Free Republic

This is your "what the hell?" video of the morning. Treasury Secretary Geithner is asked if he knew about the "predatory atmosphere" at the IMF. He says "this is a hard question to ask a man." Except, it's not a hard question, for a man or for anyone. "Were you aware of the culture of rape at IMF" has two possible answers: "yes, I noticed" or "no, I just didn't see it." But, of course, he can't say either because if he saw abuse then the follow-up question is going to be why he didn't do anything about it. And...

Gosh, the last two years I have been calling Congress, Senators, going to Tea Parties, Went to DC many times, Town Halls, Blogs and web sites trying to defend and preserve our freedom and liberty. I have been feeling pretty good until the HCR bill. I remember driving back from DC feeling exhausted and actually named the photo folder "last day of freedom". However, then a few days later it passed I was a tad down then bounced back. Then it has been one bill after another and one setback after another. I seem to be running out of energy......

The Senate Banking Committee passed the Livable Communities Act on Tuesday, moving the bill one step closer to final passage. The bill creates $4 billion in neighborhood planning grants for “sustainable” living projects and a new federal office to oversee them. Similar legislation in the House has been criticized by Republicans on the House Budget Committee, who charge that “the program’s aim is to impose a Washington-based, central planning model on localities across the country.” In the Senate version, written by outgoing Chairman Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), the Livable Communities Act would designate $4 billion to aid local governments in...

The Internet is a large-scale version of the "Committees of Correspondence" that led to the first American Revolution — and with Washington's failings now so obvious and awful, it may lead to another. People are asking, "Is the government doing us more harm than good? Should we change what it does and the way it does it?" Pruning the power of government begins with the imperial presidency. Too many overreaching laws give the president too much discretion to make too many open-ended rules controlling too many aspects of our lives. There's no end to the harm an out-of-control president can...

Obama's election was supposed to transform America, at least in his mind. This country's first socialist president strode into office confident that he would remake this country. Fortunately for the country, the timing of his election was twenty, if not fifty, years too late. Socialism has failed in its pure form wherever it has been tried. Now it has failed in its modified form. While much of the world realizes this, President Obama is either ignorant or has more sinister plans for the country. In the 1920s, Ludwig von Mises demonstrated via economic reasoning why socialism could not work. His...

Prosperity: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke can talk all day about doing everything possible to sweeten a sour economy. Monetary policy is pretty much exhausted. It's Congress that could act — but won't. 'We remain prepared to take further policy actions as needed to foster a return to full utilization of our nation's productive potential in a context of price stability." Those were the words the Fed chief hoped would have a healing effect on an economy battered by years of housing and lending policies hijacked for ideological purposes. But what more can Ben Bernanke do? The interest rate elevator...

The recently passed Donk (Dodd-Frank) Finreg abomination, which nobody has yet read is finally starting to disclose some of the interesting side effects of its harried passage. Such as that the rating agencies may have suddenly become extinct. As the WSJ's Anusha Shrivastava discloses: "The nation's three dominant credit-ratings providers have made an urgent new request of their clients: Please don't use our credit ratings." The Moodies of the world suddenly have good reason to not want their name appearing next to those three A letters (at least in Goldman CDO and bankrupt sovereign cases) out there: "The new law...

Last night, as part of a procedural vote on the emergency war supplemental bill, House Democrats attached a document that “deemed as passed” a non-existent $1.12 trillion budget. The execution of the “deeming” document allows Democrats to start spending money for Fiscal Year 2011 without the pesky constraints of a budget. The procedural vote passed 215-210 with no Republicans voting in favor and 38 Democrats crossing the aisle to vote against deeming the faux budget resolution passed. Never before -- since the creation of the Congressional budget process -- has the House failed to pass a budget, failed to propose...

Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats are deliberately and unapologetically engaging in economic sabotage; simultaneously targeting numerous sectors of the American economy using orchestrated systemic crisis in an effort to overwhelm the U.S. economy and effect the destruction of capitalism and America from within. By using the Cloward-Piven Strategy to promote economic and social change through the exploitation of misfortune, national crisis and disorganization the Left is advancing government as the tool for reorganization. The tactics and intended consequences of the Obama administration include: Strategically planned “crises” to systematically takeover private industry. Flooding government with impossible financial burdens until the debt...

This is pretty scary stuff. The Federal government is ready to seize control of private company networks in order to "protect" us in the event of a hacker attack.

