Free Republic

Last week, during a bit of banter on Fox News, my colleague Jonah Goldberg reminded me of something I’d all but forgotten. Last September, during his address to Congress on health care, Barack Obama declared: “I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.” Dream on. The monstrous mountain of toxic pustules sprouting from greasy boils metastasizing from malign carbuncles that passed the Senate on Christmas Eve is not the last word in “health” “care,” but the first. It ensures that this is all we’ll be talking about, now and...

ENGLEWOOD, N.J. (CBS) ― Click to enlarge1 of 1 David Muneton, an eighth grade honor student, needed reconstructive facial surgery after being savagely beaten by a gang of 11 students on Dec. 18, 2009, in Engelwood, N.J. David Muneton, an eighth grade honor student, needed reconstructive facial surgery after being savagely beaten by a gang of 11 students on Dec. 18, 2009, in Engelwood, N.J. Police said as many as 11 students beat up the eighth-grader leaving him severely injured, and he may even lose his sight. CBS 2 HD spoke with some of his friends about what led to...

Whatever the results of the Copenhagen conference on climate change, one thing is for sure: Draconian reductions on carbon emissions will be tacitly accepted by the most developed economies and sloughed off by many developing ones. In essence, emerging economies get to cut their "carbon" intensity--a natural product of their economic evolution--while we get to cut our throats. The logic behind this prediction goes something like this. Since the West created the industrial revolution and the greenhouse gases that supposedly caused this "crisis," it's our obligation to take much of the burden for cleaning them up. Plagued by self-doubt and...

For our money, one of the better parts of President Obama's speech at West Point this week was his connection between a healthy economy and U.S. national security. To quote: "Our prosperity provides a foundation for our power. It pays for our military. It underwrites our diplomacy." We only wish Mr. Obama understood the link between the larger welfare state he is trying to build at home and the economic weakness that will undermine our military power. The proof is right before his eyes in the U.S. struggle to get Europe to contribute more forces to Afghanistan. Mr. Obama has...

Congressional Democrats are using several budget gimmicks to disguise the cost of their health care overhaul, claiming the House and Senate bills would cost only (!) about $1 trillion over 10 years. Now that critics have begun to correct for those budget gimmicks, supporters of ObamaCare are firing back. One gimmick makes the new entitlement spending appear smaller by not opening the spigot until late in the official 10-year budget window (2010–2019). Correcting for that gimmick in the Senate version, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) estimates, “When all this new spending occurs” — i.e., from 2014 through 2023 — “this bill...

But he's not "us." I won't go so far as to say that "he's 'them'," because that always degenerates into a discussion of who "them" really are, but Simpson did a nice job of helping clear up the identification. "President Obama is not trying to lead America forward to recovery, prosperity and strength. Quite the opposite, in fact. ... Obama and the Democrats are overwhelming political opposition to their plans with a flood of apocalyptic legislation. Their ultimate goal is to leave us so discouraged, demoralized, and exhausted that we throw our hands up in defeat. As Barney Frank said,...

Political correctness is without doubt one of the most effective weapons in the real unacknowledged war that is being waged today, the war of self-subversion. It relies on the strategy of specialized euphemism to avoid naming things or events honestly and directly, gutting the vocabulary in order to avoid giving offense or to dodge the labor and inconvenience of confronting unsettling circumstances. What one recoils from naming, one cannot identify and adequately combat. Political correctness is different from what we might call “ordinary lying,” from misrepresenting, exaggerating, or omitting facts to promote our perceived advantage. It is a form of...

It is time to cast aside all remaining doubt. President Obama is not trying to lead America forward to recovery, prosperity and strength. Quite the opposite, in fact. In September of last year, American Thinker published my article, Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis. Part of a series, it connected then presidential candidate Barack Obama to individuals and organizations practicing a malevolent strategy for destroying our economy and our system of government. Since then the story of that strategy has found its way across the blogosphere, onto the airwaves of radio stations across the country, the Glenn Beck...

