Free Republic

Sometimes in politics and legislation, whether you win is less important than how you win. That's the dilemma facing House Speaker John Boehner as he tries to round up the votes to pass a fast-approaching spending compromise and avert a partial government shutdown by week's end. Boehner, R-Ohio, wants the overwhelming majority of those votes to come from his fellow Republicans, even if dozens of easily attainable Democratic votes could help carry the budget bill to victory. The goal complicates Boehner's task, and possibly could push the bill farther to the right. It motivates him to battle for the votes...

The tumult in Cairo may spell much worse to come for the Copts.Hosni Mubarak can count on at least one loyal supporter. Coptic Christian leader Pope Shenouda wants the anti-Mubarak protesters to stand down. He has two inarguable reasons to stick with the dictator: fear and experience. Even if the Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t take over, there is every reason to believe that a democratically elected Egyptian government will become more Islamist and more hostile to the country’s roughly 8 million Christians, who are overwhelmingly Copts. As a horrifying premonition, the Copts need look no farther than democratic Iraq, where the...

Dozens of lawmakers are getting a second dose of high school as they venture across the aisle and ask colleagues to sit with them for President Obama’s State of the Union address next week. <----> snip <----> The bipartisan gesture carries a serious tone for nearly all who have pledged to do away with the typical seating arrangement, which is not assigned but generally gets divided by party. But the humor of asking one of their fellow lawmakers to attend the event as their “date” has not escaped members.

President Obama and his leftist pals ought to start taking responsibility for the shortcomings of their extreme ideology. The left’s knee-jerk reaction: Blame former President George W. Bush for anything that goes wrong, seems to have no bounds. Bush has been saddled with everything from a bad economy to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Continues... To stem the Gulf oil gusher and clean up the mess, Obama has been mustering all the incompetence his entire administration could manage under the circumstances. His biggest achievement thus far is watching this drag out for over a month before realizing...

The national debate on health care took an ominous turn last week as a number of high profile Democrats beginning with former President Jimmy Carter argued that critics of the Obama Administration have latched on to this debate as a way of voicing their latent racism and anti-Black bigotry. The worst chief executive of the twentieth century dismissed tea party protestors as sore losers who cannot accept the painful reality that an African-American man is now the President of the United States. The fact of the matter is that since 1980 Jimmy Carter has been unable to accept the painful...