Free Republic

Leadership: If the president meant to calm the markets on Monday, he failed utterly — and no wonder. All he did was make it clear he's completely out of ideas on how to get the economy moving again. After his televised remarks, the Dow industrial average continued to fall, finishing 5.5% lower. The Nasdaq plummeted 6.9%. Why should it have been any different? In his brief statement, the only thing President Obama demonstrated was a cluelessness about the country's current mess — of which the debt downgrade is just the latest example — and an even weaker grasp on how...

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry will today take a refocused campaign - and some of Bill Clinton's former advisers - on the road as he tries to battle back from a 10-point deficit in the polls. Mr Clinton may be about to undergo heart bypass surgery, but he spent 90 minutes on the phone with Mr Kerry over the weekend urging him to reinvigorate his campaign by attacking George Bush on bread and butter domestic issues such as jobs and healthcare. With less than two months to go before the US presidential election, Mr Kerry has drafted former Clinton advisers...

<p>Forty years ago this month, John F. Kennedy made his famous Rice University speech, in which he supposedly laid out the rationale for the Apollo program.</p> <p>We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.</p>