Free Republic

The House of Representatives yesterday set into motion the nuclear option for H.R. 3200 that would make it possible for the Senate to pass government-run health care with only 51 votes. House Ways & Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) held the mandatory hearing yesterday to pass the formal notification in the form of a letter to the Budget Committee saying H.R. 3200 -- the main House Obamacare bill which was the subject of all the town hall rage in August -- has met all requirements to pass as a “budget reconciliation” measure. Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), the top Republican...

I'm a life-long Republican, and I'm sorry to say I don't recognize the party anymore. The party of smaller government, personal freedom, and fiscal responsibility has become the party of bloated government, covert subjugation of our personal rights, porous borders, and deficits that are bankrupting our nation. Would it shock you to know that three-quarters of our total national debt was incurred under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush? We all know Barack Obama is on a path to outdo the two of them combined. There was much hand-wringing after the last election, with no shortage of advice on what...

PHOENIX — An Arizona sheriff known for aggressively cracking down on illegal immigration has been stripped of some of his special power to enforce federal immigration law, and he claims the Obama administration is taking away his authority for political reasons. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose office faces racial profiling allegations over crime and immigration sweeps in some heavily Latino areas of metro Phoenix, said officials from Washington won't let him renew a deal that let his deputies make federal immigration arrests

Peter Schiff's day job is running Euro Pacific Capital, a Connecticut-based investment fund. But he's better known as the guy who called the housing collapse and recession back in 2006. Schiff, a hard-core free-marketeer and an adviser to Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) during his 2008 presidential run, now moonlights as a cable news analyst and has become a YouTube fixture, thanks to the "Peter Schiff Was Right" mashups of his predictions. His latest job: seeking the Republican nomination to run against Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), chairman of the banking committee. Washington Post business reporter Frank Ahrens spoke with Schiff about...

Conservative Republican Marco Rubio says $1 million in donations to his Senate campaign is a 'strong statement' about the direction of the GOP. BY BETH REINHARD U.S. Senate candidate Marco Rubio said Tuesday he raised nearly $1 million in the past three months to challenge Charlie Crist for the Republican nomination, turning what looked like a cakewalk for the popular incumbent governor into a potentially competitive race. In the previous fundraising quarter, Crist's $4.3 million dwarfed the $340,000 raised by Rubio. But the former leader of the Florida House from Miami gained momentum, winning 11 small, unofficial polls of county...

(snip) The libertarian movement within the Republican Party, led by U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, is gaining ground fast, to the acute embarrassment of the party establishment.(snip) In essence, libertarian conservatives stand for small government, small business and personal freedom. This translates into lower taxes, increased employment and increased prosperity. These were the policies of President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.Listening to mainline Republican Party spokespersons, people could be persuaded to think Republicans are libertarian. However, recent Republican actions show them to support big government, big business and increasing control over people. This has resulted in higher...

Rep. McClintock gave the following speech to the How to Take Back America Conference in St. Louis hosted by the Eagle Forum on September 26, 2009. A funny thing happened this summer on the Road to Serfdom. The American people decided we don’t want to go! We are watching something unfold across the country that is quite remarkable. We are watching Americans do what Americans have always done whenever we have sensed that our country or our freedom is in danger. Ever since the days of the Boston Tea Party, in times of crisis, we have set aside our personal...

Is this a trick question? "The president’s problem isn’t that he is too visible; it’s the lack of content in what he says when he keeps showing up on the tube. Obama can seem a mite too impressed with his own aura, as if his presence on the stage is the Answer. There is, at times, a self-referential (even self-reverential) tone in his big speeches. They are heavily salted with the words “I” and “my.” (He used the former 11 times in the first few paragraphs of his address to the U.N. last week.) Obama is a historic figure, but...

Well, today in New York with his speech that actually was unremarkable in its genus except that it comes from a head of an erstwhile serious nation, President Obama continued his tour of singling out his own country, the greatest force for good the world has ever known, today implicitly pinning on us the global warming industry's hysterical claims of apocalypse. This set the tone for the UN's climate talks this week and related discussions at the G-20 in Pittsburgh. But it's got me wondering. The world's fourth-largest economy (way back behind #s 1 and 2) in the largest emitter...

Barack Obama has demanded the Pentagon conduct a radical review of US nuclear weapons doctrine to prepare the way for deep cuts in the country's arsenal, the Guardian can reveal. Obama has rejected the Pentagon's first draft of the "nuclear posture review" as being too timid, and has called for a range of more far-reaching options consistent with his goal of eventually abolishing nuclear weapons altogether, according to European officials.

