Free Republic

Here is a question to be posed to the candidates seeking the presidency, in particular, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. Why does it seem impossible to resolve the most important challenges facing the nation? Throughout American history and especially in times of crisis, the nation has been able to come together. Today, that is unlikely. Sixty-plus years ago in the Senate, when Sens. Lyndon Johnson (D-Texas), Everett Dirksen (R-Ill.) and Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.) served, and 40 years ago when Rep. Tip O’Neill was Speaker of the House, despite huge policy differences, partisanship could be defeated. LBJ contributed...

... There is no military way for Israel to fully destroy Hamas without killing tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and radicalizing even more. An invasion of Gaza would be a humanitarian, moral, and strategic catastrophe, not only inflicting unfathomable human costs but also badly undermining Israel’s long-term security. Nothing it can hope to achieve – beyond satisfying Israeli demands for revenge – can outweigh the harm it is certain to do even in the best of scenarios. Because Hamas’ military infrastructure is embedded in civilian areas and its 30,000-40,000 fighters hide among noncombatants, any attempt to destroy Hamas in...

Hilarious realization by some woksters in this skit who finally realize Biden really does plan to run in 2024. There's a previous skit in that same show about a Bride being upset because the best man is dressed like Joker at the wedding. I actually did chuckle at that one since no woke crap was a part of it.

The murder of a 13-year-old in Vienna, for which four Afghan asylum seekers are said to be responsible, poses a dilemma for feminists: Should there be sympathy for a girl who, according to the current state of the investigation, was drugged with up to eleven ecstasy tablets, raped several times and killed or outrage over "racist reporting"? VIENNA.. The Wiener Einsatzgruppe Feminist Alarmabteilung (Wefa) decided on the latter. Around 20 hooded Wefa women stormed the rooms of the news portal oe24.at in the Austrian capital on Wednesday and attacked the employees. On handouts, the feminists complained that reports of the...

In the late spring of 2020, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Israel. His visit came after Israel formed a coalition government between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud and Benny Gantz’s Blue and White Party. Pompeo, while endorsing Israel’s rights to Judea and Samaria, had a blunt message for his Israeli friends: “Beware of China.” Pompeo added, “We don’t want the Chinese Communist Party to have access to Israeli infrastructure, Israeli communication networks, and the kind of things that endanger the Israeli people and the ability of the US to cooperate with Israel.” Pompeo’s gently expressed admonition to Israeli...

Few 'deplorables' on this side of the pond are shedding any tears over the predicament that French President Emmanuel Macron finds himself in with the violent protests erupting throughout France. The man is an arrogant globalist whose pretensions both for himself and his country reach far beyond their means. And it is hard to forget that Macron recently insulted America by saying Europe needs a strong military to defend itself not just from the Russia and the Chinese but also the U.S. The ignorance of such a statement is breathtaking. And it is humorous to think that the fragmented European...

Charles Darwin worried about a possible hole in his theory of evolution, but some American scientists may just have plugged it. For about a billion years after the dawn of life on Earth, organisms didn't evolve all that much. Then about 600 million years ago came the "Cambrian explosion." Everything changed relatively quickly, with all kinds of plants and animals emerging—which doesn't quite seem to fit with Darwin's theory of slow change, hence "Darwin's dilemma." Now, within a few days of each other, two new studies have appeared that could explain the shift, ABC News reports. One, by scientists at...

Toppling tyrants is ineffective in the long term without years of unpopular occupation. Two and a half years ago, the U.S. pulled every soldier out of a mostly quiet Iraq. In the void thus created, formerly al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists calling themselves “The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” are now tearing apart the country, leaving medieval savagery in their wake. Obama partisans are blaming the Bush administration for going into Iraq in the first place. But critics counter that Obama wanted out of Iraq before the 2012 election at all costs. The result of that reckless skedaddle is that we have...

If President Obama does not reauthorize his job council this week, the move will likely spark criticism from Republicans and could disquiet some Democrats. Obama has a lot on his legislative wish list, and Democrats on Capitol Hill do not want the White House to get distracted from the top issue on voters’ minds: jobs and the economy. The Jobs Council has met in full only four times in its two-year existence, according to its own website, though it also held 18 “listening and action sessions” around the nation. Obama last year praised it as “a work council” rather than...

Some years back I had the great opportunity to preach in a prison facility. This blessing extended for about two years. It really enabled me to see and understand a great number of things about those inside and outside of the prison system. I am not a person who is in favor of any frills or extras in the prison system. I guess you can say I am a Sheriff Joe Arpaio fan. If an individual breaks the law, my preference is the punishment seriously deters them from every committing the same mistake. Not only should it deter the transgressor,...

