Free Republic

If no current GOP Presidential candidate garners more than 50% of delegates during the primary, Republican delegates can have the opportunity to vote for anyone they wish, whether or not they are currently a candidate. This is called a brokered convention If you were a delegate, would you prefer one of the current candidates or consider somebody currently not in the race? To make this more intriguing, we paired off potential and current candidates like a sports tournament pairing - choose one person per each match up for each round. Round 1. Jeb Bush vs Bobby Jindal -----| Newt Gingrich...

I will start this out by saying that I am usually wrong when I make political predictions (how did that Hillary Clinton-Rudy Giuliani face-off turn out in 2008?). But I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and in the off chance that I happen to be right, I just want it on the record. So here goes… Mitt Romney will not be the Republican nominee for president in 2012. Neither will Newt Gingrich. And certainly not Ron Paul or Rick Santorum. No, the Republican candidate for president will be someone who isn’t even a candidate for president right now....

November 28, 2011 Get ready for a Perry comeback By Bryan Fischer Newt is the current flavor of the month in the GOP race for the presidential nomination, and grabbed a coup in New Hampshire with the endorsement of the Union-Leader. However, Newt has enough baggage with enough rocks in it to drag him below surface again. His amnesty stance on immigration puts him to the left of Perry on that issue, and we now know he took $1.8 million from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac right when they were dragging the housing industry to the bottom of the sea....

via Surber, here is the ad: (VIDEO AT LINK) He says: My take on it is simple: If she is on the ballot in the West Virginia primary in May, I shall vote for her. She is my first choice. I’m even simpler: I’ll write the lady in, if possible. A lot of people, like Teach in the comments, are miffed that she took so long to bow out quietly. Maybe that’s her final word. Even if it is, the dangling threat of her lives rent-free in the mind of the Left. Let’s keep the mind-frak going, and fight for...

Texas Gov. Rick Perry could still stage a comeback in the topsy-turvy race for the Republican presidential nomination if Newt Gingrich stumbles under growing scrutiny. That’s the conclusion of some commentators on the Sunday morning network television talk shows where much of the focus was devoted to Gingrich surging to lead the pack in the latest polls nationwide, in Iowa and in New Hampshire. “I do not rule out a possible comeback by Rick Perry simply because he has got a lot of money to spend,” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson told colleagues on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.” “Granted...

Discovery has ordered a documentary on the life of the late Steve Jobs, with the Mythbusters duo on board to host. The network is teaming with NBC’s Peacock Productions for iGenius: How Steve Jobs Changed the World, a one-hour special. Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, who celebrate the spirit of innovation on Discovery’s hit Mythbusters, will host the show.“Someone once said that to follow the path that others have laid before you is a very reasonable course of action, therefore all progress is made by unreasonable men,” Savage said. “Steve Jobs was an unreasonable man. He didn’t simply give...

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Confidence in the market for newly built single-family homes dipped slightly in September to remain in very low territory, according to an index released Monday. The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index fell by a point to 14, on a seasonally adjusted index where readings above 50 are considered good. The index, which correlates closely with single-family housing starts, has held between 13 and 16 for the last six months.

Liberals outline stimulus agenda in 'Contract for the American Dream' By Erik Wasson - 08/09/11 10:57 AM ET Liberal organizations and unions are frustrated that President Obama has not aggressively pushed a new jobs stimulus agenda and they are offering up a consolidated fall agenda for Democrats to embrace as an alternative to austerity. Representatives of MoveOn, Rebuild the Dream and the Center for Economic Policy and Research will join Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) on Tuesday to launch a progressive “Contract for the American Dream” to urge the administration and Congress to turn away from budget cutting and focus on...

This weekend I took in "Page One: Inside the New York Times." I heard that a movie about bad times for the Times was out, and I was giddy with excitement. Most of the people in the film get it - that consumers have so many new media options available to them that the Times is no longer the first source they turn to for news. Others live in denial, thinking that embarrassments like Jayson Blair and Judy Wilson have had no impact on the paper's standing in the publishing world. These folks are scared. During the course of the...

WASHINGTON — There was a collective rolling of the eyes and a distinct sense of “Here we go again” among the women of the House of Representatives last week when yet another male politician, Representative Anthony D. Weiner, confessed his “terrible mistakes” and declared himself “deeply sorry for the pain” he had caused in sexual escapades so adolescent as to almost seem laughable. “I’m telling you,” said Representative Candice Miller, a Michigan Republican, “every time one of these sex scandals goes, we just look at each other, like, ‘What is it with these guys? Don’t they think they’re going to...