Missile defense - as the term might suggest - is defensive, not offensive. Brilliant American scientists have developed sophisticated technologies to prevent missiles - including those armed with nuclear warheads - from reaching their intended victims. If we are willing to share this capability to protect people around the world, Sen. Jim DeMint asked, "What is controversial about that?" I'd like to take a stab at answering the Senator's question (raised at a Heritage Foundation forum in which I was privileged to participate this week) but first, a little context is in order. Iran's ruling mullahs have the largest arsenal...

I want to know how the situation covered on Hannity today is not cause enough for armed insurrection by the people of California against the tyranny of Washington DC. I want to know how governor Schwarzenegger has not called out the national guard and by force of arms turned the water on. I want to know how any rational human being can look at the starving of an area, the destroyed landscape, the human misery caused by artificially starving an area of a natural resource and defend it. I want to know if our government would accept such actions committed...

WASHINGTON – The capital was rocked today by a taxpayer march and rally that could be the biggest protest ever – potentially dwarfing the Million Man March and the Promise Keepers Rally. Though crowd estimates vary from as low as 60,000 to 70,000 according to ABC News to a high of 2 million by London Daily Mail, photographs and videos of the march and rally demonstrate its enormity. The taxpayers stormed Washington, D.C., today, taking their fight against excessive spending, bailouts, growth of big government and soaring deficits to the front door of the U.S. Capitol. All week citizens have...

It's clear that President Barack Obama's $787-billion stimulus hasn't worked as advertised, but some economists are worried it could backfire and cause something much worse. According to a new study by economists Charles Rowley of George Mason University and Nathanael Smith of the Locke Institute and endorsed by Nobel laureate James Buchanan, the Keynesian tactics employed by Obama "will ultimately hamper the long-term growth potential of the U.S. economy and may risk delaying full economic recovery by several years." The study accuses the president of making Depression-era mistakes. Stephen Moore, member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board and senior...

Conservatives are taking too much solace in the precipitous drop in Barack Obama's approval ratings, and too many of us are overconfident that his administration is merely a replay of the hapless presidency of Jimmy Carter that was easily swept out in a landslide election. Today's situation is far different, far more conducive to our political adversary's political power, than that which faced Carter. And Obama is an entirely different breed of cat. He's more ruthless, more tactically savvy, and has far more dangerous objectives. A drop in his poll ratings isn't as serious a setback for him as similar...

Here is a new Naked Emperor News video with the audio of Obama Adviser and Green Jobs Czar saying in 2008 he had a goal of moving the United States from "suicidal capitalism" to a "Green Economy" that will "push it and push it and push it" until it "tranforms the whole society." He said "Complete Revolution is on the table," and the "Green Movement" would be the engine to bring it to pass. . . . (Listen to Audio)

So now the mainstream media is in catch-up mode. Having quietly fretted as Obama’s poll numbers drifted lower and misrepresented the extent of independent voters’ support, they now must explain that the town hall crowds weren’t simply crackpots or dupes of the insurance industry. Those people are actually quite representative of the electorate — especially the electorate willing to turn out to vote in the 2010 congressional elections. And while they swooned at Obama press conferences, the media must now admit that Obama has been colossally ineffective at persuading the public. The “catch-up” phenomenon is nothing new. We saw it...

Just before Thanksgiving last year, a group of former aides to Mitt Romney convened at his salmon-colored Belmont home, many of them gathering for the first time since Romney had disbanded his presidential campaign some nine months before. Romney had invited them for a post-mortem of the election weeks earlier, the type of dispassionate assessment that the Harvard Business School alumnus so enjoyed. But over cookies, they found few of the metrics for success that Romney prized -- Republicans had been decisively thumped at all levels -- and his attention shifted from 2008 to the future.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday shows that 27% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-one percent (41%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -14. These figures mark the lowest Approval Index rating yet recorded for this President. The previous low of -12 was reached on July 30 (see trends). Prior to today, the number who Strongly Approved of the President’s performance had never fallen below 29%. Some of the decline has come from within the President’s own party. Just 49%...

BACKSTORY At a Little Rock restaurant, after Mr. Clinton was elected president, Emanuel ticked off a list of disloyal Democrats and other political enemies, stabs the table with his knife screaming, ''Dead!'' ''Dead!'' ''Dead!'' after each name. Seven months after moving into the West Wing as Obama's COS, Emanuel is emerging as perhaps the most influential White House COS in a generation. But with his prominence in almost everything important going on comes a high degree of risk. As the principal author of Mr. Obama’s do-everything-at-once strategy, he stands to become a figure of consequence in his own right if...