There are only 35 shopping days left until Christmas. I'm keenly aware of this primarily because of those overcaffeinated Glee-show-choir-in-red-white-and-blue-alpine-sweaters-and-ear-flaps-making-high school-cheerleading-pyramids Gap ads that started running about a week ago. You know, the ones where they chant a little ditty titled, annoyingly, "Happy Dowhateveryouwannukah." "Go Christmas! Go Hannukah! Go Kwanzaa! Go Solstice!" the exceptionally good-looking, multicultural, skinny-jeans-clad cheerbots shout. "You 86 the rules, you do what just feels right," they cheer, before entreating us to "do whatever [we] wannukkah" this ambiguous winter holiday season. Their jangly dance number ends by wishing us "a cheery night." How festive, you say? Meh....

Rep. Paul Kanjorski describes the closed door session of Congress in 2008 where it was revealed that there was a $550 billion electronic run on the banks and that was what caused the economic crisis. Kanjorski says this occurred on Thursday, September 15, 2008. However, September 15th was a Monday. That Thursday was......September 11, 2008! (date seem familiar?). Was this a demonstration, or a dry run of things to come? This was a Financial Terrorist attack on the seventh anniversary of 9/11. Aren’t the American people entitled to know who was behind the run on the banks? Why was this...

On the morning after the deadliest instance of Islamist terrorism in the United States since 9/11, President Obama warned the American public not to "jump to conclusions" about the motives that impelled Nidal Hasan's rampage of mass murder at Fort Hood. By the time Obama issued this warning, it had already been reported that Hasan yelled "Allahu akbar" before he opened fire.This assertion of the supremacy of Allah is invoked by Islamic terrorists worldwide before they kill. It was also known that Hasan's fellow participants in an Army program on public health had complained to military authorities about Hasan's anti-American...

What was once venerated is now, in many ways, dismissed and even despised. Matthew Arnold, the great Victorian poet, marked the turning moment. He had early intimations of “the way we live now,” a way largely evacuated of its Christian allegiances, certainly – in the public sphere – evacuated of the regard and respect that the profession of Christianity once automatically evoked. “The Sea of Faith/ Was once, too, at the full,” he wrote, before going on in lines of immense power to record: But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the...

One reads and hears with increasing disbelief and anger that we don’t know the motive or motives of Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army major who fired over 100 shots at his fellow American soldiers in order to murder and maim as many as possible. Hasan ended up allegedly murdering 13 people, but government and Army spokesmen and the mainstream media claim they just can’t figure out why he did this. They are, however, certain that it was not an act of terrorism. Sunday’s New York Times “Week in Review” article about Nidal Hasan was titled “When Soldiers Snap.” The gist...

Nidal Malik Hasan was two men. One was the proud Army major who wore battle fatigues to mosque; the other, the proud Arab who wore Muslim garb in civilian life. What brought Hasan's identities into fatal conflict was his belief that Iraq and Afghanistan were unjust wars, and his shock that he, a Muslim, was to be sent to serve in one of those wars, against fellow Muslims -- a sin against Allah meriting damnation. Hasan was conflicted by a dual loyalty -- to the country he had sworn to protect, and to his perceived duty as a Muslim. When...

What is unique in our system, in the American system, is that its leaders are not kings. The government is not a king. Presidents, senators, judges, from the top right on down to the county sheriff on patrol, they are all bound by constitutional limits. They have the power to do what they have the power to do, as spelled out in the constitution, and not one thing more. Anything beyond that belongs to the citizen. If something needs doing, and it isn’t covered in the constitution, does that mean it won’t get done? Of course not. It means that...

Labour threw open Britain's borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a "truly multicultural" country, a former Government adviser has revealed. The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and "rub the Right's nose in diversity", according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett. He said Labour's relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration" but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for...

In their lifetimes, they have seen their Christian faith purged from schools their taxes paid for, and mocked in movies and on TV. They have seen their factories shuttered in the thousands and their jobs outsourced in the millions to Mexico and China. They have seen trillions of tax dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society, only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates. They watch on cable TV as illegal aliens walk into their country, are rewarded with free educations and health care and take jobs at lower pay than American families can...

