Free Republic

It seems Democrats these days are expressing their anger by not inviting those one would normally expect to attend. What caught my attention was a piece on Jamie Dimon, the highly competent CEO and Chairman of JP Morgan Chase, and a former supporter of Obama. But he has become a major critic starting with the after-the-fact pay and dividend restrictions for accepting TARP funds, calling them a Scarlet Letter. For this and objecting to provisions of the financial reform bill, he was rewarded with a non invitation to Obama’s bill signing ceremony. To show insults can work both ways, Obama...

The whole escapade makes no sense. With the exception of the “money man” Christopher Metzos who escaped, none represented a threat. It would have been far better to keep the remaining 10 under observation, as they had been for years. So the question is why did the FBI roll the operation up at this time? We tend to think operations like this are well thought out and run according to plan. But it is more likely this was an enormous screw up between the FBI and the White House. First, no FBI director in his right mind would conduct such...

On his radio show yesterday, Al Sharpton surprisingly reveals an overwhelming support for Supreme Court Second Amendment decision in the black community. Sharpton: "I would say 90% of the calls I received yesterday were in support of the Supreme Court and people say they want to bear guns. They’re tired of the violence and it’s very very interesting. I have had a few on both sides today, but yesterday was overwhelming, it was stunning to me." Political correctness has masked the true intent of big city Democrat mayors for their support of gun control. Quite frankly it is and has...

The latest Real Clear Politics Presidential Job Approval data shows President Obama with greater disapproval numbers than approval. The numbers are 47.7% approve of his performance, 48.0 % disapprove, for a net minus of 0.3%. Only media affiliated polling groups (with the exception of Fox) continue to show Obama with significant positives: CNN/Opinion Research 50 – 48; Ipsos/McClatchy 50 – 45; AP/GFK 50 – 49; and ABC/Wash Post 52 – 45. With the exception of a single

On April 22 the Air Force launched the X-37B, an unmanned miniature space shuttle look-alike that was cloaked in secrecy and described in official gobbledygook that still defies the best decryption efforts of NSA. Here’s a sample:...“The program supports technology risk reduction, experimentation and operational concept development.” Nothing about this mission makes sense. What aroused my curiosity was an article in the NY Times that Harvard astronomer Jonathan Mc Dowell had reported the upper stage was sent into an unknown orbit around the sun. Now the upper stage of any launch vehicle shoves the main payload into its final orbit,...

The US Coast Guard has approved the use of the top kill method of capping BP’s well. There has been no time set to begin the procedure, but you can follow the video feed live from the ROV camera here (link). Note the moving wormlike object close to the pipe....

I don’t want to diminish the problems with the oil spill, but we have lived through far worse and our waters and shoreline recovered. During World War II, Nazi U-boats sank scores of oil tankers off the Atlantic Coast and the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf of Mexico campaign began precisely 68 years ago today, May 4, 1942. In a little over a month they had sunk oil cargoes of over 600,000 barrels (one barrel equals 42 gallons), and by December 1943 when they sank the last ship in the Gulf, nearly 900,000 barrels of oil and oil products had...

Two major clues came to light over this past weekend. The first was the unusual secret meeting of CIA Director Leon Panetta last Thursday (Jan. 28) with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and later Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The second was an administration leak to the press that we are beefing up missile defenses in the Gulf. After months of Iran’s stalling, nuclear negotiations have gone nowhere. It was obvious from the start they would go nowhere. The self imposed deadline we made to keep Israel from unilaterally striking Iran came and went at the end of the year. Someone...

The White House war on Fox News heated up in early October. It culminated, after almost 3 weeks of harassment, in an unsuccessful effort to exclude Fox, a member of the White House press pool, from an interview with pay czar Kenneth Feinberg. In a successful pushback, members of the press pool unanimously refused to conduct any interview, unless Fox was included. The White House backed down. The language used to marginalize Fox was primarily “Fox is not a legitimate news organization” used by Gibbs on many occasions, and then Communications Director Anita Dunn’s “[T]he way we view it is...

China just completed the world’s fastest high speed rail line, a 664 mile stretch between Wuhan in central China to Guangzhou, north of Hong Kong. The significant fact is not that it is the fastest rail link (217 mph average), but that it was built in less than four years. If we were to commit the resources to a similar effort, we wouldn’t have completed the environmental impact statement much less resolved the innumerable lawsuits in the same amount of time. The Lilliputians have simply immobilized us. Lest anyone think such an effort was ever beyond our capabilities, in 1869...