House Democrats continued to struggle with how to handle the pending ethics trial of Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), returning to the Capitol on Monday as unclear on the matter as when they left last week. "People will wait and see how that plays out," Pelosi said. "The committee has made its announcement and [outlined] its timetable, and I think that we just have to wait to see how that plays out.Because none of us, not any of us except those on the committee, has any knowledge of" what the charges are. The indecision over how to handle the matter...

As President Obama concluded his Rose Garden statement revealing that he had replaced Gen. Stanley McChrystal as the top American commander in Afghanistan, a reporter shouted an impromptu question. "Can the war be won?" he yelled. The president didn't answer — perhaps because he doesn't know. You can watch the non-answer here. (video at link) The moment comes as the president starts to walk away: Obama is trying to stick to a July 2011 deadline to draw down troops in Afghanistan — but the McChrystal flap was the latest setback for an administration trying desperately to regain momentum in a...

2019 --- This blog is charged with Contributing to the Delinquency of Citizens. Its recent post, "The Government Should Mind Its Own Business" was found, by the ministry of free speech, to be "subversive and disquieting", offenses punishable by death. Arrests were made. It was discovered that the blog's owner did not write the article, a fact which saved his skin. His punishment was a mere six years educational readjustment. During the course of his routine interrogation to extract information related to the crime, the blog owner, after being forced to listen to Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" three...

When Republicans discuss party Chairman Michael Steele, it often comes down to a conversation about Good Michael versus Bad Michael. The problem is, on any given day, GOP politicos don't know which Michael is occupying the big office at Republican National Committee headquarters. A lot of people saw it coming in February and March of last year, after Steele narrowly won election as chairman of the 168-member RNC. He made a lot of enemies back then, getting a slow start on the job, leaving top positions unfilled, and committing gaffe after gaffe on TV -- such as calling Rush Limbaugh's...

The most interesting part of Barack Obama’s victory speech was when he said, “We may not get there in a year, or even in one term . . . ,” thus setting the stage to renege on his baseline campaign promises. Obama faces an immediate dilemma: either abandon his promises of higher taxes and more giveaways, risking a severe loss of adulation, or following through and risking an extended recession or an economic depression.

The Democrats now find themselves in a thoroughly uncomfortable dilemma over Iraq. Back in the early days of the American invasion, when things were going relatively badly, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced the war was "lost" and America's only recourse was to pull out. (This, of course, would have been an absolute political disaster for the Bush administration, as Mr. Reid no doubt knew and hoped.) In the subsequent months and years, when things there have gone substantially better, Mr. Reid has never retracted his highly premature conclusion but it is safe to say it is now "inoperative."...

**EXCERPT** It doesn't seem fair that the Democratic nomination might be decided by the well-connected, unelected "superdelegates," or by the primaries in Florida and Michigan that were not supposed to count. Then again, the rules to select party nominees are rarely fair and never permanent, even within an election cycle. The parties set them - and change them - to suit the objectives of the people in power. Just ask Willie Brown, who chaired the 271-member California delegation that was pledged to George McGovern in 1972. The stop-McGovern forces tried to unseat 151 of McGovern's California delegates, arguing that the...

This is the most graceless stunt I’ve seen a while. Leon Fleisher, the conductor and pianist, received a Kennedy Center honor. As part of the weekend of festivities associated with this prestigious award, Fleisher was invited to attend a White House reception along with the four other honorees (Brian Wilson, Steve Martin, Diana Ross, and Martin Scorcese). This caused the conductor to wrestle with his conscience. In the past seven years, Bush administration policies have amounted to a systematic shredding of our nation's Constitution — the illegal war it initiated and perpetuates; the torturing of prisoners; the espousing of "values"...

When Alexander Zaitsev presented his recent paper at the International Astronautical Congress in Hyderabad (India) recently, he spoke from the center of a widening controversy. The question is straightforward: Should we broadcast messages intentionally designed to be received by extraterrestrial civilizations, thereby notifying them of our existence? Zaitzev, chief scientist at the Russian Academy of Science’s Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics, addressed the question by seeing a necessary relationship between SETI (the search for ETI) and METI (messaging to other civilizations). Indeed, the Russian scientist, working at the Evpatoria Deep Space Center in the Ukraine, has the experience to...

TWO weeks after my husband and I quit our jobs, gave up our Brooklyn apartment and moved to Mexico to travel and work as freelance reporters, I discovered I was pregnant. Among the subjects I hoped to write about in Mexico was its restrictive abortion laws. Now I was contemplating an abortion myself. Even though my period was 10 days late, it hadn’t occurred to me that I could be pregnant....