Free Republic

The Houston Chronicle is reporting Texas Gov. Rick Perry is quietly fundraising for Newt Gingrich, the man he endorsed for president when he dropped out of the race. Perry has not made any public speeches on Gingrich's behalf yet. How is Perry raising money for Gingrich? Perry has sent an email to potential donors with the title "Bold Reagan Conservatives." In the email he touted what he believes are Gingrich's conservative qualities, stating that giving his campaign money would send a message to President Barack Obama.

“Constitution 101: The Meaning and History of the Constitution” is a 10-week online course presented by Hillsdale College. Featuring an expanded format from the “Introduction to the Constitution” lecture series with Hillsdale College President Dr. Larry Arnn, Constitution 101 follows closely the one-semester course required of all Hillsdale College undergraduate students. In this course, you can: • watch lectures from the same Hillsdale faculty who teach on campus; • study the same readings taught in the College course; • submit questions for weekly Q&A sessions with the faculty; • access a course study guide; • test your knowledge through weekly...

Via Politico: . . . Another illustration of presidential hubris involved the Bush family. The White House put out a picture of a private meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 27 that included former President George H.W. Bush and his son, Jeb, the former governor of Florida. The Bushes were in town for the annual black tie dinner the next night at the Alfalfa Club, a gathering of business and political elites. The two featured speakers, both intended to be brief and humorous, were Obama and Jeb Bush. The president spoke to good reviews. He left before Bush spoke....

When Anders Aslund, a Swedish economist who has studied and advised most of the leaders in the former Soviet Union, visited Kiev in late 2004, at the height of the Orange Revolution, he returned to his office in Washington, D.C., with a surprising observation. Most reports depicted the Orange Revolutionaries, with their determined, subzero encampment of the capital city's central square, either as western Ukrainians rebelling against the government's pro-Russian stance, or as idealistic students who were unwilling to stomach political repression. Both characterizations were true, but Aslund saw a third dynamic at play. The Orange Revolution, he told me,...

USA Today reported Jan. 21 that President Obama was setting aside much of that weekend to work on his State of the Union address. He should have just worked on the state of the union. I can hardly fault the president for using the occasion to make a campaign speech. All presidents do in election years. But in so doing, they usually point to all the good they accomplished during their first term in office. But there’s very little good to which President Barack Obama can point.

America is coming apart. For most of our nation's history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world—for whites, anyway. "The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of American democracy, in the 1830s. "On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day." Americans love to see themselves this way. But there's a problem: It's not true anymore, and...

Obamacare” appears ready to collapse under its own weight. Look at the CLASS Act, a government-run long-term care program Congress is likely to vote to repeal from the 2010 law. Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) ignored warnings from the Medicare actuary and the American Academy of Actuaries when they added this budget gimmick to the 2010 health law. A bipartisan Senate majority voted to strip CLASS from the law, but Democratic leaders needed CLASS premiums to offset the costs of unrelated parts of “Obamacare.”

WASHINGTON -- Tensions between the rich and poor are increasing and at their most intense level in nearly a quarter-century, a new survey shows. Americans now see more social conflict over wealth inequality than over the hot-button topics of immigration, race relations and age. The survey released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center highlights U.S. perceptions of the economic divide, an issue that has moved to the forefront in the 2012 presidential campaign amid stubbornly high unemployment, increasing poverty and protests by the Occupy movement.

Not so classy, captain! Yankees star Derek Jeter, one of New York’s most eligible hunks since his split with longtime gal pal Minka Kelly, is bedding a bevy of beauties in his Trump World Tower bachelor pad — and then coldly sending them home alone with gift baskets of autographed memorabilia. The Yankees captain’s wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am kiss-offs came to light when he mistakenly pulled the stunt twice on the same woman — forgetting she had been an earlier conquest, a pal told The Post. “Derek has girls stay with him at his apartment in New York, and then he gets them...

