Free Republic

Take Oakland, which is Detroit's doppelganger on the West Coast. The run-down Bay Area city, which has the highest crime rate in California, recently laid off more than 100 police to fund retirement benefits and pension-obligation bonds. Murders and robberies shot up by nearly 25% last year. To avert steeper cuts, the city borrowed an additional $210 million to finance pensions. . . Philadelphia is spending about 20% of its budget on pensions to make up for years of short-changing the system.

. . . No, that is where the media comes in. Once we persuade a few deranged right-wingers to condemn us, the national media will have to lurch and stumble to our defense. And those news organizations and commentators who don't, we will threaten with boycotts and accusations of polyphobia and - the most terrible crime in our society - being mean-spirited. We will also remind them that Hitler was against polygamy.

President Barack Obama is expected to tap James Comey to succeed Robert Mueller as FBI director on Friday, Politico reported Thursday afternoon. Comey, 52, is a Republican who served as deputy U.S. attorney general in George W. Bush’s administration from 2003 to 2005.

Tipsville . . . Sneed is told that Attorney General Eric “Fast and Furious” Holder’s days are numbered. Sneed hears President Barack Obama, who is this/close to Holder, has set his sights on Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick as a possible replacement “when the heat dies down on the latest hot-button scandals to hit the U.S. Justice Department,” said a top White House source. Last year, Holder became a hot button over a congressional probe of the sale of government guns to drug cartels. This time it’s the double whammy of an IRS scandal and the U.S. Justice Department’s seizure of...

On Feb. 10, the world was shocked to hear that Pope Benedict would step down from his Papal office on Feb. 28, and become the first leader of the Catholic church to resign from office in over 500 years. However, speculation for his replacement is already under way, and the front runner to become the next Pope has strong ties to the creation of a global economic system, as well as being a prime candidate to an ancient Catholic prophecy suggesting he would help lead the world into a new order. “The front runner to be the next pope...

Just hours after Pope Benedict XVI‘s surprising Feb. 28 resignation, bookmakers have already started placing odds on his successor. Quickest off the mark was the Irish bookmaker Paddy Power, which has already gone through three favorites for the position, starting off with Nigerian Francis Arinze, before shifting to Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Turkson and then to Canadian Marc Ouellet — who at the time of this writing is the most favored option, with odds of 11 to 4. A rival bookie, Ladbrokes, currently has Turkson as the slight favorite at 3 to 1, followed by Arinze (7 to 2) and then...

...Revolution? Yes, it all sounds rather “extreme”, but the cold hard reality of our era is not going to comfort us with diplomacies and niceties, so honestly, why should I have to sugar coat anything? We live in extreme times and there is no longer room for prancing around the ultimate consequences of that which is taking place in America today. This country is increasingly sliding towards the edge of internal conflict. The Liberty Movement and true Constitutionalists see it, subsections of Republicans and Democrats see it, and most of all, the federal government sees it. In fact, they may...

The Sunday news shows featured a rare spectacle that at once revealed the decline of civility in Washington and the depth of GOP outrage over Harry Reid’s unproven claim that Mitt Romney didn’t pay income taxes for an entire decade: two of the nation’s top GOP officials flat out called the Senate majority leader a liar. That’s no ordinary criticism in official Washington. There are plenty of other ways that pols use to call out their partisan rivals on their statements. Reid’s GOP counterpart, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, for one, has already said Reid’s charge is “beneath the dignity” of...

March disaster debris may reach Hawaii next year US researchers say some of the huge amount of debris that has been drifting in the Pacific Ocean as a result of Japan's disaster in March may reach Hawaii next year. Nikolai Maximenko, senior researcher at the University of Hawaii's International Pacific Research Center, says a huge amount of debris was spotted by a Russian training ship heading for Vladivostok from Hawaii in late September. The debris was found in a wide area in the northern Pacific Ocean about 3,200 kilometers east of Japan and about 900 kilometers west of the Midway...

UPDATE: Former U.S. Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell will not speak at a tea party event featuring former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in Indianola, Iowa, this weekend, an organizer told Washington Wire. “I made a mistake,” said Ken Crow, president of Tea Party of America. “I assumed there was an open slot and there wasn’t.” Monday night, Mr. Crow told Washington Wire that Ms. O’Donnell would appear. Tea Party of America’s cofounder, Charlie Gruschow, said the group withdrew Ms. O’Donnell’s after receiving numerous “emails from a lot of tea party folks that were very disappointed that she would be speaking.” “We...