(Little Rock, AR) -- Mike Huckabee isn't ruling out a run as a Republican candidate for President next year. The former Arkansas governor earlier announced on his program airing on Fox that he had decided against mounting another campaign for the White House. However, in remarks at the Clinton School of Public Service, Huckabee said "everything is still open." He added, quote, "I haven't closed doors." He also had a forecast about how the GOP primary in 2012 will pan out. Huckabee said the eventual nominee will come out of a "bloody primary broke and battered." He predicted Republicans will...

Carter: 'Probably superior' to other ex-presidents *** UPDATE 3:59 pm ET *** Former President Carter issued a written statement after his comments aired: "What I meant was, for 27 years the Carter Center has provided me with superior opportunities to do good." In an interview with NBC's Brian Williams, former President Jimmy Carter, who has been a target of the right through the years, lauded his own post-presidency, telling Williams, "I feel that my role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents." Carter, who is out with a new book defending his legacy, backed up...

British scientist Stephen Hawking has branded heaven a "fairy story" for people afraid of the dark, in his latest dismissal of the concepts underpinning the world's religions. The author of 1988 international best-seller "A Brief History of Time" said in an interview with The Guardian published on Monday that his views were partly influenced by his battle with motor neurone disease. "I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first," he told the...

We're just living in it. Says...Juan Williams... Very interesting conversation about the results of Paul's being the father of the Tea Party movement, and in particular following on the discussion of the legalization of drugs.

A rush of recent reports on energy has much to say about the fundamental foolishness of the green vision of energy production -- the vision long regnant in academia and the one that informs the Obama regime. The green vision -- really, the green dream or delusion -- is that the world is running out of fossil fuels, and we need to switch to so-called renewable/sustainable sources such as solar power, wind power, and biofuels. (These "renewable," allegedly low-pollution green options never include nuclear or hydroelectric power, both of which are proven to be cost-effective and clean -- an interesting...

The Washington Post yesterday commented that the Muslim Brotherhood , which was founded in 1928 by Hassan Al Banna, and inspired Hamas and Al Quida , was inspired by the YMCA. “inspired by the YMCA when it was founded in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood has been under a ban since 1948, and its real size is difficult to gauge. The group was brutally repressed by President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s. Since then, it has at times been propped up as a foil – especially for Western audiences – with periodic crackdowns that have sent many of...

"Despite today's nearly double-digit unemployment rate, 4 in 10 unemployed Americans expect to get a job in the next four weeks and one in three underemployed have the same expectations with respect to obtaining a full-time job." That's the finding of a new Gallup poll released yesterday. I guess it's nice that so many Americans remain upbeat in the face of our economic challenges. But this goes beyond upbeat into pure delusion. As Mish points out, there are around 14.5 million unemployed people. In order to employ 40% of them, businesses would have to create 5.95 million jobs. In December...

The secret to instant wealth is to spot a mass delusion and bet against it.  The Tulip Craze.  Florida swamp land.   Getting the timing right is tricky, but we are blessed with an overload of mass delusions.  You can pick your own favorite.  Delusional bubbles have to pop at some point, because the people who are paying for them eventually figure out that they've been had. Global warming fraud is now in the midst of a slow collapse.  The Chicago Carbon Exchange just closed, because the investors figured out the scam.  But the list of liberal crazes is long,...

A close reading of Sherriff Clarence Dupnik's recent statements suggest that he and Jared Lee Loughner may suffer from similar degrees of delusion. The sheriff has leveled charges of racism, bigotry, and conspiracy without evidence or argument. Indeed, the entire state of Arizona has been indicted by the Tucson Sheriff as a "Mecca (sic) for prejudice and bigotry." Clearly, political operatives and a sympathetic media would like to stem the recent Democratic electoral hemorrhage by laying the criminal violence in Tucson at the feet of conservatives and Republicans. By any historical or contemporary measure, any attempt to link conservative politics...

I would like to feel elated about the elections last Tuesday, but alas, I live in California. As the rest of the nation lurches back toward common sense, California defiantly stands as a testament to the power of delusion. Over twenty billion dollars in debt, some of the highest unemployment in the nation, businesses fleeing the bloated bureaucracy's draconian regulations, water policies dooming the farming industry in the vital Central Valley, out-of-control taxation -- all of these crises are political in origin and speak to a legacy of ideological obtuseness combined with incompetence of astonishing magnitude. I have been striving...