Obama To Stick With Class-Warfare Approach in 2012December 28, 2011 President Obama is expected to set the major theme for his 2012 re-election campaign with a State of the Union address on January 24 that portrays him as the defender of the middle class and Republicans as the party of the rich and big corporations. Democratic strategists say Obama's earlier campaign message--that his economic policies prevented a bad situation from getting worse--was weak and didn't connect with most voters. Now Obama has decided to shift gears in an attempt to take on the role of tribune of Middle America. Among...

Wisconsin --(Ammoland.com)- Wisconsin Carry, Inc. firmly believes in, and advocated for constitutional carry this past legislative session. While we were successful in putting constitutional carry front and center on the legislative and media radar, ultimately, Wisconsin’s concealed carry law that passed requires mandatory proof of training to be supplied with your application to the DOJ. A hunters education certificate serves as proof of training as does your DD214 showing honorable discharge from the military. In addition, a concealed carry permit (current or expired) from another state will also serve as proof of training. Wisconsin Carry believes that there are thousands...

Very informative! Must Watch! http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=JY8LKII_MNA&feature=youtube_gdata_player

NYU To Offer Occupy Wall Street ClassUpdated: Friday, 09 Dec 2011, 7:12 AM EST NEW YORK (AP) — New York University plans to offer two classes next semester on the Occupy Wall Street movement. **SNIP** It will be called: "Why Occupy Wall Street? The History and Politics of Debt and Finance."

Hypocrisy, thy name is Barack Hussein Obama. WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama has met with a small number of donors at a Washington fundraiser to benefit his re-election bid. Democratic Party officials say about 20 people attended the fundraiser at The Jefferson hotel in downtown Washington. Tickets cost $35,800 a person, with the money going to the Obama Victory Fund, a joint fundraising account by the Democratic Party and Obama’s re-election campaign.

Obama's Income Inequality SpeechAdam Clark Estes - 2:18 PM ET **SNIP** Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, there’s been a certain crowd in Washington for the last few decades who respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If only we cut more regulations and cut more taxes – especially for the wealthy – our economy will grow stronger. Sure, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everyone else. And even...

Forget the books. This semester, Georgetown students might need to bring woofers and turntables to class instead. According to USA Today, the university is offering a sociology class focusing on the career of one of rap music’s biggest stars: WASHINGTON – Michael Eric Dyson parses Jay-Z’s lyrics as if analyzing fine literature. The rapper’s riffs on luxury cars and tailored clothes and boasts of being the “Mike Jordan of recording” may make for catchy rhymes, but to Dyson, they also reflect incisive social commentary. Dyson, a professor, author, radio host and television personality, has offered at Georgetown University this semester...

US school student arrested for 'burping audibly' in class Washington, Dec 3 : A seventh-grader in a US school was reportedly arrested after he ‘burped audibly’ during a class. The 13-year-old from Cleveland Middle School alleges that after he burped, his teacher called the school resource officer, who in turn called the authorities to have him arrested for ‘interfering with public education’. The student has filed a civil rights lawsuit naming his teacher, principal and a police officer. It also claims that school authorities transported him from the school to the detention facility without notifying his parents. “They are using...

SEATTLE -- She lives in a beautiful waterfront home on Seattle’s Lake Washington. Yet, she's on welfare assistance.   This week federal agents moved in to put a stop to it. They raided her south Lake Washington home armed with a search warrant.   KING 5 News is not naming the woman or her husband because they have not been criminally charged.   Search warrant documents unsealed Friday in federal court reveal that she received more than $1,200 a month in public housing vouchers, plus monthly cash from the federal and state government for a disability, as well as food stamps.  ...

NEW YORK – A doctoral candidate in Yale University's American Studies Program is teaching a course in "nightlife culture" that includes DJ lecturers, a field trip to New York nightlife hot spots Le Bain and the Boom Boom Room and a discussion titled "Looks, Doors and Guest Lists: Getting Past the Velvet Rope."

Teacher suspended after showing 'Daily Show' in classBy Rob Manker - Tribune reporter 5:37 p.m. CST, November 16, 2011 A downstate teacher has been suspended after showing segments of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” in his class. Rhett Felix, a first-year government and law teacher, was suspended for six school days and will return on Nov. 28, Eureka High School Superintendent Randy Crump told the Tribune on Wednesday. Crump declined to confirm the reason for the suspension, other than to say Felix had violated school policy. Mayor Scott Punke, a lifelong Eureka resident and uncle of a student in Felix’s...

