalan living...

Sen. Byrd during a June 21, 2000 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on then-Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.

Lest you find yourself discouraged about voting or worse, still undecided, on this the last day before the national election, here are a few incentives for you to get out and make your vote count. 1. Free coffee at Starbucks. Starbucks locations nation-wide will be giving out free cups of regular coffee (tall, of course) to patrons who have voted. 2. Krispy Kreme is preparing special star-shaped Election Day donuts for each customer sporting an "I Voted" sticker. 3. And what Election Day would be complete without a free scoop of Ben & Jerry's ice cream ? Of course, good...

The following is a youtube of Darcy Burner's interview with John Carlson and Ken Schram: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnhybrxEEVw

WASHINGTON -- John McCain, like many Americans who should know better, extravagantly praises Theodore Roosevelt. He is a kindred spirit of the impulsive Rough Rider, but the visceral McCain is rescued from some of TR's excesses by not having TR's overflowing cupboard of ideas. In "Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness" (Yale University Press), Joshua David Hawley, 28, a former clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts, demonstrates that TR, far from being, in Henry Adams' acerbic description, "pure act," was a man of many complex ideas. Some were admirable; many were repellant. He was an individualist who considered the individualism of...

We have a new report out on the use of immigration law to combat criminal gangs. It should — but probably won't — seal the case against "sanctuary" cities that prohibit cooperation between their local police and federal immigration authorities. The limitations these sanctuary cities put on their cops are violations of federal law, but Congress, after outlawing the practice, has done nothing to follow up. This is a serious oversight because local police cannot succeed in fighting these vicious international criminal organizations without using immigration law.

Immigration law enforcement has been a key ingredient contributing to the success of criminal gang suppression efforts in many jurisdictions across the United States. Since 2005, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has arrested more than 8,000 gangsters from more than 700 different gangs as part of a special initiative known as Operation Community Shield. This effort has produced incalculable public safety benefits for American communities, despite being criticized periodically by immigrant and civil liberties advocates that are consistently opposed to all immigration law enforcement. Local governments and law enforcement agencies that shun involvement in immigration law enforcement...

We'll see what happens tomorrow, of course, but in the meantime it's worth noting that today the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell only about seven percent. Only? Yes, only. On October 19, 1987, it fell by more than 22 percent.

I do not understand why those who've voted no should be labeled "irresponsible." The senate evidently will not deign to take up this crisis legislation until Wednesday. Meanwhile, even if you don't reject the bill on philosophical grounds (see e.g., Dick Armey's article on NRO today), there is massive room for improvement. Why not take the time to try to improve it? This was a terrible bill. To take just a few particulars, why is there no reform of the government interventions that got us to this point in the first place? Why aren't Fannie and Freddie being wound down...

Who do you think won the first Presidential Debate?

The single-biggest mistake in the Paulson bank-rescue-plan marketing effort has been the failure to explain clearly how taxpayers are going to recoup $700 billion used to buy toxic assets at auction in order to unfreeze the banking system. In other words, folks don’t understand how taxpayers will be paid back, and may actually make profits, which will enable the new government debt to be erased after the Treasury bank-rescue is completed. Here’s the key point: Any loan package bought by the Treasury will be 100 percent taxpayer owned. Period. Let’s walk through this hypothetical for a moment. Through a market-driven...

If you want to get a good handle on the kind of toxic waste Hank Paulson and Congress think we need to buy, read “Behind the Housing Crash: Confessions from an Insider” by Aaron Clarey (better known as “Captain Capitalism”). Clarey was an analyst for several banks in Minnesota from 1998 to 2007 and he witnessed the utter destruction of lending standards over the last decade. Clarey makes an important point — there would be no crisis if individuals and businesses who had promised to pay back their loans were doing so. The vast majority of those who are not...

Q: Where do you stand on Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s $700 billion emergency banking plan? A: Congress should pass the Paulson plan. 24 votes Congress should pass a modified version of the Paulson plan. 74 votes Congress should not pass the Paulson plan. 102 votes 200 votes total.

"The queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. 'Off with his head!' she said without even looking around." -- "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" WASHINGTON -- Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama. Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked The Wall Street Journal to editorialize that "McCain untethered"...

I understand the rough and tumble of politics. But Barack Obama -- the supposedly postpartisan, postracial candidate of hope and change -- has gone where few modern candidates have gone before. Mr. Obama's campaign is now trafficking in prejudice of its own making. And in doing so, it is playing with political dynamite. What kind of potential president would let his campaign knowingly extract two incomplete, out-of-context lines from two radio parodies and build a framework of hate around them in order to exploit racial tensions? The segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s were famous for such vile fear-mongering. Here's...