Shepard Smith reporting... Rep. Hoyer quoted as saying Pelosi has decided to pitch pro-life Dems over the side and pass Obamacare without them... unknown how they will get the votes... still rumors of parliamentary tricks to pass a bill for which they do not have the votes.

Barack Obama is proving himself to be a destructive nihilist with capitalism, the Constitution, the Rule of Law, and the traditional American experience in his crosshairs. In today's American culture there are other sorts of nihilism. Pop culture nihilists much more common, comprising a virtual demographic segment of self-satisfied know-nothings. Destructive nihilists are rarer, but more fearsome. They believe western civilization is so corrupt that wholesale destruction is the only solution. Nihilism, while easily abused by the casual thinker, is actually both political, and in a thunderingly empty way, deeply spiritual. Russian author Ivan Turgenev's character Bazarov explains in Fathers...

Krauthammer's take from last night's All-Stars Panel on Special Report with Bret Baier: On Eric Holder possibly appointing a prosecutor to investigate Bush-era interrogation techniques: If he does this, it is a terrible mistake. What we heard today, that [the special prosecutor] will only be for rogue interrogators who went outside the law—presumably, you know, [for] sadists who wanted to have a good time out of the rubric of interrogation. I'm not sure there are a lot of those. What will happen is once you appoint a prosecutor, as we know from past history, he's out of control. There are...

This ALERT is regarding the MORPHING of REAL ID in to the PASS ACT. The REAL ID as you may or may not know was the failed law that snuck through congress in May of 2005 that would require all Americans to Carry a standardized FEDERAL ID card with an embedded trackable chip. NOW I need you to contact your senate committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs IMMEDIATELY to STOP THE PASS ACT – S.1261 Special interests groups are trying to force Democrats, Independents and Republicans to support this legislation. States have been and are working to ensure drivers...

I no longer subscribe to either of the following perceptions of our government: 1. The popular impression that we are a democracy where the will of the majority determines public policy. 2. The originally intended conception of American government as a constitutional republic consisting of representatives of the people whose votes reflect the will of their constituents, balanced with an intelligent, complete, and benevolent pursuit of the general welfare. We have neither of those. What we have, as evidenced by the passage of the 1500 page Cap and Trade bill which included "a 300 page amendment that was introduced in...

A prisoner who says he was tortured while being held for nearly four years as a suspected terrorist can sue former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo for coming up with the legal theories that justified his alleged treatment, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled Friday. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White's decision marks the first time a government lawyer has been held potentially responsible for the abuse of detainees. "Like any other government official, government lawyers are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their conduct," White said in refusing to dismiss Jose Padilla's lawsuit against Yoo. If Padilla, now serving...

The goal seems to be nothing short of eradicating American farms and self-sustainability. Even DEMOCRATS are opposing the Obama Energy Bill. Climate change legislation will be utterly devastating for American farmers. Rep. Leonard Boswell (D-IA) of the House Agriculture Committee says that not only will he not vote for it, but no one else on his committee will support it either. The bill would increase the cost of everything that farmers depend on, such as diesel fuel, gasoline, fertilizers, pesticides, and a host of other things. It would raise taxes on energy by $846 billion over the next ten years....

Healthcare is the biggest segment of our economy. In the debate over who should pay for what or, increasingly, for whom, most people don't stop to understand just how large a portion of our society's money is dedicated to healthcare. For some perspective, as a share of GDP, the U.S. spends about twice that of other advanced nations. This is an important reason why the U.S. is increasingly uncompetitive in global manufacturing. It is, for instance, the most important factor (besides poor management) that General Motors and Chrysler are going bankrupt. http://www.commoditynewscenter.com/articles/Insight/Why_Healthcare_Is_Killing_America

Michael Scott points us to the fact that US Attorneys have requested data on anonymous commenters who commented on an article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. From the description, it sounds like the feds are fishing for a lot more than they should be allowed to get. The subpoena requested: "full name, date of birth, physical address, gender, ZIP code, password prompts, security questions, telephone numbers and other identifiers ... the IP address," of everyone who commented Seem a bit excessive? It's not entirely clear what the feds are fishing for, but one indicator? Some of the comments were quite...

Today's Rasmussen survey finds that voters now trust Republicans over Democrats on six of ten issues, most notably the economy, 45 percent to 39 percent. Another one is government ethics, 35-29. And immigration, by a wide 43-29 margin.