Free Republic

There is one aspect of the final debt deal from DC that took me by surprise. I was convinced the 2% reduction in payroll taxes would be extended through 2012. On July 12th I wrote about this and got it completely wrong. Not only did I think there would be a one year extension of the existing holiday; I forecast that the subsidy would actually be increased.

Do you notice how the Democrats are cranking up the class warfare rhetoric? The ObamaMedia, of course, is loving it, and they’ve shown their eagerness to promote the message right into the election. Just know this … the media – with exceptions of course – is dedicated to the reelection of The Community Organizer. The only real tactical question is just how obvious they are going to be about it. The dumb masses must be reeled in --- so let’s not make it too obvious. Actually … it looks like the dumb masses have already been reeled in. I cited...

In its most recent report, Blue Chip Economic Indicators predicted that the nation's unemployment rate would fall to 8% by the end of 2012. That might seem like good news, considering the fact that unemployment now stands at 9.1%. But it is not good news for the President. Barring some cataclysmic event ("wag the dog") that would rally the country behind him, Obama's reelection rests on the health of the economy and especially on employment. The problem for this President is that unemployment rates during the second and third quarters of 2012, when undecided voters will make up their minds,...

America's Ruling Class-And the perils of a Revolution Angelo Codevilla As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors' "toxic assets" was the only alternative to the U.S. economy's "systemic collapse." In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not...

There has rarely been a starker juxtaposition of evil and innocence than the moment President George W. Bush received the news about 9/11 while reading The Pet Goat with second-graders in Sarasota, Fla. Seven-year-olds can't understand what Islamic terrorism is all about. But they know when an adult's face is telling them something is wrong - and none of the students sitting in Sandra Kay Daniels' class at Emma E. Booker Elementary School that morning can forget the devastating change in Bush's expression when White House chief of staff Andrew Card whispered the terrible news of the al-Qaeda attack. Lazaro...

A glimpse of tonight's speech by Obama: President Barack Obama will call tomorrow for a combination of reductions in entitlement spending and tax increases on higher-income Americans to address long-term fiscal debt while drawing a sharp contrast with the Republican alternative proposed by Representative Paul Ryan, according to a person familiar with the plan. This speech is just more evidence of the Marxist nature of our President. He will bandy about words such as "shared sacrifice" and "fairness" but in Obama's world shared sacrifice means you turn over more and more of YOUR labor and wealth to the government...

The size of government threatens the American way of life as we know it. The solution is straightforward -- cut government. A vibrant grassroots movement insists that it happen, and Washington is lousy with rival plans for how to go about it. The social threat to the American way of life is as dire, if not more so. But it is more insidious, and more complicated. No grassroots movement has mobilized against it, and no high-profile bipartisan commission is suggesting remedies. Yet it proceeds apace, all but ignored except in the lives of Americans. Among those trying to sound the...

Life not fair. Nor for that matter is it unfair. It simply is. It’s not fair or unfair that the lion feasts on the slowest zebra or that the penguin who leaps into the ocean at just the wrong moment becomes dinner for an Orca. Life is life… fair doesn’t come into play. Fair is a fundamentally human concept that is defined by a lack of preference or favoritism and or injustice. Despite its subjective nature, fairness is a word that the left loves to bring to what should be an objective realm, politics. It’s not fair that CEOs...

Lawdy.

RUSH: Robert B. Reichhhh, you've got to hear this. Robert B. Reichhhh was on NBC live last night with the anchor Cenk Uygur, and he spoke with Reich, and Cenk Uygur said, "This isn't just about let's get the money from the rich because that's where it is and they've accumulated all the wealth up at the top. It also makes sense for the rich if we had more equal distribution of income because of the effect it would have on the middle class. Tell us about that, why do you think [it's better to redistribute the wealth?] Now if...

To make sense of what's going on in Wisconsin, it helps to understand that the left in America lives in an ideological fantasy world. The dispute between the state government and the unions representing its employees is "about power," Paul Krugman of the New York Times observes accurately, before going off the rails: What [Gov. Scott] Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin--and eventually, America--less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy. And that's why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be...

