Free Republic

PRESIDENT OBOLA: "...You'll recall that three or four months ago, everybody in Washington was convinced that President Putin was a genius... And he had outmaneuvered all of us and he had, you know, bullied and, you know, strategized his way into expanding Russian power. And I said at the time we don't want war with Russia but we can apply steady pressure working with our European partners, being the backbone of an international coalition to oppose Russia's violation of another country's sovereignty, and that over time, this would be a strategic mistake by Russia."INTERVIEWER: Are you just lucky that the...

"No blood for oil" was a popular slogan chanted by the left in opposition to President George W. Bush's push to send U.S. forces into Iraq. Now that President Obama has authorized Operation Odyssey Dawn in Libya, I have been waiting to hear chants of "no blood for oil." I am happy to report, I don't hear them. I went to the No Blood For Oil website; its lead item opposes efforts to strike wolves from the endangered species list. In fact, as NATO forces are lobbing missiles to enforce a no-fly zone over the country with Africa's largest oil...

NATO has asked the United States to continue participating in airstrikes over Libya through late Monday, ABC News has learned. This was done to make up for the bad weather earlier in the week that had hampered targeting of Gadhafi forces and allowed them to push the rebels back to Ajdabiyah. The United States was supposed to have significantly begun dropping its participation in airstrikes over Libya. "Due to poor weather conditions over the last few days in Libya, the United States has approved a request by NATO to extend the use of some U.S. strike aircraft," NATO spokeswoman Oana...

"No blood for oil" was a popular slogan chanted by the left in opposition to President George W. Bush's push to send U.S. forces into Iraq. Now that President Obama authorized Operation Odyssey Dawn in Libya, I have been waiting to hear chants of "no blood for oil." I am happy to report, I don't hear them. I went to the nobloodforoil.org website; its lead item opposes efforts to strike wolves from the endangered species list. In fact, as NATO forces are lobbing missiles to enforce a no-fly zone over the country with Africa's largest oil and gas reserves, the...

Tune into CNN TV at 8 and 9 p.m. to get expert analysis on the president's speech on "In the Arena" and "Piers Morgan Tonight" -- only on CNN. Send your personal stories, video on unrest in the Arab world. Washington (CNN) -- President Barack Obama on Monday rejected criticism of his decision to commit U.S. forces to the U.N.-authorized military mission in Libya, telling the American people there were strategic and moral reasons to act. In a nationally televised speech at the National Defense University, Obama said his administration kept its pledge that the mission would be limited in...

George W. Bush is gone from Washington but his legacy, like an abandoned toxic waste dump, lingers on. Like President Franklin Roosevelt before him, President Bush helped redefine American freedom. And like Roosevelt's, Bush's changes were perversions of the clear vision the Founding Fathers bequeathed to us. What did freedom mean in the era of George Bush? In Iraq in September 2004, the U.S. military constructed Camp Liberty, a tent compound to house Iraqi detainees next to the Abu Ghraib prison. (The torture scandal and photos had been revealed in late April.) Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller declared that Camp Liberty...

Matthew Vadum, writing in today's American Spectator, blows the cover off Barack Obama's plans to hijack the observance of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by turning it over to the radical leftist Lennox Yearwood of the politically well-connected Hip Hop Caucus. This news has been hiding in plain sight, but got lost in the battle this month over nationalized health care, so Vadum has done a great service by bringing this to our attention. Vadum's piece has been picked up by Michelle Malkin and Gateway Pundit.This article is intended to fill in some big pieces of the picture about what this...

(Porn star Alexia Moore performs on stage ... ... and hurries out of court Friday night.) (Louis Posner) Teams of vice cops swooped down and busted a posh midtown strip club that catered to stockbrokers and bankers - and featured porn stars who charged $5,000 for private trysts. Prominent tax lawyer Louis Posner; his wife, Betty; and 19 others were arrested on a variety of prostitution and money-laundering charges at The Hot Lap Dance Club, which the couple ran out of a velvet-heavy loft, police said. Cops said Posner raked in $1 million over the last 10 months from the...

U.S. Representative Harold Ford, Jr. (center) tours the Behlen plant in Huntingdon Thursday. At left is plant manager Stuart Daffron and at left is employee Jeremy Willis. U.S. Representative Harold Ford Jr. (D-Memphis) made a stop in Huntingdon Thursday to gather support in his bid for the U.S. Senate. Ford, 35, currently represents the Ninth Congressional District after being elected in 1996 to the seat. He is a candidate for the 2006 U.S. Senate seat that is being vacated by U.S. Sen. Bill Frist, a Republican, who plans on running for the presidency in 2008. He’s been billed as an...

President Bush was very wise to make his Iraqi speech this week. He and his advisors are following the same public opinion polls we all are. Polls show that support for the war among Americans has been falling. Time has now become an enemy, almost as threatening as the insurgents, to the President's ability to achieve a victory. Our nation does not have much patience for fighting wars that are not discernibly winnable in a relatively short period of time. With congressional elections next year, anti-war sentiment could easily be expressed by voters -- resulting in the erosion of the...

