Free Republic

Since the Federal government could potentially inflate away these trillions in Treasuries, buy enough elected officials to force austerity so inflation remains tame. In essence, these private banks and corporations now own the revenue stream of the Federal government and its taxpayers. Neat con, and the marks will never understand how "saving our financial system" led to their servitude to the very interests they bailed out. The circle is now complete: in "saving our financial system," the public borrowed trillions and transferred the money to private Power Elites, who then buy the public debt with the money swindled out of...

<p>In a sometimes testy televised debate Monday night, Paul's chief Republican opponent, Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, said he "proudly" would vote for McConnell. McConnell has endorsed Grayson in the May 18 primary.</p> <p>The debate is the final face-off in what has become an increasingly acrimonious race to replace Sen. Jim Bunning.</p>

That’s my call for now. And at one point I thought this was going to be a boring election year. What a day, let me summarize the reactions. Lefties: It’s a cynical stunt Righties: It’s a cynical stunt… that happens to be in the best interest of the country as a whole. Independents/undecided: ??? - we have no idea how this will play out. I think the move was smart because it works on so many levels. level 1: Politically, McCain makes a move that can easily be seen as putting country first over politics. Even acknowledging that it’s cynical,...

In the wake of the Mark Foley scandal, questions are circulating below the radar screen in Ohio about the past record of Democratic Rep. Ted Strickland on pedophilia. Strickland is the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Ohio running against Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell. The issue surfaced Dec. 15, 2005, when the left-leaning Athens News reported on an anonymous letter-writing campaign to Democratic voters citing Strickland's vote as "present" and not in support of the 1999 House Concurrent Resolution 107 that condemned an American Psychological Association study supporting "nonnegative sexual interactions between adults and adolescents." (Story continues below) The APA...

OVERVIEW: Part 1 — Why It’s Being Brought Up Ted Strickland’s 1999 “Present” vote on H CON RES 107, his reaction to the Resolution in question, and his stated reason for opposing it are relevant to the 2006 Ohio gubernatorial campaign because: * There’s a big difference between serving 600,000 people in Congress and governing an entire state of 11 million people. * The Strickland campaign has been widely agreed to be painfully short on specifics, so we must look elsewhere for clues as to what kind of governor he might be. * The conduct of Strickland’s party in Washington...

I inputted the numbers into my spreadsheet. In a perfect replay of 2000, If Each county in Ohio voted according to the same percentages Republican and Democrat With the same turnout figures Bush gets 157,431 more votes Kerry gets 120,780 more votes than Kerry did.That makes for a 37,000 vote advantage which would increase Bush&#8217;s margin of 166,000 to over 200,000.source: http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/news/mediaguide.htm Keep in mind that I did not factor out the huge 163,000 Franklin increase which was due almost entirely to their not purging any inactive voters. Franklin was almost half/half so it did not matter that much in...

Here’s what it will take for either George W. Bush or John Kerry to win Ohio: 2,899,798 votes. That’s one more than half the record number expected to vote in Tuesday’s election. Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell projected last night that nearly 5.8 million Ohioans will go to the polls or vote absentee. If he’s right, the turnout would top the total from the 2000 presidential race by almost a million and would exceed by 750,000 the Ohio record, set in 1992 when independent H. Ross Perot joined Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush on the presidential ballot. A...

The Columbus Dispatch - Election Franklin County has more than 227,000 inactive voters -- about a quarter of the county's registered voters. Voters are labeled "inactive" once they have failed to vote in two federal-election cycles and don't respond to confirmation cards. Almost 1.9 million of Ohio's more than 8.5 million registered voters haven't cast a ballot since at least 1999, the Dispatch analysis found. Of course the useful thing here would be to know how many inactive voters we had in 2000, for comparison purposes. 816k -227k = 589k far less than the 682k registered in 2000. But unfortunately...

As I read through the forums and blogosphere I am struck by how much hand-wringing there is over Ohio. As we should know by now, polls are either junk or guesses made on assumptions that may or may not be true. Let's investigate some of these assumptions and call them x-factors. X-factor 1: The Black Vote. In 2000 the turnout was 54% among AA voters and they voted for Gore at an overwhelming 89%. source. Kerry must equal this. Recent reports are saying that Kerry has support of only 80% of black voters. This is a 40k net decline in...

Todays CPD has an in-depth article on how Bush and Kerry are working to win the OH electoral votes. Between them, the campaigns are leaving little of the state untouched. They want Ohio's votes badly, so Ohioans will be hearing a lot from the candidates and their surrogates in person, in television ads, in letters and in e-mail... I can certainly vouch for that, but in Warren County my mail is running 10-1 Bush literature. The Bush campaign is confident it can win the state; as if to prove its comfort level, today marks 14 days since the Republican president...