Individuals applying for concealed carry permits in Wisconsin will no longer face minimum training requirements, a change welcomed with open arms by Second Amendment groups and other gun rights supporters. But the sudden switch has thrown a wrench into the plans of Blackhawk Technical College, which hosted its first four-hour training course last Friday and had planned to offer additional classes in the near future, said Mark Brown, the Dean of Public Safety there. "It will impact our plans," Brown said in an email Tuesday. "We plan to meet this week to discuss this issue and come up with a...

Idaho Board Approves First Ever Online Class RequirementPublished November 04, 2011 | Associated Press Boise, ID – Education officials on Thursday gave final approval to a plan that makes Idaho the first state in the nation to require high school students to take at least two credits online to graduate, despite heavy criticism of the plan at public hearings this summer. The measure is part of a sweeping education overhaul that introduces teacher merit pay and phases in laptops for every high school teacher and student. **SNIP** "There is still a live teacher. It may be at a distance, but...

Congress caused the mortgage crisis, not the banks. Permit denied for Occupy Madison due to public masturbation. Cops: School worker asked student to pose nude for picture.

WASHINGTON, D.C.--Senator John Thune today criticized the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) admission at a U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing that the Obama Administration has spent "just under $5 million" on the implementation of Obamacare's failed Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Act. The CLASS implementation figure cited today is more than twice the $2.2 million figure HHS claimed had been spent in a letter to Thune in August, just three months ago. "After ignoring repeated warnings from budget experts and Congressional Republicans, HHS still spent nearly $5 million of taxpayers' hard-earned money to implement...

The Obama administration will not implement a controversial piece of the healthcare reform law, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Friday. Sebelius said the department will not continue trying to implement the CLASS program, which was intended to provide insurance for long-term care. Republicans charged that the program’s financial structure was unsustainable, and Sebelius conceded as much Friday. “We have not identified a way to make CLASS work at this time,” she wrote on the Huffington Post's website. Sebelius said HHS will “suspend” implementation of the program. The department recently reassigned the people it had placed in the...

"Now the Republicans, you know when I, I talked about this earlier in the week. They said 'well, this is class warfare.' You know what? If asking a billionaire to pay their fair of taxes. To pay the same tax rate as a plumber or a teacher is class warfare, then you know what? I, I, I, I, I'm, I'm a warrior for the middle class. I'm happy to fight for the middle class," President Obama said at the Brent Spence Bridge in Cincinnati, OH.

Last week, a report from a Republican working group revealed that administration officials, in the rush to pass Obamacare, ignored internal warnings from government experts about the fiscal sustainability of a long-term care insurance entitlement program included in the health reform law. Throughout the health care debate, officials within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, as well as the Health and Human Services Department, repeatedly warned that the CLASS Act would be a fiscal disaster. Yet, the final version of Obamacare not only included the CLASS Act; it even counted CLASS as a cost-saving measure. Now, the Republicans behind...

In his increasingly desperate attempts to pander to a population that has by now entirely given up on the hope, and barely has any change left, Obama is going for broke (or technically the reverse) by setting the class warfare bar just that little bit higher. This time around, his targets are millionaires, who according to the NYT are about to see their taxes soar. Or not: nobody really knows if the proposed "Buffett Rule", affectionately known for crony communist #1, will impact just millionaires income tax, which incidentally is the same as what everyone else is paying, or, far...

Ian McKeachie is a freckled 15-year-old who "drifted along" in elementary school. Not because he didn't love to learn or because it wasn't a good school, but because he mastered new concepts so quickly that the classroom work presented no challenge. "My teachers would usually use me as a tutor for the other kids," he says, "so I was engaged in school, just not in a way that had me learning."

(And you wonder why Britain is in trouble ....) After just one day of classes at her summer school of choice, Emily Birkenshaw had already learned a crucial lesson: how to "go floppy" when facing arrest. "You're heavier then, so you can't be carried," she said, with the genuine delight of a new recruit. The 24-year-old been practising by linking arms with her classmates and singing loudly at a pretend policeman. "It just felt really empowering," she said. "If that happened [in real life] – and I hope it wouldn't – I'd know how to do it without getting hurt."...