Hormonal changes may actually alter the chemical balance in the brain and trigger some of the mood swings associated with a woman's monthly menstrual cycle, according to a new study. The study suggests that cells in a brain region called the hippocampus generate different types of receptors for the brain chemical GABA during various phases of the menstrual cycle. These changes may affect a woman's susceptibility to anxiety, depression, and seizures. Both estrogen and progesterone have effects on nerve cell activation, but the mechanism behind changes in seizure activity and increased anxiety are unknown, write the researchers. They say their...

Critics of the Bush Administration are divided between those who tend to view Republicans as part of an ultra-secret, ultra-capable military-industrial cabal who control the world and everything in it, and those who view the President as a moron and his advisers as ideologues who are leading us over a cliff. While I don’t presume to know for a fact which school of thought is correct, they can’t both be right. The Republicans-as-evil-geniuses point of view is exemplified by the “No Blood for Oil” argument. The Republicans-as-fools point of view is exemplified by the “quagmire” or “No End in Sight”...

Is there any more glaring public display of folly possible than the "No Blood For Oil" bumper sticker I recently spotted on the back of an SUV? The closest thing to that level of irony was a "Buy American" bumper sticker I saw years ago on a VW Beetle -- a German car manufactured in Mexico. The humor was intentional in that case, however. (Thanks, Dr. G, wherever you are.) Frankly, unless you live in a hand-built log cabin eating only what you grow and wearing clothes you weave yourself out of the hemp you don't smoke, you're as sticky...

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - A European Union (news - web sites) commissioner said on Friday he believed the United States aimed to take control of Iraq (news - web sites)'s oil and was 'on its way to becoming a member of OPEC (news - web sites).' Poul Nielson, EU Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, was speaking after the United States and Britain introduced a U.N. draft resolution that would phase out an existing oil-for-food humanitarian program for Iraq. 'They (the United States) will appropriate the oil,' he told Danish public service DR radio news on return from a three-day trip...

Canadian Alliance foreign affairs critic Stockwell Day yesterday questioned whether Jean Chrétien's family associations had any bearing on the government's decision to stay out of the recent war against Iraq. "I do not fault the prime minister's ties with his nephew (Raymond) our ambassador to France," Mr. Day said in the Commons, "or with Paul Desmarais Sr., who is the largest individual shareholder of France's largest corporation, TotalFinaElf, which has billions of dollars of contracts with Saddam's former regime." Mr. Chrétien's only daughter, France, is married to André Desmarais, son of the controlling shareholder of Montreal-based Power Corp., one of...

This war may not be about oil in the first place, but to argue that the United States is committing more than 300,000 armed men and women to the single area of the world sitting atop two-thirds of the global oil reserves without having oil on its mind is a bit of a stretch.

<p>I KNOW the saying dictates that to the victor go the spoils. But there are serious questions emerging over the process by which US companies are hired to put out oil fires, build roads and bridges, restart oil production, and do whatever is necessary to ''reconstruct'' Iraq after allied forces deconstruct it. Some answers need to come from Vice President Dick Cheney, a major architect of the war with Iraq, according to many newspapers and columnists around the country. That's the same Dick Cheney who was, until 2 1/2 years ago, chief executive officer of Halliburton Co., a Houston-based oil field services firm that takes in nearly $20 billion annually.</p>

It should be the duty of a country as powerful as the United States to be a leader that helps developing countries fairly and ethically. It should not be isolated when it comes to making decisions that will largely affect the rest of the world. The United States lacks a reputation of good diplomacy, which puts it in a precarious position. Any possibilities that America could take on characteristics of a team player in the United Nations have been officially choked to death. In minutes, President Bush smothered all of President Clinton's efforts toward turning America into a world...

Before the fighting started, one of the fears expressed by critics of the war to liberate Iraq was the prospect of terrorist attacks that al-Qaeda and other jihadist organizations might launch against Americans at home and abroad. A war on Iraq would distract us from the war on terror. The Democratic Party, which did not want to go to war against Iraq in 1991 or 2003, made this its principal point of criticism of administration policy. It was the pre-war theme of Democrats like Joe Biden, ranking member on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Tom Daschle, Senate minority leader, Ted...

After dropping off Mrs. DFU at the airport for a visit with our lonely daughter on Whidbey Island (her husband is on the USS THEODORE ROOSEVELT), I stopped by the mini mart at the Texaco gas station to get a cup of coffee. I was wearing a sweatshirt with an eagle and the words "God Bless America" as well as my Roosevelt ball cap. The nitwit young kid at the register informed that there was a demonstration on Indian Hill Blvd. yesterday of about 200 anti-war goofballs (my word). He approved and for some reason thought I would want to...