Republicans are already celebrating their comeback — and promising an even bigger year in 2012. Oddly enough, Walter Mondale knows exactly how they feel. His party's obituary was written by the press after the 1980 election, when Ronald Reagan capitalized on stagflation to score a 44-state landslide over Jimmy Carter. Just like Obama, Reagan came to power with enormous expectations and soaring popularity — only to watch it all melt away in his first two years on the job, thanks to a brutal recession and double-digit unemployment.

A US security official on Wednesday said the country was capable of withstanding another terrorist attack and bouncing back, saying Americans needed to put extremist threats in "perspective." Michael Leiter, head of the National Counterterrorism Center, said despite recent successes there was no guarantee that intelligence and law enforcement agencies could prevent every attempt by extremists to attack the United States. "We're not going to have a perfect batting average and its important that Americans understand that," Leiter told a conference on intelligence reform. "It's important that we approach this with national resilience that in fact shows that this country...

‘Washington: We Have a Problem” proclaims Vanity Fair magazine. In an eerie echo of the verdicts passed during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, namely that the presidency was “too big for one man,” Vanity Fair now declares “The evidence that Washington cannot function — that it’s ‘broken,’ as Vice President Joe Biden has said — is all around.” The Vanity Fair piece is a long apologia for President Obama’s perceived ineffectiveness, and reflects — no surprise here — the Obama interpretation of events. “The G.O.P.,” writes Todd Purdum, “has spent most of the period since the inauguration in near lockstep...

"The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil." Cicero On 5 November 2009, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a US Army Psychiatrist and devout Muslim, opened fire on his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, TX, killing thirteen and wounding 32. As he fired, he shouted "Allahu Akbar," which means "God is Great," an Islamic declaration of faith. On 10 August 2010, the Department of Defense (DoD) released 23-pages of recommendations from an independent review of the Fort Hood massacre. It is not as pure a whitewash as the first Fort Hood report, called "Protecting the Force". It actually...

NORTHBROOK — Republican Senate candidate Mark Kirk publicly apologized Tuesday for being “careless” in describing his military service and background, after a series of embellishments were revealed that could threaten his bid for President Barack Obama’s former seat. As Kirk apologized, however, he also acknowledged something his campaign had flatly denied just two weeks ago.

The National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS) just published in the online edition of the Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and funded by the Gill Foundation and the Lesbian Health Fund of the Gay Lesbian Medical Association, claims that children of lesbian mothers do better than children from a married-mom-and-dad family. The AAP is no stranger to controversy; they are the pediatrics group that recently capitulated to political-correctness to advocate a “less extreme” form of female genital mutilation and then, when under pressure, reversed their recommendation.  The NLLFS study professes to be a highly respected, peer-reviewed “longitudinal”...

It's official now. You cannot use "Muslim extremism" or "Islamic terrorism." Not because the words don't describe a real phenomenon in the world. An ugly phenomenon. And, alas, an abundant phenomenon. But because the president doesn't like the thought. And he certainly doesn't like the religious adjective. I myself don't mind calling Jewish extremists "Jewish extremists." In fact, calling them Jewish extremists neatly separates the very few from the very many. There are myriad Jewish types: nudniks, for example, of whom there are a lot, and chachomim, of whom there are far fewer, liberals, even radicals, and (now more than...

http://www.diploweb.com/Russie-Europe-les-risques-du.html Russia-Europe: The dangers of a "reset" Françoise Thom* French Original here: http://www.diploweb.com/Russie-Europe-les-risques-du.html What strikes a historian when looking at the relationship between Russia and Europe is the unchanging illusions Russia produces in the imagination of Westerners, and Russia’s ability to dictate the conceptual frameworks within which it wants to be interpreted --and misunderstood-- abroad. This explains another mystery in the relationship between Russians and Europeans: the astonishing imperviousness of the Western partners to experience. The successive setbacks suffered by businessmen in Russia, the snubs regularly inflicted on European statesmen, the murders, the insults to diplomats, the abusive nationalizations, the...

The top NATO commander in Afghanistan, U.S. General Stanley McChrystal, says he hopes the increased number of American troops in Afghanistan will lead to a negotiated peace deal with the Taliban. In an interview published in The Financial Times Monday, General McChrystal acknowledged his skepticism about the war, but said NATO is poised to make positive progress this year as a result of the extra 30,000 U.S. troops being sent to Afghanistan. McChrystal said he aims to weaken the Taliban insurgency to the point where its leaders would be willing to accept a settlement with Afghanistan's government. The U.S. general...

