Free Republic

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., defended saying “amen and awoman” after his opening prayer in Congress this week after being mocked online. Cleaver told the Kansas City Star said he did not expect to be made fun of for the “lighthearted pun,” which was really just an an attempt to recognize “the record number of women who will be representing the American people in Congress during this term,” he said.

The world finally knows how former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke views the 2008 financial crisis. “September and October of 2008 was the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression,” said Bernanke in a document filed Aug. 22 with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, reports The Wall Street Journal. Of the 13 “most important financial institutions in the United States, 12 were at risk of failure within a period of a week or two.”

House Democrats said Tuesday they will offer an amendment to push to overturn stand-your-ground self-defense laws in states like Florida. The amendment, which would withhold some grants from states that have such laws, will come as part of the House's debate on the Commerce Department spending bill. Emphasis added

In his marvelous book "Decision Points," former President George W. Bush cites the comment of a general during a review of flagging American policy in Iraq. Bush quotes the general as saying, "Don't get stuck on stupid." U.S. strategy there, he said, needed changing to something different and more successful. The Democratic Congress is now embarked on a lame-duck session that ought to be history's last. This is the same Congress that gave the nation a program of socialized medicine it doesn't want and various "stimulus" measures that haven't worked -- spending measures that hardly have nudged the needle on...

Sen. Rockefeller, in a more rare and honest moment, says that he is tired of the Right and the Left and that we’d all be better off if the FCC would shut down Fox News and MSNBC. That’s interesting, because the FCC doesn’t have any jurisdiction over cable whatsoever. At least not yet. You see, Rockefeller says he hungers for quality news and believes that the FCC should play a part in facilitating that end. He believes that without the extremes of Fox News and MSNBC, the American people would have more faith in their government, would have better political...

... to Pilfer and Sabotage Operative word for conservatives: VIGILANCE The so-called progressives aren't done with their date-rape of this country just yet... As legislators return to the Hill today, don't let the reported "slow start" to the congressional lame duck session lull you into complacency... rather expect the worst and keep your guard up for a sharp left-hook at anytime over the coming weeks. From it's deathbed, the fading Obama-Reid-Pelosi triumvirate is apt to ram-through anything they can get the votes for: it's not like they'll be restrained by any scruples- and you already know what they think of...

snip The article recommends that President Obama govern from executive order to push through a progressive agenda. snip Demonstrating the close relationship between the DSA and the Progressive Caucus, two weeks ago WND reported the Democratic chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee was caught on tape meeting with DSA leaders to discuss how the group can cooperate to strengthen President Obama and advance their "one-world" plans.

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Most people who voted in Election 2010 on the East Coast think the average Democrat in Congress is more liberal than they are and describe the views of most congressional Democrats as extreme. These results come from a Rasmussen Reports telephone polling of people who have already voted in states in the Eastern Time Zone. Fifty-eight percent (58%) of these voters say the average Democrat in Congress is more liberal than they are. Only 10% say that member of Congress is more conservative, while 27% see his or her views as about the same as theirs. Fifty-five percent (55%) say...

Democrats in the Senate on Thursday held a recess hearing covering a taxpayer bailout of union pensions and a plan to seize private 401(k) plans to more "fairly" distribute taxpayer-funded pensions to everyone. Sen. Harkin (D-Iowa), Chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee heard from hand-picked witnesses advocating the infamous "Guaranteed Retirement Account" (GRA) authored by Theresa Guilarducci. In a nutshell, under the GRA system government would seize private 401(k) accounts, setting up an additional 5% mandatory payroll tax to dole out a "fair" pension to everyone using that confiscated money coupled with the mandated contributions. ***...

Low-income workers stand to lose the most if lawmakers fail to reach a consensus on the Bush-era tax cuts, according to a new report from the Tax Foundation. The report states that on Jan. 1 the doubling of the child tax credit, increased standard deductions and income credits and the creation of the 10 percent tax bracket — all of which primarily aimed at non-wealthy taxpayers — will vanish if gridlock persists in Washington. While wealthier taxpayers pay more in taxes and stand to lose more money if the tax cuts expire, the impact on low-income taxpayers will be far...

