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KABUL, Afghanistan – Two Afghan government sources say former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani has been killed in the capital Kabul. The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Rabbani was killed Tuesday evening at his home in Kabul.

There is enough blame for both political parties to share, according to S&P, since one of their primary reasons for the downgrade is the fact that fiscal policy has now become little more than a political football. "The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America's governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed." Apparently legitimate Republican offerings such as Cut, Cap and Balance are considered by S&P to be on a par with the White House's belligerent bullying, posturing, obfuscation and stubborn refusal to present a plan. The...

Rand changed my life. When I embraced her philosophy, Objectivism, the conversion was far more dramatic than my decision, several years later, to follow Jesus Christ—more dramatic, but in the end transitory. Yet Rand, the novelist, philosopher, and uncompromising atheist, inadvertently opened a door for the gospel. I don't believe dead people spin in their graves, but if they did and she could read these words, I imagine Rand would be twirling violently. As many have noted, Rand's ethic of rational self-interest is incompatible with the gospel, and leads to social as well as spiritual disaster. "Most observers see Rand...

----snip---- Three things would change. I'd bet a round of drinks he would ... 1. Frame everything around the user experience. Citizens are users, and the government delivers services. Guess what? Since World War II, the basic framework of our bureaucracy hasn't changed, just grown on rotting foundations. Now it's a tangled, clumsy, wobbling mass of weeds. President Jobs would restore a sense of purpose by reorienting the whole thing around people. Human-centered government begins with insisting on only releasing services that people will be irresistibly drawn to use and love. To get there, begin with keen observation. Look for...

Speaking on education reform and the Muslim Brotherhood and its connections. Horowitz' speech.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Ismael Hernandez, the founder of the Freedom & Virtue Institute. He is a black Hispanic ex-communist activist who is now a conservative. His decision to launch his institute was founded on years of hard work in poor communities and his eventual realization that, decades after the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, there are still walls of silence, oppression and division erected in minority communities by governments, organizations and leaders who are invested in a government-centered vision for minority America. FP: Ismael Hernandez, welcome to Frontpage Interview. I would like to talk to you today...

So now the parrot press is claiming that Obama is "walking-back" his comments about the building of a mosque near the site of the World Trade Center "man-caused disaster" as he would prefer to call the horrific and barbarous events of that infamous day. Walking back? Hogwash. It was a rhetorical feint. Obama intends for his comments to be heard as walking back from his earlier position, and for the drive-by media that is precisely how they will take it, thereby trivializing the entire discussion. But for anyone with half a brain, it is patently clear that he has set...

“Another thing we can do for jobs is make toys of me, especially for the holidays. Little dolls. Me. Like maybe little action dolls. Me in an army uniform, air force uniform, and me in my suit. They can make toys of me and my vehicle, especially for the holidays and Christmas for the kids. That’s something that would create jobs. So you see I think out of the box like that. It’s not something a typical person would bring up. That’s something that could happen, that makes sense. It’s not a joke.”

It’s bad enough that mainstream conservatives like Gov. Sarah Palin and Erick Erickson have endorsed Ron Paul’s son Rand in Kentucky’s Senate race. But now that two more major conservative leaders—Dr. James Dobson and Sen. Jim DeMint—have done the same, the Right should be very troubled by the mainstreaming of the Paul family’s near-total abandonment of America’s national defense. ... Rand and his father represent nothing less than a rejection of the Right’s commitment to engaging and assessing the world as it really is, rather than as we would like it to be, and an embrace of the Left’s belief...

Anyway, what is the general philosophy that guides this President abroad? I think there are four or five elements, and I’d like to just go briefly through them and then apply them to specific policies and countries—and see if we can spot their presence. One, of course, is that he’s a post-modern President. That’s a fancy word for saying a culture that arose after the modern period, the so-called the post- modern period. And within it is a belief system that incorporates things like utopian pacifism. He seems to believe that as a child of the Enlightenment that if very...

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Robert Buchar, an associate professor and author of the Cinematography Program at Columbia College in Chicago. A political refugee from former Czechoslovakia, he is the producer of the documentary, Velvet Hangover, which is about Czech New Wave filmmakers, how they survived the period of “normalization” and their reflections on the so-called Velvet Revolution of 1989. He is the author of the new book, And Reality be Damned… Undoing America: What The Media Didn’t Tell You About the End of the Cold War and Fall of Communism in Europe. The book is based on a documentary...

After watching the near shameless celebration of Geraldo Rivera over the passage of the most significant phase to date of your totalitarian vision for America, I want to strongly suggest that you back off of your criticism of Fox News. If, as you assert, Fox News was merely a mouthpiece of the Republican Party, Geraldo would have been assigned tonight to something else altogether. Instead, he was barely able to contain his glee. If, as your favorite broadcaster, Keith Olbermann, suggests, that everything that gets on Fox is at the personal direction of Rupert Murdoch, we would probably not have...

Tea Party Express Oklahoma City Photos from November 4, 2009

"At the end of the twentieth century, as we look back over a seventy-year Socialist experiment and an equal period of capitalistic Western prosperity, one thing becomes clear. Economic freedom is not a superfluous footnote to to other freedoms, but a prerequisite to the existence of all other freedoms. Even liberal Sweden attests to this. As the years have gone by, Sweden's coercive Socialist economic policies have increasingly spilled over into other areas to the point that civil liberties of all kinds are threatened. Religious freedom, educational freedom, and the freedom to raise one's children according to one's own beliefs...

A registered nurse in Durham, N.H., has filed a civil suit against three officials of the Obama Administration alleging the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act's health information technology provisions unconstitutionally violate the HIPAA privacy rule, Privacy Act and Federal Common Law.

Newt just broke out a brand new, king-sized, can of industrial-strenght whup-ass on completely speechless MSNBC reporter. The reporter challenged Newt on Palin's experience. Newt blew, asked him when the MSM was going to give up spouting that baloney and then went through the most concise, most compelling litany of why she is eminently more qualified than Barack Obama. At the end he challenged the reporter to name ANYTHING that Obama has done that compares with her actual experience and the reporter demonstrated the ultimate deer in the headlights look. It would be so nice to have a clip of...

AUSTIN — Ginny McCallum, 43, who has been confined to a wheelchair for much of her adult life, came to hear presidential candidate Barack Obama speak at the University of Texas. Afterward she found herself in a wheelchair access breezeway as Obama and his entourage exited the arena. The candidate spotted her, came over, grabbed her hand and pulled her up. She found herself standing for the first time in eleven years.

While in the fair city of Baltimore a couple of weeks ago I noticed Arabic writing on a number of round embossed medal "seals?"(5 inches or so in diameter) embedded in the brick pavement around the Inner Harbor.

1. "I would accept schism" For a century, the fight between liberals and conservatives in the mainline denominations has usually meant that conservatives have broken away to create new denominations while asserting that it's the liberals who have truly departed from the church and its teachings. It has been difficult to convince the liberals that they're the ones who are schismatic. But while that story looked to be happening again in the fight between orthodox Anglicans and liberal Episcopalians, it now appears that something different may indeed occur. Faced with a unanimous ultimatum from the world's Anglican leaders to bar...