I saw him Tuesday night. I saw Senator Marco Rubio in person as he delivered a speech at the Ronald Reagan Library outside of Los Angeles. I saw Marco Rubio catch Nancy Reagan as she stumbled. And I saw Marco Rubio offering coy answers to the question everyone in the press was there to see him answer: would you want to be vice president? ...Rubio is known as a Tea-Party candidate, or semi-Tea-Party candidate, but he didn't throw any rhetorical bombs Tuesday. That alone made him sort of agreeable. There were moments when he dared to offer a gram of...

Gannett Rag - Link Only http://caucuses.desmoinesregister.com/2011/05/26/bachmann-to-announce-in-waterloo-next-month/

He’ll be handing over leadership of the mission to someone at some point, but the details are still as vague and gassy as one of those “jobs created or saved” graphs. Adm. Gary Roughead, the Chief of Naval Operations, said that he has received no guidance on the path ahead for command and control of the no-fly zone, no-drive zone, no-sail zone, arms embargo enforcement, and any other missions currently being managed by U.S. Africom Commander Gen. Carter Ham, who is in Germany. NATO has been battling internally over whether to take command, while the French government’s latest proposal is...

Tuesday’s elections swept Republicans across America into office, but what do freshly elected Republicans need to do next? 1) Realize They’ve Not Sold the American People Victorious Republicans should enjoy their election victory, but they should also understand it does not mean that the American people have bought wholesale into conservative political philosophy, as is so tempting to believe after a big election. After George W. Bush’s victory in 2004, Hugh Hewitt wrote Painting the Map Red. After 2008, James Carville wrote 40 More Years: How Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation. Both books turned out to be overly optimistic...

Top Republicans in Washington and in the national GOP establishment say the 2010 campaign highlighted an urgent task that they will begin in earnest as soon as the elections are over: Stop Sarah Palin. Interviews with advisers to the main 2012 presidential contenders and with other veteran Republican operatives make clear they see themselves on a common, if uncoordinated, mission of halting the momentum and credibility Palin gained with conservative activists by plunging so aggressively into this year’s midterm campaigns. There is rising expectation among GOP elites that Palin will probably run for president in 2012 and could win the...

Top Republicans in Washington and in the national GOP establishment say the 2010 campaign highlighted an urgent task that they will begin in earnest as soon as the elections are over: Stop Sarah Palin. Interviews with advisers to the main 2012 presidential contenders and with other veteran Republican operatives make clear they see themselves on a common, if uncoordinated, mission of halting the momentum and credibility Palin gained with conservative activists by plunging so aggressively into this year’s midterm campaigns. There is rising expectation among GOP elites that Palin will probably run for president in 2012 and could win the...

As vote counting continues in the Philippines, all indications are that Liberal Party candidate Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino will become the next president. With more than half the votes counted by mid-day Tuesday, Aquino holds an almost unassailable lead over his nearest rivals. Former President Joseph Estrada trails a distant second while businessman Manny Villar has conceded defeat in Monday's election. An Aquino victory is in line with expectations. The son of former President Cory Aquino, who died last year, led the opinion polls throughout the campaign. Pete Troilo is director of business intelligence for risk consultancy Pacific Strategies and Assessments....

The Tories Will Lose The Next Election If They Enter Into A Coalition With The Tainted Lib Dems Norman Tebbit May 8th, 2010 What a mess! What an unholy mess! The unloseable election against the worst government in British history finishes in talks to establish the terms on which the losers’ party with only 23 per cent of the votes and only 57 seats might graciously allow the party with 36 per cent of the votes and 307 seats to form a government. This was the election in which the poisonous legacy of Blair’s NuLab plan for the irreversible change...

The President Will Again Have To Consider A Complicated Political Calculus It didn't take President Obama very long to pick Sonia Sotomayor as his nominee to replace Supreme Court Justice David Souter, but he may face the same difficult choice again soon. With Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens likely approaching the end of their tenures, Obama could end up naming at least two more justices to the high court. What would he be looking for in his second and third nominees? Court observers predict he will seek out consensus candidates -- or at least non-provocative ones. In...

After they vote to take over the Health Care of the United States later today, what shall we do then? What are you going to do to stay mobilized? I propose we engage in a new campaign, call it 44 Days of Rage, in Honor of TOTUS 44. Non stop phone calls to the Congress and the Senate for 44 days, all of them directed at the Yes Votes. Let them know every day, for more than a month, that they will be defeated in November. The Left thinks that once this vote is cast, that its over, that it...