Questions are also being raised questions over whether London could be trusted to stage a safe Olympic Games. After months during which China has bridled over western lectures about its fierce crackdown on dissent in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings, the country's official media reported on the shaming scenes in Britain with a mixture of shock and schadenfreude. "The West have been talking about supporting internet freedom, and oppose other countries' government to control this kind of websites, now we can say they are tasting the bitter fruit [of their complacency] and they can't complain about it," wrote...

There is one aspect of the final debt deal from DC that took me by surprise. I was convinced the 2% reduction in payroll taxes would be extended through 2012. On July 12th I wrote about this and got it completely wrong. Not only did I think there would be a one year extension of the existing holiday; I forecast that the subsidy would actually be increased.

Do you notice how the Democrats are cranking up the class warfare rhetoric? The ObamaMedia, of course, is loving it, and they’ve shown their eagerness to promote the message right into the election. Just know this … the media – with exceptions of course – is dedicated to the reelection of The Community Organizer. The only real tactical question is just how obvious they are going to be about it. The dumb masses must be reeled in --- so let’s not make it too obvious. Actually … it looks like the dumb masses have already been reeled in. I cited...

In its most recent report, Blue Chip Economic Indicators predicted that the nation's unemployment rate would fall to 8% by the end of 2012. That might seem like good news, considering the fact that unemployment now stands at 9.1%. But it is not good news for the President. Barring some cataclysmic event ("wag the dog") that would rally the country behind him, Obama's reelection rests on the health of the economy and especially on employment. The problem for this President is that unemployment rates during the second and third quarters of 2012, when undecided voters will make up their minds,...

America's Ruling Class-And the perils of a Revolution Angelo Codevilla As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors' "toxic assets" was the only alternative to the U.S. economy's "systemic collapse." In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not...

There has rarely been a starker juxtaposition of evil and innocence than the moment President George W. Bush received the news about 9/11 while reading The Pet Goat with second-graders in Sarasota, Fla. Seven-year-olds can't understand what Islamic terrorism is all about. But they know when an adult's face is telling them something is wrong - and none of the students sitting in Sandra Kay Daniels' class at Emma E. Booker Elementary School that morning can forget the devastating change in Bush's expression when White House chief of staff Andrew Card whispered the terrible news of the al-Qaeda attack. Lazaro...

A glimpse of tonight's speech by Obama: President Barack Obama will call tomorrow for a combination of reductions in entitlement spending and tax increases on higher-income Americans to address long-term fiscal debt while drawing a sharp contrast with the Republican alternative proposed by Representative Paul Ryan, according to a person familiar with the plan. This speech is just more evidence of the Marxist nature of our President. He will bandy about words such as "shared sacrifice" and "fairness" but in Obama's world shared sacrifice means you turn over more and more of YOUR labor and wealth to the government...

The size of government threatens the American way of life as we know it. The solution is straightforward -- cut government. A vibrant grassroots movement insists that it happen, and Washington is lousy with rival plans for how to go about it. The social threat to the American way of life is as dire, if not more so. But it is more insidious, and more complicated. No grassroots movement has mobilized against it, and no high-profile bipartisan commission is suggesting remedies. Yet it proceeds apace, all but ignored except in the lives of Americans. Among those trying to sound the...

Life not fair. Nor for that matter is it unfair. It simply is. It’s not fair or unfair that the lion feasts on the slowest zebra or that the penguin who leaps into the ocean at just the wrong moment becomes dinner for an Orca. Life is life… fair doesn’t come into play. Fair is a fundamentally human concept that is defined by a lack of preference or favoritism and or injustice. Despite its subjective nature, fairness is a word that the left loves to bring to what should be an objective realm, politics. It’s not fair that CEOs...

Lawdy.