....Like Poo-bah in the Mikado, the president seems to be Lord High Everything Else, Secretary of Everything and a non-stop presence before the television cameras. Some of his supporters are chagrined. The New Republic's publisher Marty Peretz, who evinces buyer's remorse over Obama's Middle East policy, diagnosed the president with "Narcissistic Personality Disorder" in his blog on October 4. The reason for Obama's peculiar mode of governance, though, may have less to do with his apparent narcissism than with his objectives. It is a credible hypothesis that this president holds views that he cannot easily share, even with his own...

We did not need to wait until the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 10,000. It has been clear for some time that global equity markets are bubbling again. On the surface, this looks like 2003 and 2004 when the previous housing, credit, commodity and equity bubbles started to inflate, helped by low nominal interest rates and a lack of inflation. There is one big difference, though. This bubble will burst sooner. So how do we know this is a bubble? My two favourite metrics of stock market valuation are Cape, which stands for the cyclically adjusted price/earnings ratio, and Q....

Review: When China Rules the World, by Martin Jacques While the decades since the Vietnam War may be most known for their startling technological developments, they have also spawned a chic genre of literature: the ‘America is in Decline' tract. What started most prominently with the work of Paul Kennedy has turned into a veritable cottage industry. Tomes in this category have included Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, Bruce Horton's Decline and Fall, and, most recently, Fareed Zakaria's The End of America, which Barack Obama was famously photographed holding last summer. Some of these books argue that the decline...

Demographics & Depression David P. Goldman First Things, May 2009 Three generations of economists immersed themselves in study of the Great Depression, determined to prevent a recurrence of the awful events of the 1930s. And as our current financial crisis began to unfold in 2008, policymakers did everything that those economists prescribed. Following John Maynard Keynes, President Bush and President Obama each offered a fiscal stimulus. The Federal Reserve maintained confidence in the financial system, increased the money supply, and lowered interest rates. The major industrial nations worked together, rather than at cross purposes as they had in the early...

The slow suicide of the West continues. Muslim communities are forming across the Netherlands, and Sharia Law is slowly taking hold. None of this apparently matters though, as the people of Rotterdam have voted in a Muslim mayor. Unifying Dutch city falls to Muslim mayor In Rotterdam, where cultural and social divides are apparent, the burden of bridging them now belongs to Morocco-born Ahmed Aboutaleb. How he fares could matter beyond his city's borders.

" chemist who led to the invention of the birth control pill says he regrets the demographic catastrophe that has resulted from people using the contraceptive device to separate reproduction from sexuality, reports Baptist Press. Carl Djerassi, the 85-year-old Austrian chemist who was one of three whose formulation of synthetic hormones paved the way for the pill, wrote an opinion piece in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard lamenting the way the pill has been used. Austria's population now includes more people over age 65 than under 15, and Djerassi said the country soon will face an "impossible situation" as the...

Well, the post-racial candidate had given us a 95% black monolithic voting pattern in the primaries against a fellow liberal candidate. Add up Rev. Wright, Father Pfleger, the clingers speech, an exasperated Bill Clinton’s assessment of “playing the race card on me”, “typical white person”, ‘wise Latina’, the Skip Gates mess, the Van Jones’ white polluters, the satraps like Gov. Patterson and Reps. Rangel and Watson reverting to blatantly racist scapegoating, and so on. I fear that this is the most polarizing administration we have seen in matters of race since the 1920s. If those around Obama, and his supporters...

The first seven months of the Obama administration seemingly make no sense. Why squander public approval by running up astronomical deficits in a time of pre-existing staggering national debt? Why polarize opponents after promising bipartisan transcendence?