Nick Clegg is to make an explosive attack on British universities as ‘instruments of social segregation’ as he orders them to stop taking so many middle-class students. The Deputy Prime Minister will this week insist that top institutions must ‘throw open their doors’ and lower their entrance requirements for the less well-off.

The ruling class continues to live high on the hog at the expense of the rest of the country -- staggering national debt, 10th Amendment and Great Recession be damned. The figures that follow are more consistent with an aristocracy, monarchy or plutocracy than our constitutional republic. Home prices According to the Washington Post, the Washington DC area experienced "the highest year-over-year home price gains in the nation this fall, as real estate values slumped in nearly every other metropolitan area." The article cited Standard & Poor's latest S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices released last week. From October 2009 to October...

Barack Obama has a substantial record of using thug-like language: ** Obama: “They Bring a Knife…We Bring a Gun” ** Obama to His Followers: “Get in Their Faces!” ** Obama on ACORN Mobs: “I don’t want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry! I’m angry!” ** Obama to His Mercenary Army: “Hit Back Twice As Hard” ** Obama on the private sector: “We talk to these folks… so I know whose ass to kick.“ ** Obama to voters: Republican victory would mean “hand to hand combat” ** Obama to lib supporters: “It’s time to Fight...

I need to know the rules for the Democrat’s class warfare. I understand that we are supposed to hate the rich, but which rich? I don’t understand the rules that separate friend from foe. We are supposed to hate successful manufacturers. But we are supposed to love a man who came to the Senate as a pauper, then used his position to become a multi-millionaire. We are supposed to hate Wall Street Bankers. But we are supposed to love a sleazy ambulance chaser. We are supposed to hate Paris for inheriting millions from a daddy who made it big in...

WASHINGTON (AP) - After meeting with President Barack Obama Thursday, Democratic leaders in Congress said they plan to hold a series of politically charged votes to extend middle-class tax cuts while letting tax cuts for the wealthy expire. Excerpted per FR posting rules.

...Christian Lander’s low-key but excellent “Whiter Shades of Pale” is a sequel to his first book, “Stuff White People Like” (2008)...Lander’s books are about that demographic slice of educated (or self-cultivated) people who are drawn to places where the good cheese stores, coffee bars, bookshops, art movie houses and indie bands are — places where, as importantly, there are plenty of other people pretty much like themselves. Needless to say, this bunch is easily satirized, and few people alive are as deft at this as is Lander...The conceit of Lander’s books is that he’s explaining, like some cross-cultural docent, the...

George W. Bush has come out of his self-imposed media blackout to promote his new book, Decision Points, which goes into full release on November 9th. Oprah Winfrey will air a pretaped interview with the former President on that day, but has a preview of the appearance out already, via The Right Scoop. In this clip, Bush tells Winfrey that he refrains from opining on Barack Obama’s performance because he wants to treat the current President the way he wished other former Presidents had treated him. Also, he elects to stay out of the “swamp” of punditry when Winfrey asks...

Consumers' right to file class actions is in dangerIf AT&T has its way before the Supreme Court, any business that issues a contract to customers would be able to prevent them from joining class-action lawsuits, taking away arguably the most powerful legal tool available to the little guy. By David Lazarus November 5, 2010 It hasn't gotten a lot of press, but a case involving AT&T that goes before the U.S. Supreme Court next week has sweeping ramifications for potentially millions of consumers. If a majority of the nine justices vote the telecom giant's way, any business that issues a...

Hidden in ObamaCare, Section 8002, is a new payroll tax that will hit paychecks of American employees beginning 01/01/2011. It was placed in ObamaCare to make the legislation appear to cost almost $100 billion less than the true cost. That’s according to Ron Greiner of StopObamaCare101.com,a national medical insurance expert. The program is called the Community Living Assistance Services and Support Program (ironically dubbed: “CLASS Act”). Even the Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee (Senator Kent Conrad D-ND) called it, “A Ponzi Scheme of the first order, the kind of thing that Bernie Madoff would have been proud of.” (Charles...