Free Republic

Airports have been the main stages for security and hygiene "theater.". Bureaucrats cling to power. It’s their institutional predisposition. So it was no surprise on Wednesday when the Department of Justice appealed the recent Federal court ruling that struck down the mask mandate imposed on mass transportation by the Centers for Disease Control. As the appeal demonstrates, governments are especially reluctant to give up emergency powers. When they do, the relinquishment is grudging and only partial. That is a big reason why big government keeps getting bigger. As economist Robert Higgs showed in his book Crisis and Leviathan, since the...

Chuck Todd, NBC News Political Director and moderator of Meet the Press, appeared on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show on Tuesday November 11, to promote his new book "The Stranger: Barack Obama in the White House." During his appearance, the NBC host defended Obama’s 2008 speech in which then-candidate Obama claimed “bitter Americans” “cling to guns or religion.” Todd argued that Obama’s “just observing the way an anthropologist would observe a society.” Todd’s defense of Obama came in response to a caller to the show who argued: One asks why Obama is so aloof, so cool, so withdrawn,

People who cling to guns vote, too By: Roger Simon April 15, 2008 06:57 PM EST Barack Obama thought he was among friends. That was his problem. He is an urban sophisticate, and he was talking to other urban sophisticates. He was in San Francisco last week explaining at a closed-door fundraiser how the rubes of small-town America often do foolish, misguided things when the economy turns bad. “It’s not surprising that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigration sentiment or anti-trade sentiment,” the golden-tongued orator from Illinois...

Jonah Goldberg has defined correctly what Americans are upset with in Obama's San Francisco speech. Goldberg said today on Fox News that elitism can be good (for instance, you want the best, most elite surgeon to do your surgery) and using the word "bitter" isn't the problem with Obama's speech; however, the problem comes with Obama's use of the word "clinging" in describing small town America's reverence for God and support of the 2nd Amendment. So, the problem with Obama is not so much elitism but arrogance.

Senator Barack Obama fought back Saturday against accusations from his rivals that he had displayed a profound misunderstanding of small-town values, in a flare-up that left him on the defensive before a series of primaries that could test his ability to win over white voters in economically distressed communities. For a second day, Mr. Obama sought to explain his remarks at a recent San Francisco fund-raiser that small-town Pennsylvania voters, bitter over their economic circumstances, “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” as a way to explain their frustrations. Acknowledging Saturday that “I didn’t...

The possibility of a Clinton comeback was looking far-fetched. But operatives in both parties were buzzing about that possibility Saturday following the revelation that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) told wealthy San Franciscans that small-town Pennsylvanians and Midwesterners “cling to guns or religion” because they are “bitter” about their economic status. Obama at first dug in on that contention Friday after audio of the private fundraiser was posted by The Huffington Post. Altering course, on Saturday in Muncie, Ind., he conceded that he “didn’t say it as well as I should have.” And he told the Winston-Salem, N.C., Journal that “obviously,...

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to...

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Islanders on tiny Tuvalu in the South Pacific last week saw the future of global warming and rising sea levels, as extreme high tides caused waves to crash over crumbling sea-walls and flood their homes. "Our island is sinking together with our hearts," wrote Silafaga Lalua in Tuvalu News (www.tuvaluislands.com). Tuvalu is a remote island nation consisting of a fringe of atolls covering just 10 sq miles, with the highest point no more than 17 ft above sea level, but most a mere 6.5 ft. Global warming (news - web sites) from greenhouse gas pollution is regarded...

I’d love to have a talk about the current situation in the Ukraine with my left-wing friends, but I don’t think they would be interested, and probably not even capable of an intelligent discussion. Not only is the Ukraine so far off and seemingly unimportant to them, the intricacies of its politics defy the usual “left” vs. “right” stereotypes. I truly believe that many long-time lefties pine for the days of the Soviet Union. It gave them a glimmer of hope for world-wide socialism in their otherwise very comfortable, cushy, American lives. Too much guilt about living in the midst...