A Freedom of Information request has revealed that Britain's National Health Service (NHS) has sponsored dozens of abortions for underage girls in Scotland in recent years. The Daily Record newspaper reports that 87 13-year-old girls and eight 12 year-olds as well as almost 3,000 girls under 15 had NHS abortions between 2000 and 2008. The government has responded to the statistics with promises of still more sex education in Scotland for young people, despite statistics demonstrating the failure of the strategy. Public Health Minister Shona Robison told media that the numbers were "cause for concern" and said that the government...

THE HAGUE, 13/08/09 - Mohamed is by far the most popular name for babies in the Netherlands' four major cities. Additionally, many more boys are called Mohamed than the statistics suggest, Elsevier magazine reported yesterday. Party for Freedom (PVV) MPs Geert Wilders and Sietse Fritsma requested the cabinet in written questions this week for a Top 7 of the most popular names in the big cities and for the Netherlands as a whole. Elsevier already received this data from the Social Insurance Bank (SVB). The SVB data shows that in the four major cities - Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and...

While the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding was good cinema, it was also a big fat Hollywood fiction.  With Greece's fertility rate of 1.36 children per woman  -- well below the replacement level of 2.1 -- "big" is not a modifier demographers would associate with today's Greek families.  In fact, a more accurate film might be called My Big Fat Muslim Wedding.  Worse still, Greece is no anomaly.  Long ago the cradle of Western civilization and more recently one of its backwaters, it's now part of a phalanx of Western demographic failures.  In fact, while it may seem counterintuitive...

Christopher Caldwell’s “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West” is a hot book presented under a cool, scholarly title. To observe that Mr. Caldwell’s rhetoric is “hot” is not to say that it is aggrieved or unruly. On the contrary, Mr. Caldwell, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a columnist for The Financial Times, compiles his arguments patiently, twig by twig, and mostly with lucidity and intellectual grace and even wit. But they are arguments one is not used to hearing put so baldly, at least from the West’s leading political journalists. Primary among...

Since the Chicago press has been largely silent on the upcoming Hizb ut-Tahrir conference in Oak Law (their first major meeting in the U.S.), citizens who may be concerned that an Islamic supremacist/indoctrination group is meeting in their backyard are forced to research this group ourselves. They may want to start here. The Heritage Foundation issued a report on Hizb ut-Tahrir in 2003, calling it "an emerging threat to US interests in Central Asia." An excerpt: Hizb has called for a jihad against the U.S., its allies, and moderate Muslim states. The purpose of the jihad is "to find and...

A former FBI special agent told law enforcement and Homeland Security personnel that a network of Islamic organizations are working to incrementally implement Islamic law in the United States. During a presentation at the Bedford County Emergency Management Agency, former FBI agent John Guandolo briefed members about groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which he claims is working with other Islamic groups to slowly implement Shariah, also known as Islamic law, which encompasses all areas of life. Guandolo worked in the FBI since 1996, including nine years as a member of its SWAT team. After 9/11, he worked in the...

"Naval Academy Professor Challenges Rising Diversity," ran the headline in The Washington Post. The impression left was that some sorehead was griping because black and Hispanic kids were finally being admitted. The Post's opening paragraphs reinforced the impression. "Of the 1,230 plebes who took the oath of office at the Naval Academy in Annapolis this week, 435 were members of minority groups. It's the most racially diverse class in the nation's 164-year history. Academy leaders say it's a top priority to build a student body that reflects the racial makeup of the Navy and the nation." Who can be against...

Dozens of girls as young as 12 or 13 are regularly having abortions, Government figures show. More than 450 youngsters below the age of 14 ended unwanted pregnancies between 2005 and 2008 - including 23 girls aged just 12, the Department of Health statistics reveal. Over the same period, 52 teenagers terminated four or more pregnancies before they reached their 18th birthday, helping the number of repeat abortions hit record levels. Across all age groups, 64,715 repeat abortions were carried out last year. This is the biggest figure on record and includes 46 women who had terminated at least eight...