In her op-ed piece today, entitled Captain Obvious Learns the Limits of Cool, Maureen Down simply eviscerates President Obama for his cluelessness in handling the panty bomber fiasco. Here’s how it starts: Our president came down from the mountaintop. He had applied the freshness of his independent thought to the critical matters at hand. He had convened his seminar, reviewed the reviews, analyzed the intelligence every which way, thought anew about everything, and lo and behold, he finally emerged to tell us some stuff we already knew. We are under attack. There is evil in the world. Yemen is a...

This incredible revelation came to light in a letter Monday from Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thompson to a number of news organizations. It was a response to a NY Times article by David Carr entitled “Under Murdoch, Tilting Rightward at the Journal.” Carr's somewhat snarky article accused the Journal of tainting its reputation as “one of the crown jewels of journalism” into a more mundane conservative newspaper and that it was assuming a pro-business, anti government stance. The Times accusing the Journal of sullying its reputation with biased journalism??? What chutzpah! The Journal’s response was quoted in Editor...

The forebodings the Jews of Europe had as they were herded onto cattle cars to an unknown destination are the same feelings of helplessness I have as the Copenhagen Climate Summit reaches its conclusion. It is the concern that unaccountable, unelected and unresponsive individuals will seal my fate and squander my assets to bring “social justice” to the world. Make no mistake, global warmists are more interested in achieving an agenda of undoing Westernism than cooling the planet. It is Westernism that has brought unbridled prosperity to most of the world, and where it doesn’t exist (North Korea, Cuba, Myanmar...

Stanley Fish in his NY Times blog Opinionator reviews Sarah Palin’s book Going Rogue. It is a very satisfying analysis for those who admire her, of which I am one. But it is totally out of character for the Times. Read it. It finishes with these words: "But run she does (and falls, but so what?), and when it is all over and she has lost the vice presidency and resigned the governorship, she goes on a long run and rehearses in her mind the eventful year she has chronicled. And as she runs, she achieves equilibrium and hope: “We’ve...

Stanley Fish in his NY Times blog Opinionator reviews Sarah Palin’s book Going Rogue. It is a very satisfying analysis for those who admire her, of which I am one. But it is totally out of character for the Times. Read it. It finishes with these words: "But run she does (and falls, but so what?), and when it is all over and she has lost the vice presidency and resigned the governorship, she goes on a long run and rehearses in her mind the eventful year she has chronicled. And as she runs, she achieves equilibrium and hope: 'We’ve...

When I was in college in 1958 my dad made a comment that my generation was the worst generation ever, meaning primarily morals and music. It’s a statement most dads have probably made to sons over the millennia. My retort was, “well what about the Roaring Twenties, bathtub gin and petting parties?” After denials of his involvement in any of that, this line of conversation ceased. Those who came of age in the fifties lived through what is now considered one of the tamest times since the Victorian era. It was the age of Doris Day, hula hoops, and dancing...

Today’s Times of London reveals the UK Met (Meteorological) Office will go through the painstaking job of reassembling all of the original temperature data that was recently discovered to have been destroyed by the CRU, reportedly in the 1980s. This earth shattering news was discovered by the University of East Anglia shortly after it announced all source data and code used in the CRU’s reports would be made public. Two days after the revelation of the destroyed data, it was announced Phil Jones, CRU’s director would temporarily step down, pending an independent investigation... This is a necessary task for any...

The “temporary” step down of Phil Jones finally forced the NY Times to do some print coverage of the scandal. Missing from the story are any quotes from the incendiary emails and very little about reaction of other scientists over this growing scandal.... The Times’ emphasis on the criminal aspect of the email release, is more than somewhat laughable in light of some of its rather questionable leaks of highly classified comint information. But the important point here is the Times has simply played the same old game of attempting to suppress a story that has been burning up the...

The following just passed over the AP wire. CRU director and author of many of the damning “hacked” emails, Phil Jones, has temporarily stepped down pending an independent investigation. This is only the beginning of his problems. East Anglia University holds all the emails and source data (what’s left of it, on its computers. They should be able ascertain the scope of the fraud he perpetrated. If data has been recently destroyed, they should be able to find out who did it. Happy hunting guys! "Britain's University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is...

This video includes a lengthy series of interviews with Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit. It is an excellent recap of his battles with Mann and the CRU. It was produced by a Finnish group and adds their own tree ring data which support McIntyre. It is in Finnish with English subtitles. The McIntyre interviews are of course in English. It was released recently and appears to have been updated with new information from this past weekend. Click here to open the site. http://dotsub.com/view/19f9c335-b023-4a40-9453-a98477314bf2