Free Republic

Are we really headed into another Great Depression?Here's my Op-Ed in today's National Post arguing that no, we're not: So we’re in for another Great Depression, are we? Don’t believe it. Now that the epic U.S. presidential race is over, a caffeinated press corps is in withdrawal, so hyperventilating about a new Depression is their new fix. Just to pick one newspaper at random, Toronto’s Globe and Mail used the phrase “Great Depression” over 300 times in December alone — or about a dozen times each edition. And that’s restrained compared to U.S. cable news shows. It’s not just bored...

Can we just all play nice? Never mind the fact that the rats have spent the last 8 years...DO NOT EVER FORGET THOSE YEARS...crapping on President Bush and Vice President Cheney and plan to continue. Be nice, will you? What kind of rotten hateful people are you anyway? Obama is OUR president, so it's time to get behind him...even though we have no effing idea who he is (well, we have some idea but not because of disclosure). Just give him the benefit of the doubt, he is above making simple disclosures to us mere plebes. It is disrespectful, and...

This is pure vanity, and bribery at that. Laz is important to this site. He's rude, he's crude, he's sometimes lewd. The mods can always ban him again. They surely will. But free Laz for now and I'm in for another twenty bucks. Who's with me?

For an entire week, Americans watched as Senator Barack Obama took his act on the road, courting the European elitists and cowtowing to an endless array of foreign politicians. At this point it may be easy to take Obama’s “celebri-plomacy” lightly. Yet, his trip highlights a dangerous threat to America’s national sovereignty in the form of his globalist policies that will diminish America’s role in the world and outsource decisions of vital national interest to the United Nations. His Global Poverty Act, currently under consideration in Congress, is just one such policy. Despite its seemingly innocuous title, the Global Poverty...

DAKAR (Reuters) - Senegal's president said on Thursday George W. Bush told African leaders at one stage the United States might send troops to Sudan's Darfur if they did not act to halt what he saw as genocide there. President Abdoulaye Wade said Bush, who has lobbied strongly for robust international action to end the five-year-old conflict in Darfur, ... Commenting on the International Criminal Court chief prosecutor's move this week to seek a war crimes arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Wade said Bush had "always proclaimed loudly and clearly that the United States considered Bashir had...

GOP presidential contender Fred Thompson brought his message to religious conservatives in Hollywood after a stopover in Pensacola. Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson polished his conservative credentials Friday as he emphasized family values and traditional policy pillars in a speech Friday night to a conservative religious group. The Florida Family Policy Council invited Thompson to be the keynote speaker at at a dinner at the Westin Diplomat Resort & Spa in Hollywood. The group is an off-shoot of James Dobson's Focus on the Family and has advocated a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. The group is not endorsing the Republican...

Moderate Arab governments plan to tell Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice they will help Washington stabilize Iraq if the U.S. takes more active steps to revive a broad peace initiative between Israel and its neighbors, Arab officials and media said Sunday. The deal, dubbed "Iraq for Land," is expected to be proposed during a meeting between Rice and her counterparts from eight Arab countries in Kuwait on Tuesday. It echoes widespread Arab feelings that a lasting Middle East peace cannot be achieved as long as Israel doesn't reach a settlement to hand over lands it occupied during the 1967 Mideast...

As the United Nations cobbles together a peacekeeping force for Lebanon, debate is heating up in Moscow about whether to send troops to the Middle East. A growing consensus of Defense Ministry officials and military analysts oppose sending ground forces. But a handful of political observers counter that the situation offers Russia an opportunity to restore some of its Soviet-era prestige. "We are examining the situation," Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said Friday, Interfax reported. "The peacekeepers' status and their rights are not clear, as well as what they will do there and what kind of mandate they will have." Ivanov,...

Virtually everything American society has done for the past 100 years has made it easier for us to be fatter, said James Sallis, a San Diego State University psychology professor, and others who gathered recently at the American College of Sports Medicine's annual meeting. "We've built an unhealthy world in a lot of different ways," said Sallis, who was once dubbed an "obesity warrior" by Time magazine. Sallis contends change will come only when the public demands walkable development, more federal money for parks and bike paths and even a tax on industries that promote sedentary lifestyles (he pointed to...

THE frontrunner for the Democrat nomination for president in 2008, Hillary Clinton, is heading into a hail of opposition from within her own party after a poll showed last week that most Americans would “definitely” not vote for her. Aides in Bill Clinton’s White House are warning she could be a risky choice. To their left, an anti-war “stop Hillary” bandwagon is gathering momentum, threatening her ability to unite the Democrats. Mike McCurry, Bill Clinton’s White House press secretary, fears the 2008 campaign could be brutal for the former first lady, now a senator for New York. He remembers how...

WASHINGTON, Oct 4 (Reuters) - President George W. Bush asked Congress on Tuesday to consider giving him powers to use the military to enforce quarantines in case of an avian influenza epidemic. He said the military, and perhaps the National Guard, might be needed to take such a role if the feared H5N1 bird flu virus changes enough to cause widespread human infection. "If we had an outbreak somewhere in the United States, do we not then quarantine that part of the country? And how do you, then, enforce a quarantine?" Bush asked at a news conference. "It's one thing...

WASHINGTON - President Bush, increasingly concerned about a possible avian flu pandemic, revealed Tuesday that any part of the country where the virus breaks out could likely be quarantined and that he is considering using the military to enforce it. "The best way to deal with a pandemic is to isolate it and keep it isolated in the region in which it begins," he said during a wide-ranging Rose Garden news conference. The president was asked if his recent talk of giving the military the lead in responding to large natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and other catastrophes was...

Who would have thought it? A Tory view is about to become seriously cool. Opposition to joining the euro is no longer the province of what the BBC likes to call "hardline Right-wingers". It is now being publicly endorsed by, among others, Harry Enfield, Bob Geldof, Rik Mayall, Vic Reeves and John Sessions. Whatever next? Can we look forward to an organisation called the National Coalition of Alternative Comedians in Favour of Tax Cuts? Well, maybe not for a while. But there must be a lesson here for those who hold - and would like to proselytise - currently unfashionable...