RUSH: Robert B. Reichhhh, you've got to hear this. Robert B. Reichhhh was on NBC live last night with the anchor Cenk Uygur, and he spoke with Reich, and Cenk Uygur said, "This isn't just about let's get the money from the rich because that's where it is and they've accumulated all the wealth up at the top. It also makes sense for the rich if we had more equal distribution of income because of the effect it would have on the middle class. Tell us about that, why do you think [it's better to redistribute the wealth?] Now if...

To make sense of what's going on in Wisconsin, it helps to understand that the left in America lives in an ideological fantasy world. The dispute between the state government and the unions representing its employees is "about power," Paul Krugman of the New York Times observes accurately, before going off the rails: What [Gov. Scott] Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin--and eventually, America--less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy. And that's why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be...

Nick Clegg is to make an explosive attack on British universities as ‘instruments of social segregation’ as he orders them to stop taking so many middle-class students. The Deputy Prime Minister will this week insist that top institutions must ‘throw open their doors’ and lower their entrance requirements for the less well-off.

The ruling class continues to live high on the hog at the expense of the rest of the country -- staggering national debt, 10th Amendment and Great Recession be damned. The figures that follow are more consistent with an aristocracy, monarchy or plutocracy than our constitutional republic. Home prices According to the Washington Post, the Washington DC area experienced "the highest year-over-year home price gains in the nation this fall, as real estate values slumped in nearly every other metropolitan area." The article cited Standard & Poor's latest S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices released last week. From October 2009 to October...

Barack Obama has a substantial record of using thug-like language: ** Obama: “They Bring a Knife…We Bring a Gun” ** Obama to His Followers: “Get in Their Faces!” ** Obama on ACORN Mobs: “I don’t want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry! I’m angry!” ** Obama to His Mercenary Army: “Hit Back Twice As Hard” ** Obama on the private sector: “We talk to these folks… so I know whose ass to kick.“ ** Obama to voters: Republican victory would mean “hand to hand combat” ** Obama to lib supporters: “It’s time to Fight...

I need to know the rules for the Democrat’s class warfare. I understand that we are supposed to hate the rich, but which rich? I don’t understand the rules that separate friend from foe. We are supposed to hate successful manufacturers. But we are supposed to love a man who came to the Senate as a pauper, then used his position to become a multi-millionaire. We are supposed to hate Wall Street Bankers. But we are supposed to love a sleazy ambulance chaser. We are supposed to hate Paris for inheriting millions from a daddy who made it big in...

WASHINGTON (AP) - After meeting with President Barack Obama Thursday, Democratic leaders in Congress said they plan to hold a series of politically charged votes to extend middle-class tax cuts while letting tax cuts for the wealthy expire. Excerpted per FR posting rules.

...Christian Lander’s low-key but excellent “Whiter Shades of Pale” is a sequel to his first book, “Stuff White People Like” (2008)...Lander’s books are about that demographic slice of educated (or self-cultivated) people who are drawn to places where the good cheese stores, coffee bars, bookshops, art movie houses and indie bands are — places where, as importantly, there are plenty of other people pretty much like themselves. Needless to say, this bunch is easily satirized, and few people alive are as deft at this as is Lander...The conceit of Lander’s books is that he’s explaining, like some cross-cultural docent, the...

George W. Bush has come out of his self-imposed media blackout to promote his new book, Decision Points, which goes into full release on November 9th. Oprah Winfrey will air a pretaped interview with the former President on that day, but has a preview of the appearance out already, via The Right Scoop. In this clip, Bush tells Winfrey that he refrains from opining on Barack Obama’s performance because he wants to treat the current President the way he wished other former Presidents had treated him. Also, he elects to stay out of the “swamp” of punditry when Winfrey asks...

Consumers' right to file class actions is in dangerIf AT&T has its way before the Supreme Court, any business that issues a contract to customers would be able to prevent them from joining class-action lawsuits, taking away arguably the most powerful legal tool available to the little guy. By David Lazarus November 5, 2010 It hasn't gotten a lot of press, but a case involving AT&T that goes before the U.S. Supreme Court next week has sweeping ramifications for potentially millions of consumers. If a majority of the nine justices vote the telecom giant's way, any business that issues a...