Free Republic

MEXICAN PRESIDENT Felipe Calderón has shown courage in leading his government to take on the violent drug gangs that have claimed thousands of Mexican lives. On Thursday, he displayed a different kind of fortitude: standing before a joint meeting of Congress and asking for a revival of the U.S. assault weapons ban. The Obama administration, which has been largely absent in the fight against the illegal gun trade, should have such backbone. Mr. Calderón, who has been in Washington for a state visit, made a powerful case. Over the past three years, Mexican authorities have seized some 75,000 weapons used...

Mayor Richard Daley today refused to concede that the Supreme Court is likely to overturn the city's gun ban, but said that he will be ready to act quickly to put in place restrictions on gun ownership if it does. * The mayor said if the court overturns the Chicago ban, as expected, he'll quickly present new legislation to the City Council. * But he talked about the possibility of ballistics tests for registered guns, so police can track them if they're used in crimes. The mayor mentioned the possibility of some kind of registry to let police know how...

President Barack Obama's hopes of closing the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects slipped further into the distance Wednesday night. The defense authorization bill approved by the House Armed Services Committee, 59 to 0, late Wednesday contains language barring funding to build or convert any facility in the U.S. to accept former Guantanamo detainees.Such a provision could scuttle President Barack Obama's plan to close Guantanamo by purchasing a state prison in Thomson, Ill. to house some of those now at Gitmo.The administration had sought $350 million in Department of Defense funding for detainee-related closure and transfer expenses and another $237 million in...

On Mother's Day, Chuck Schumer delivered two commencement speeches upstate, flew back to Brooklyn to eat dinner with his wife, mother and daughters and at 7:38 p.m. toted a briefcase into his midtown office for the political ritual known as the Sunday press conference. Picking his way through a line of television cameramen, he joked: "It's like football. No holes. Can't get through," then settled into his habitual spot between a lectern and a ratty blue curtain. "The Times Square car bomb should be a wake-up call for the administration," Schumer said into a bouquet of microphones, demanding that President...

Change is Barack Obama’s political calling card and the fuel that propelled his never-waste-a-crisis agenda — but change is boomeranging big time on the president in a turbulent and unpredictable 2010.  For the first time since he emerged as a national political figure six years ago, Obama finds himself on the wrong side of the change equation — the status quo side — with challengers in both parties running against him, his policies or his handpicked candidates.  Tea party conservative Rand Paul romped in the GOP Kentucky Senate primary by pledging to overturn virtually every major Obama initiative. And both...

Bloomberg link: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aAvytpuvyv4Y&pos=15

THERE are many theories for why very conservative Republicans seem to be doing so well lately, taking their party’s Senate nominations in Florida, Kentucky and Utah, and beating Democrats head-to-head in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Virginia. Some attribute this to a generalized anti-incumbent mood. Others say it reflects the tendency of parties in power to falter in midterm elections. Recently it has been fashionable to ascribe right-wing success to the Tea Party movement. Related But the most obvious explanation is the one that’s been conspicuously absent from the gusher of analysis. Republican success in 2010 can be boiled down to...

Jonathan I. Katz, a physics professor at Washington University in St. Louis., said he was fired from the team of scientists chosen by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu to help BP Plc control the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. “Some of Professor Katz’s controversial writings have become a distraction from the critical work of addressing the oil spill,” Stephanie Mueller, a spokeswoman for the Energy Department, said in an e-mail today. “Professor Katz will no longer be involved in the department’s efforts.” Chu brought Katz to Houston last week along with four other experts, Richard L. Garwin, a...

My fear is that Bill Maher’s religious-like crusade to wipe out religion is going to wipe out the Bill Maher I’ve grown to enjoy and respect. His seething intolerance and disrespect for people with religious faith are becoming as offensive as the racial and sexual-orientation bigotry Maher delights in railing against. Last Friday on his HBO program, “Real Time with Bill Maher,” he engaged his political panel in a 14-minute discussion that focused on his belief that religious people are “deluded.” His panelists, including an author who is an atheist, disagreed with Maher, which served to frustrate him. Maher’s flippant,...

In a firefight, a soldier armed with an M-16 rifle can zip through a couple hundred bullets. The United States military is fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That combination is prompting the biggest surge in production at the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant near Independence since the Vietnam War. This year the plant will produce about 1.5 billion rounds of small-caliber ammunition. And the complex is in the middle of a $244 million modernization program to keep up with the demand. Its work force has jumped from 600 people when its current operator, Minneapolis-based Alliant Techsystems, took over the...