Democrats on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue and beyond launched a massive last-minute push for votes on the climate change bill that is scheduled to hit the House floor on Friday. “It’s the most extraordinary whip effort I’ve ever seen,” one veteran Democratic staffer said. From the White House lawn to the bowels of the Capitol to the hills just east of Nashville, Democrats pulled out all the stops and employed their biggest guns to whip dozens of still-undecided members. Although supporters of the bill to lower carbon emissions expressed confidence that the universe of undecided votes was shrinking in...

Earlier this week the British Broadcasting Corporation, or BBC, appointed a Muslim as head of its religious programming department -- a move being hailed as a "radical departure from broadcasting tradition." Aaqil Ahmed, former executive at Channel 4, is the new of Head of Religion and Ethics and Commissioning Editor for Religion TV, a position some call one of the most influential religious roles in the United Kingdom. Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is concerned over the appointment of a Muslim, claiming it comes at a time when Christian leaders worry their faith is being marginalized and criticized...

The country's only chance is a leaner, sounder and less indebted government.Hope springs eternal in the breasts of politicians. None more so than in Alastair Darling, Britain's chancellor of the exchequer, as he delivered his annual budget speech to Parliament last week. He conceded that Britain's economy was in a bad way. It would shrink by 3.5% this year, rather more than the 1% dip he forecast only in November. But hey, every country is in a bad way right now, and by 2011-12 the U.K. will be growing again at a record, rip-roaring rate of 3.5%. Crisis? What crisis?...

By now almost everyone agrees the numbers are staggering. Since Barack Obama took his oath of office around 11 weeks ago, he has proposed a $3.6 trillion budget, which will create a deficit this year of almost $1.8 trillion. This amounts to 12.3 percent of the GDP, up from 3.2 percent in 2008 and 1.2 percent in 2007. The President’s budget was submitted in conjunction with a $410 billion omnibus spending bill, complete with some 8,500 earmarks. This legislation, in turn, came in the aftermath of a $787 billion stimulus package.

The EPA has officially declared that CO2 is endangering the public's health and welfare. This means that there will be new pressure on businesses to cut their emissions. It also sets the stage for cap and trade legislation: WSJ: A finding that CO2 is a threat to public health and welfare also would ratchet up pressure on Congress to enact a system that caps greenhouse gases and creates a market for businesses to buy and sell the right to emit them, as President Barack Obama has proposed.

<p>Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in January indicates that the economy continues to contract.  Job losses, declining equity and housing wealth, and tight credit conditions have weighed on consumer sentiment and spending.  Weaker sales prospects and difficulties in obtaining credit have led businesses to cut back on inventories and fixed investment.  U.S. exports have slumped as a number of major trading partners have also fallen into recession.  Although the near-term economic outlook is weak, the Committee anticipates that policy actions to stabilize financial markets and institutions, together with fiscal and monetary stimulus, will contribute to a gradual resumption of sustainable economic growth.</p>

Amid all of the mixed messages on the strength of the economy coming from the White House, one theme has emerged loudly, clearly, and unvaryingly: The American economic system is about to undergo a profound shift. “Never allow a crisis to go to waste,” President Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel famously stated. “Never waste a good crisis,” concurred Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Americans, said Obama, should “discover great opportunity in great crisis.” What kind of opportunity? “Capitalism,” Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner said last week, “will be different.” All of Obama’s economic policies thus far are designed...

The U.S. Census is supposed to be free of politics, but one group with a history of voter fraud, ACORN, is participating in next year's count, raising concerns about the politicization of the decennial survey. The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now signed on as a national partner with the U.S. Census Bureau in February 2009 to assist with the recruitment of the 1.4 million temporary workers needed to go door-to-door to count every person in the United States -- currently believed to be more than 306 million people. A U.S. Census "sell sheet," an advertisement used to recruit...

And not on confirmations, either, but on legislation. Peter Orszag, Barack Obama’s budget director, says the White House won’t take off the table an option to push through its legislative agenda using the “reconciliation” process. It would keep Republicans from stopping bills on taxes, budgets, and global warming: The White House budget director said Tuesday that the Obama administration may take advantage of a rarely used congressional rule that would strip Republicans of their filibuster power to get some controversial proposals through the Senate by simple majorities. Peter Orszag told reporters that the White House would prefer not to use...