This memo was just distributed to all Senate chiefs of staff: From: Adam Green, co-founder, Progressive Change Campaign Committee -- on behalf of the PCCC, Democracy for America, and Credo Action RE: The right lesson from Massachusetts & the path forward on health care We wanted to make sure you saw the Massachusetts Research 2000 poll, reported on by the Wall Street Journal, NBC, Politico, Huffington Post, TPM, and others. It polled critical 2010 swing voters: the 18% of Obama voters who returned to the polls and voted for Republican Scott Brown. • On health care, they oppose the Senate...

Today many in the United States are crying out to President Obama and Government to do more and more to fix our social ills. The notion that Big Government has all our answers and the solutions we need in this very chaotic and unstable world is fairy tale. It is one that is rooted in the personal belief that Fallen Man through and by the efforts of Big Government or "Socialism" can bring security and comfort to it's inhabitants. There is no man made ideology or system that can ever usher in a world Utopia of perfection and bliss. These...

OSLO — Three of the five members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee had objections to the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to US President Barack Obama, the Norwegian tabloid Verdens Gang reported Thursday. "VG has spoken to a number of sources who confirmed the impression that a majority of the Nobel committee, at first, had not decided to give the peace prize to Barack Obama," the newspaper said... "The committee was unanimous," its influential secretary Geir Lundestad said Friday. But Inger-Marie Ytterhorn, who represented the right-wing populist Progress Party on the committee, led the way in objecting to the choice...

Rowdy Gaines, NBC swimming commentator, was asked why by ESPN news why Chicago lost the bid in the first round. Replied Gaines, "I looked at the bid, it had everything needed, it was the best bid. Maybe it was political. Maybe there's still a hangover from the last eight years. I don't know."....obama's loyal disciples continue to drown in their delusions....

Popping up on Facebook tonight, was an acquaintance flogging his blog. What was fascinating was what the liberals and netroots seem to think about how we on the Right do business. Consider it, in many ways, a guided tour through a Leftie's mindset. Included is the assumption that the Left can organize via social networks, but apparentely we cannot. As an EXTRA bonus, he even throws up a link to a group of blogs fighting "climate change" It shows me, how much has changed, and how far Blue America has gone from those of us in Red America. And what's...

The cry and mantra we’re now hearing from the Obama administration and the Leftist Secular controlled Democratic Party is that we have to have a National Health Care bill passed and in place before the beginning of the summer congressional recess. The urgency and subtlety of this bill is quite telling. Some common tactics used by the Left are camouflage, deception, manipulation, connivery and demagoguery to get the agenda that they want. It is the Left’s agenda with this issue - as well as many others - to seize massive power and control in a fascist style and manner. It...

In the Canadian Ottawa Citizen David Warren reckons that US liberals are out of touch. He says it all got started long ago when the afternoon newspapers started to fail and their predictably conservative views no longer balanced the liberal morning newspapers. The result? [Liberals] have been freed, for more than a generation, from anything resembling serious public debate, and have thus got in the habit of proceeding with an infinitely extendible agenda (through the courts if there are legislative delays). The right has meanwhile got in the habit of feeling disenfranchised. That explains the outrage "at the very existence...

The cry and mantra we’re now hearing from the Obama administration and the Leftist Secular controlled Democratic Party is that we have to have a National Health Care bill passed and in place before the beginning of the summer congressional recess. The urgency and subtlety of this bill is quite telling. Some common tactics used by the Left are camouflage, deception, manipulation, connivery and demagoguery to get the agenda that they want. It is the Left’s agenda with this issue - as well as many others - to seize massive power and control in a fascist style and manner. It...

In regard to the Memorial service today in LA for Michael Jackson, as I watched the service I was overwhelmed with grief over the hopelessness, the false comfort, all the lies and deceit, the illusions and delusions, and all of the wishful thinking and erroneous expectations in the light of the awesome realities of Time and Eternity. Great achievements and worldly success bring absolutely no merit or redemptive qualities in light of our fallen humanity (Romans 3:23; Ephesians 2:8-9). The absolute bankruptcy of humanity dictates its greatest need for the righteous perfection demanded by our Divine Creator - Almighty God....

Sadly, most people choose their beliefs about how the world works the same way they choose most of their other actions: whatever makes them feel good. Nowhere is this more evident than in the assumptions of the Washington establishment about how to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The core premise of this establishment is that there is a 'peace process' and that if only this process could be gotten right, peace would result. Unfortunately, this is bald nonsense, and it is only believed because it enables that establishment to stage a pantomime in which it is both the...