UC Berkeley is adding something a little different this year in its welcome package -- cotton swabs for a DNA sample. In the past, incoming freshman and transfer students have received a rather typical welcome book from the College of Letters and Science's "On the Same Page" program, but this year the students will be asked for more. The students will be asked to voluntarily submit a DNA sample. The cotton swabs will come with two bar code labels. One label will be put on the DNA sample and the other is kept for the students own records. The confidential...

CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. — A school district that gained the support of President Obama for promoting accountability after it fired all its teachers from a struggling school announced yesterday that it had reached an agreement with the union to return all the current employees to their jobs. The two sides said a transformation plan for Central Falls High School for the coming school year would allow the 87 teachers, guidance counselors, librarians, and other workers who were to lose their jobs at the end of this year to return without having to reapply. More than 700 people had already applied...

Mark Snyder, an amateur biathlete, wanted to buy a .22-caliber bolt-action rifle for target shooting and figured the process would take about a week. After nearly six weeks, six visits to police departments and $300 in fees, he secured his rifle. "I was not expecting a free ride," said Mr. Snyder, 45, "but this is an obstacle course they put in place." The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the District of Columbia's 32-year ban on handguns in 2008, a victory for the gun-rights lobby that seemed to promise a more permissive era in America's long tussle over gun ownership. Since then,...

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected to present a revised budget plan Friday that would dismantle some of California's landmark healthcare programs after efforts to scale them back have been reversed by federal courts. The rulings, issued mostly over the last two years, have already forced the state to unwind roughly $2.4 billion in cuts approved by the governor and Legislature and have alarmed other financially strapped states seeking ways to balance their budgets. * The court fight raises new questions about the viability of the national healthcare overhaul signed into law by President Obama earlier this year. The federal legislation...

Gov. Deval Patrick said the senseless shooting death of a teenage Boston honors student this weekend should prompt lawmakers to act on a stalled measure detailed in the Herald that would target machine gun ownership. “The tragedy over the weekend in Boston with another 14-year-old who was killed just underscores the importance of getting action,” Patrick said yesterday. The governor said he spoke with the slain teen’s mother yesterday morning and told her, “It’s not the order of things that you bury your own child. That a child who is doing right and is playing on the streets would be...

CHEYENNE, Wyo. -- The grizzly took Jerry Ruth by surprise, bursting from thick brush and biting his jaw almost completely off. On the ground and barely able to see, Ruth grabbed his .41 Magnum-caliber revolver and started shooting. The third bullet pierced the bear's heart and spinal cord, killing it from 25 feet. "I'm glad I was armed with a firearm and I'm glad I was able to shoot straight," said Ruth, attacked last July 19 a couple miles from his home not far from Yellowstone National Park. Ruth's gun quite possibly saved his life. It also provided fodder for...

While the rest of the nation comes to grips with fresh concerns about terrorism, domestic and foreign, Congress is wrapped up in the peculiar obsessions of the gun lobby — most of which are certain to make Americans less safe in their homes and on the streets. Congress, for example, is cowering before the gun lobby insistence that even terrorist suspects who are placed on the “no-fly list” must not be denied the right to buy and bear arms. Suspects on that list purchased more than 1,100 weapons in the last six years, but Congress has never summoned the gumption...

The once-cautious Washington Post has begun to invest heavily in the liberal blogosphere, transforming its online presence – through a combination of accident and design – into a competitor of the Huffington Post and TalkingPointsMemo as much as the New York Times. The Post’s foray into the new media world received some unfavorable attention last weekend when its latest hire, Dave Weigel, who covers conservatives, referred to gay marriage foes as “bigots.” But the resulting controversy brought into relief a larger shift: The Post now hosts three of the strongest liberal blogs on the Internet, and draws a disproportionate share...

The ferocious oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is threatening President Barack Obama’s reputation for competence, just as surely as it endangers the Gulf ecosystem. So White House aides are escalating their efforts to reassure Congress and the public in the face of a slow-motion catastrophe, even though it’s not clear they can bring it under control anytime soon. “There is no good answer to this,” one senior administration official said. “There is no readily apparent solution besides one that could take three months. ... If it doesn’t show the impotence of the government, it shows the limits of...

A day after highlighting the need for immigration reform at an Iowa town hall meeting, President Barack Obama last week raised doubts about whether Congress really had “an appetite immediately to dive into another controversial issue.”  Immigration activists were shocked, to say the least — “pissed” is how Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, described his reaction — and the remarks undercut the next day’s unveiling of an immigration reform framework, while providing Republicans more leeway to accuse Democrats of demagoguing on the issue.  Clarissa Martinez, the National Council of La Raza’s immigration and national campaign director, put the...