The United States military used Shock and Awe to overwhelm and defeat the Iraqis in 2003. Barack Obama and the Democrats are now using the political equivalent of Shock and Awe to radically move the nation to the left. Shock and Awe is designed to confuse, overwhelm and cow opponents of Obama's legislative coup d'état. The president, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, other high administration appointees and congressional lefties are embarked on a very deliberate strategy of frontloading and ramming through big legislative packages and executive orders designed to "remake" America - to use the president's word. Shock and...

HYANNIS, Mass. -- Police have accused a 13-year-old of masterminding the slaying of his 16-year-old half brother so he could take over a drug operation they are alleged to have inherited from their father. Jordan Mendes was found shot, stabbed 27 times and dumped into a pit, where his body was torched. District Attorney Michael O'Keefe said Mendes was a "significant drug dealer." Authorities said Mykel Mendes, a seventh-grader, was jealous of the money his half brother was making selling OxyContin and cocaine and wanted to take over. A 13-year-old friend and a 20-year-old cousin also are charged with murder.

Grandpa, what were churches like? “Please Grandpa,” pleaded Max, “tell me some more about the old days.” John peered over his notepad to see the face of his curly-haired Grandson, “Okay little man,” his eyes quickly scanned the room before he continued, “jump on up here and sit next to me.” “Timmy’s dads said you are a sad old relic from the dark ages,” said Max. “Why are you sad Grandpa?” “They said that?” He could feel an angry flush creeping up his neck. “I am sad, Maxy, but that isn’t what they meant.” “What did they mean, Grandpa? Why...

A desperate search for a new policy towards Islam has yet to produce results A WAR, a riot, a terrorist attack or a row over blasphemy: not long ago, Britain’s government knew exactly what to do when a crisis loomed in relations with the country’s Muslims. As recently as July 2005, after bombs in London killed 56 people, Tony Blair was confident that he could avoid a total breakdown of trust between Muslim Britons and their compatriots. Using an old formula, the prime minister called in some Islamic worthies and suggested they form a task force on extremism. Then, hours...

I heard the local radio guy admonishing us to go to our tea party. He said the time for peaceful demonstration is short, and if not now, when? So I thought, "WTF"?I put down my tools, and grabbed a piece of half inch plywood out of my trailer, found some spray paint.On one side tagged "OBAMA IS A RADICAL COMMUNIST", other side read "STOP THE COMMUNIST COUP", jumped in the truck, fired up the 12 valve Cummins, and went to our little Nashville tea party (600 people). Hopefully they’ll get bigger, but I can tell you that zerO and his...

The Scene: A fictitious meeting in the new era of the GOP’s ever-expanding “big tent.” ------------------------------- I had the pleasure of sitting down to dinner with two members of my county Republican Party steering committee this week to discuss the GOP’s options as we move into the 2010 election cycle. I was joined by Dr. Eric von Dersgarten (of the Rhine Valley Dersgartens, of course) and Cecilia Montgomery. Ms. Montgomery chose the venue for our meeting and I have to say it was one of the most unusual ever, nicely setting the tone for what was to come. It was...

I am a student of history. Professionally, I have written 15 books in six languages, and have studied it all my life. I think there is something monumentally large afoot, and I do not believe it is just a banking crisis, or a mortgage crisis, or a credit crisis. Yes these exist, but they are merely single facets on a very large gemstone that is only now coming into a sharper focus. Something of historic proportions is happening. I can sense it because I know how it feels, smells, what it looks like, and how people react to it. Yes,...

Evil Conservative Radio (Wed 7PM Edt) continues our talk with Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch. Is there an Islamic plan to subjugate western culture? What is this plan and are they being successful? What do the Quran and Islamic scholars say about this? Is Obama an Islamophile and can a nation led by an Islamophile stand against this? All this and more in this clip from ECR.