From: xxxxxxx To: contact@alankeyes.com Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 11:29:14 AM Subject: America Alan Keyes, You republicans just do not get it. This once great country has been on a downward spiral ever since Reagan opened all white house doors to big corporation. The destruction of our country was caused by GREED!! It is obvious that you have a personal vendetta for President Obama based on you losing a political seat in Illinois. Your recent comment about President Obama is a total disgrace to the United States of America. You GOP's let Bush shred this country's constitution and with total...

On 1st November 2007, Professor Antony Flew’s new book There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed his Mind was published by HarperOne. Professor Flew has been called ‘the world's most influential philosophical atheist’, as well as ‘one of the most renowned atheists of the 20th Century’ (see Peter S. Williams’ bethinking.org article “A change of mind for Antony Flew”). In his book, Professor Flew recounts how he has come to believe in a Creator God as a result of the scientific evidence and philosophical argument. Not surprisingly, his book caused quite a stir – as can...

Female supporters of Hillary Clinton sprang to her defense Tuesday, insisting she speaks for all women and should stay in the Democratic primary race to the bitter end. "Not so fast," read a full page ad in The New York Times, amid calls for Clinton to bow out of the race to help unify the Democratic party after a gruelling race pitting the former first lady and New York senator against Illinois Senator Barack Obama. "Hillary's voice is OUR voice, and she's speaking for all of us," said the ad, purchased by a group not affiliated with the Clinton campaign...

If you thought that the era of British bigwigs keeping Indians as personal servants came to an end with the fall of the Raj in 1947, then you must have had a rude awakening last week. In a feature about carbon offsetting in The Times (London), it was revealed that the leader of the UK Conservative Party, David Cameron, offsets his carbon emissions by effectively keeping brown people in a state of bondage. Whenever he takes a flight to some foreign destination, Cameron donates to a carbon-offsetting company that encourages people in the developing world to ditch modern methods of...

While many Americans know Oxford professor and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins for The Selfish Gene, the 1976 science bestseller that portrayed all life as a struggle to propagate DNA, they may be less familiar with his other identity as a crusading atheist. Yet last fall Dawkins made news with a new book, The God Delusion, dismissing all religious faith as “insanity.” Arguing that “natural selection and other scientific theories are superior to a God hypothesis in explaining the living world,” Dawkins says he wrote the book as a “consciousness-raising exercise,” in the hope that “religious believers who open it will...

A brilliant new book by a Mexican-American historian documents how, in the Twenties and Thirties, the Nazis were inspired by what the United States had been doing to their Mexican neighbours since 1917. In Ringside at the Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juarez, David Dorado Romo establishes the US Immigration Department's systematic brutality along the Rio Grande border. Mexican visitors were forced to strip naked and subjected to 'screening' (for homosexuality, low IQ, physical deformities like 'clubbed fingers') and to 'disinfection' with various toxic fumigants, including gasoline, kerosene, sulfuric acid,DDT and, after 1929, Zyklon-B (hydrocyanic acid)...

The Academy awards ceremony may have hailed Al Gore as a prophetic hero, but history will treat him as the personification of an incredible delusion: the idea that carbon dioxide emissions fundamentally affect the Earth’s weather patterns. While much of the media treats this theory as catastrophic fact, the fact is it ain’t—it’s an unproved theory. Over the last few decades carbon dioxide emissions have risen, and there has been a slight increase in the Earth’s temperature. Ergo, goes the theory, it must be cause and effect and—ergo, ergo—we must take draconian measures to reduce the emissions, even if that...

Chief Muslim claims Jewish Temples never existed, Al Aqsa built by angelsJERUSALEM – The Jewish Temples never existed, the Western Wall really was a tying post for Muhammad's horse, the Al Aqsa Mosque was built by angels, and Abraham, Moses and Jesus were prophets for Islam. All this according to Sheikh Taysir Tamimi, chief Palestinian Justice and one of the most influential Muslim leaders in Israel. Tamimi is considered the second most important Palestinian cleric after Muhammad Hussein, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. In a WND exclusive interview, Tamimi, who preaches regularly from the Al Aqsa Mosque, claimed Jews have...

What is the underlying conviction of the European countries managing to establish a political and economical union of 500 million citizens? The leading voices of the EU itself seem to believe it all boils down to PC declarations. An alternative assertion to European strength consisting in thoughtless PC gaiety would be the immense, unsurpassed European contribution to the development of Technology, Science and the depiction of Man and his life here upon Earth as interpreted by the Humanist ideals stemming from The Renaissance and Antiquity. The EU comission article: "Federal Minister von der Leyen: "The Strength of Europe is its...