Free Republic

News reports suggest that on Thursday night, the president will tell Republicans in the House and Senate that they should put “country before party” and endorse his proposals for job creation. The “country before party” line has become Obama’s new theme in the wake of the debt crisis, and the passion with which he invokes it indicates it’s something he actually and truly believes in. And it’s utter nonsense. Offensive nonsense too. Obama isn’t truly asking Republicans to put country before party. He is asking them to elevate the interests and ideas of the Democratic party higher than their own...

President Obama called for Congress to "get on board" with more infrastructure spending and a new round of middle-class tax cuts Monday, as he delivered a campaign-style speech that served as a warm-up to a vital jobs address later this week. Interrupted repeatedly by chants of "four more years," the president marked Labor Day in Detroit at a rally with the nation's top labor leaders. He used the address to underscore his alliance with the labor movement -- at a time when cracks are starting to show -- and preview some of the proposals he'll outline during a speech Thursday...

Jeane Kirkpatrick, who died yesterday at 80, was that rare thing--a public intellectual and a public figure. She excelled at both. Ms. Kirkpatrick is known to the public at large because Ronald Reagan, after defeating Jimmy Carter for the Presidency in 1980, appointed her U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. It is worth mentioning in this context that earlier this week Senate Democrats succeeded finally in driving John Bolton from the U.N. ambassadorship. The mind's eye recalls the televised image in the early 1980s of Ambassador Kirkpatrick, a Democrat then, seated at the U.N. Security Council table and publicly defending...