New Voter Registration: Not Enough for KerryThere have been a lot of stories pushing the idea that a whole bunch of new voters are being registered in Ohio. What is underreported is that there are huge increases in Republican counties as well. Especially read the Enquirer article below. Sources: Columbus Dispatch, Cincinnati Enquirer, Cleveland PDWhat I've done is scour through these newspaper articles trying to figure out how many new registrations there are and in what counties. I then extrapolate from 2000 election results how many of these registrations are new Bush voters and new Kerry votes. what I have...

The Lieberman-Cheney Vice Presidential Debate MODERATOR: From Centre College in historic Danville, Kentucky, good evening, and welcome to this year's only vice presidential debate sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates. I'm Bernard Shaw, moderator. Tonight we come to you from the hall in the Northern Center for the Arts on the campus of Centre College. Thank you to President John Rausch, the faculty, students and community leaders state-wide, we thank you for hosting this debate. The candidates are the Republican nominee, former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney of Wyoming, and the Democratic nominee, Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. The Commission,...

This draft thing has been making the rounds. Somehow the Home School Legal Defense Association has been linked. Here is a good article with the facts. Did a little digging myself on a good Congressional search engine. And found that:a: hr.163 and s.89 are sponsored by Rangel and Hollings respectively, both Democrats. b: Nothing has happened on either bill since February of 2003. Effectively dead in committee. Don't take my word for it, see for yourself. s.89, hr.163 here is one of the websites promoting this crap. Lets take a look at what they are saying.Although Congress would have to...

Got called this morning by America Coming Together. Said they wanted to do a poll. I live in Warren County, Ohio. (Fast growing conservative county NE of Cincinnati) First Question: Have you or do you know anyone who has lost their job due to economic conditions? I thought this was an incredibly imprecise question for a poll. I asked her in what timeframe. She said there was no timeframe. So I commented that of course the answer would be yes. Second Question: What are the two biggest issues that will influence your vote in the upcoming presidential election? My answer...

Classical vs. Modern Education Modern public education does not look like the trivium. But in order to understand why, we have to understand from whence modern education has come. For, if one takes a cursory glance through Classical America, we find that even 200 years ago things were very different in American education than they are today. How did we get so far away from the classical tradition in education? In order to approach an answer, we must understand the rise of government- sponsored education, and with it, the public school nightmare. Richard Mitchell, professor of classics at Glassboro State ...

Brian Williams just said I guess we should call him "President-Elect Bush". and noted that the DNC chairman called on Gore to concede

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) -- Al Gore picked up more votes in Democratic-leaning Broward County on Saturday, while Republicans expressed concern about a published report that at least 39 felons cast absentee ballots in Broward and Miami-Dade counties. At the end of Saturday's count, with 259 of Broward County's 609 precincts hand counted, Gore had gained 79 votes over official tallies sent to the secretary of state on Tuesday. It remained uncertain if any of the manually recounted votes would be added to official totals. Secretary of State Katherine Harris has said she won't accept any manual recount totals, ...

Education will be the theme of a three-city Southwest Ohio bus tour by Al Gore and running mate Joseph Lieberman on Tuesday that will end with a Cincinnati rally. The Democratic presidential and vice presidential candidates will appear at a 2 p.m. rally Tuesday at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, a two-year college Mr. Gore visited four years ago. The appearances underscore Ohio's importance as a battleground state. IF YOU GO Tickets to the Gore-Lieberman rally will be distributed by the Hamilton County Democratic Party at Hyde Park Square and Swifton Commons Mall from 10 a.m.-3 p.m. today ...

JULY 20, 2000 Carnivore 2.0 More on the Perils of FBI Internet Surveillance and Why It's Even Worse in Australia By Robert X. Cringely Last week's column on Carnivore, the FBI's plan to install e-mail snooping PCs at the Internet Service Providers of suspected bad guys, raised a lot of interest from an interesting cross-section of readers. Hackers and especially ISPs were quick to question me on technical grounds (as I predicted), and generally suggested I return to school. But they also expressed alarm at the idea of Carnivore, not only for its probable assault on privacy, but also for ...

Monday, 10 April, 2000 Canberra tops nation in rate of thefts By FRANK CASSIDY Canberra's skyrocketing crime wave has victims of home burglaries lodging 50 per cent more claims in 1999 than they did in 1998. The Canberra surge was Australia's biggest, with other parts of the country averaging an increase of just 20 per cent. Figures by insurer AAMI show that 27 theft claims were made for every 1000 policies in Canberra last year, compared with 18 in 1998 and 26.5 nationally. The figures are in line with Australian Federal Police statistics which show 4978 burglaries of dwellings in ...