Congress left Washington without addressing the massive tax hikes that will come at the end of the year as the tax-rate reductions of 2001 and 2003 expire. Absent action on Capitol Hill, those increases will take $4 trillion out of the economy over the next ten years — and even if the lower tax bracket reductions get extended, $700 billion of capital will get redirected from the private sector to Washington. How will that impact economic growth in the US? Peter Ferrara argues that it will create not just a double-dip recession, but a second economic collapse — one worse...

A deeply unpopular Congress is bolting for the campaign trail without finishing its most basic job - approving a budget for the government year that begins on Friday. Lawmakers also are postponing a major fight over taxes, two embarrassing ethics cases and other political hot potatoes until angry and frustrated voters render their verdict in the Nov. 2 elections.

Ending the deferral of foreign income is another tax on U.S. employment. Democrats may be dodging a vote on the Bush-era tax cuts, but that doesn't mean they don't want to raise taxes before November. Witness this week's showdown in Congress over increasing the tax on the profits of American companies with foreign subsidiaries to punish firms that relocate plants overseas. How much more harm can this crowd do before it's run out of town? Like so many others, this tax increase is being promoted by President Obama, who declared last week that "for years, our tax code has actually...

The decision by Senate Democratic leaders to delay a vote on the Bush-era tax cuts until after the election has put the payroll industry on high alert. If Democratic leaders fail to determine the tax rates by Dec. 10, it could be too late for payroll administrators to withhold the right amount of tax from workers’ paychecks, according to industry officials. “The closer you get to the end of the year the more problems there’ll be,” Michael O’Toole, senior director of publications and government relations at the American Payroll Association (APA), told The Hill. “If [the IRS] issues [withholding tables]...

Piece by piece, America being given away “It’s too late; it’ll just have to be stopped in the Senate,” Tom, the young male answering the phone in U.S. Rep. John Boehner’s (R-Ohio)Washington D.C. office, said about HR 3534 (CLEAR Act). This is the globalist bill designed to give away our land, oceans, adjacent land masses and Great Lakes to an international body, and makes us pay $900 million per year until 2040. HR 3534 is a thinly disguised permanent roadblock to American energy which drives American companies out of the Gulf, delays future drilling, increases dependency on foreign oil, implements...

They won’t take no for an answer. So we have to give them both barrels again. On July 27, the Senate voted down the Democrats’ union-friendly, loophole-ridden, Orwellian-titled DISCLOSE Act. The bogus campaign finance reform bill was, as Sen. Mitch McConnell put it, a “transparent attempt to rig fall elections” that was written “behind closed doors” with help from lobbyists and riddled with political carve-outs for labor and other deep-pocketed organizations. Now, the hide-and-seek hypocrites on the Hill have resurrected their union pay-off. Priorities, you know. Hapless Harry Reid is leading the charge:

Public approval of Congress now sits at 18 percent, lower than it has been in any prior midterm election year since Gallup started polling public approval of Congress in 1974, according to a USA Today/Gallup Poll conducted Sept. 13-16. In March, approval of Congress actually sank to 16 percent, the second-lowest approval rating Congress has ever received in the Gallup poll. After that, it climbed to 23 percent in April and then started declining again, hitting 21 percent in May, 20 percent in June, 20 percent in July, and 19 percent in August. “Congress’ current approval rating is now approaching...

Sometimes answers to our problems must come from the grave. Since Democrats seized Congressional power in 2004 and hijacked the presidency in 2008, they have been unwilling to listen to rational and reasonable voices concerning the economy. Instead, they have implemented policies and legislation that will produce the greatest tax increases in U.S. history. Charles Dickens’ story, ‘A Christmas Carol’ told of a man impervious to the reality of people suffering all around him. So self-absorbed was he that it virtually took an other-world experience from ghost of the spirit world to reach him. Today we have YouTube and video...

Just as the government is trying to prevent people from investing in anything other than T-Bills by raising taxes on taxable interest and dividends to confiscatory levels, it's also trying to prevent you from parking your wealth in assets, like gold, that compete with the paper dollars issued by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury. A press release from Rep. Anthony Weiner, Democrat of New York, not yet (as of this instant) posted on Mr. Weiner's Web site, announces that a September 23 hearing of the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection (a subcommittee of Rep. Henry Waxman's Commerce...