Free Republic

Oliver Willis notices Scott Brown defending the Massachusetts health care plan -- which he supported -- and trying to make the case that it's really quite different from the federal plan with which it shares key features. "They're two different programs. What we have here is a free-market enterprise where we're providing insurance in various levels to people in Massachusetts. The plans in Washington are a one-size-fits-all plan," he said.

Frum sees him as an antidote to the Tea Party madness: Strong on defense and school choice, opposed to the Obama administration’s signature initiatives, Brown voted in favor of Mitt Romney’s health plan in Massachusetts. He describes himself as pro-choice (subject to reasonable limitations), accepts gay marriage in Massachusetts as a settled fact, and told the Boston Herald editorial board he would have voted to confirm Sonia Sotomayor.

The unauthorized release of hundreds of e-mails from the British University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit has outraged Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). Oddly, it is not the implication in the e-mails that much of the purported climate research carried out to promote the global warming crisis is flawed, bogus, or worse that has gotten the Senator’s dander up. “A lot of people are trying to make a big deal about the irregularities of the research,” Boxer said. “However, the more critical issue is the violation of privacy. These scientists had no expectation that their communications would be made public....

As with Iraq, the troops in Afghanistan (no matter what country they are from) know, from their own experience, that their service there matters. Many of their countrymen back home do not, and the media does little to change this opinion. The main reason given by the media is that the soldiers just don't understand what they are experiencing, and fail to see the "big picture." For the troops, the violence and terror that the Taliban use is real. The fear of the local victims is also quite vivid. The troops know that their efforts against the Taliban and drug...

Sorry for the vanity - I need some Freeper help. I was defending Rush Limbaugh in a forum today, and the person I was debating presented a series of Rush quotes which was supposed to prove his "racism." I'm a huge Rush fan, and clearly the man is not racist. The mainstream media misquotes him on a daily basis, and I assume these are misquotes or taken out of context.... Does anyone have any "debunk" information/links, that I can use to address the following quotes? "I mean, let's face it, we didn't have slavery in this country for over 100...

Below read a post by Hans von Spakovsky at "The Corner" blog at NationalReviewOnline about how the Eric Holder-run U.S. Department of Justice has reportedly established a disinformation unit at DOJ. The Most Transparent Administration Ever? Not at DOJ [Hans von Spakovsky] Is the Department of Justice engaging in fraud, or is it simply trying to hide its propaganda? Those of you wondering how DOJ uses your tax dollars to enforce our nation’s laws might be interested to learn that Eric Holder has apparently hired former Democratic campaign bloggers to work at the department in what appears to be a...

(My translation) Growth in Russia is not dependent on international financial markets. The Russian banking system has not been involved in speculation in derivatives from the U.S. mortgage market. Even if some Russian banks may have faced losses when their counterparts failed there is nothing that can compare to the losses suffered by the Swiss bank UBS, the big U.S. banks or some European banks. Finally, the country’s financial reserves are considerable. The situation of the Russian economy is healthier than in August 1998, but also healthier than that of many European countries. Household debt is low whereas it exceeds...

Surprise. It's not just the Obama administration and the left that's using intimidation tactics to malign and suppress WorldNetDaily. Now a few Republican bloggers are using the same bullying tactics in an effort to put WND out of business by calling on Americans to, and I quote, "boycott any of those organizations that will not renounce … support for WorldNetDaily."

Here is a new GOP ad that turns the tables on the White House's claim there is a lot of "disinformation" out there about Health Care. In fact, the ad shows that it is President Obama himself and other Democrats who are putting out "disinformation." . . . . . (Watch Video)

Welcome to the Year of the Rat. In Waltham, the city wants to pay packy employees for ratting out college-aged drinkers. In Washington, the White House Health Reform Office wants you to report any anti-Obama rumors that come your away. They’ve even set up an e-mail address for you to rat out your annoying right-winger colleague. Think I’m exaggerating? Read the message from the whitehouse.gov Web site for yourself: “Scary chain e-mails and videos are starting to percolate on the Internet. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain e-mails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep...

Document from Australia Document from Kenya

What have we learned from the BEA dog and pony show in Paris this morning? Not much! 1. ACARS messages were sent every ten minutes to facilitate the investigators to track the route of the aircraft “certain degree of precision on route”. 2. There 24 messages received from the ACARS system with different failures. Fourteen of those messages were sent within the space of one minute, from 02:10UTC to 02:11UTC. 3. There was inconsistency between measured velocities and indications of systems failures including the autothrust and autopilot. 4. BEA says the ACARS information was designed for maintenance and not investigative...

What Are Tax Day Tea Parties Protesting? About these tax-day tea parties: It's obviously fine if citizens want to exercise their first amendment rights and hold protests. Admirable, even. And if these protests are underwritten by corporate backers or supported by various media organizations (there seems to be some debate about this), that's OK too. First Amendment rights all round! But what I don't understand is why these rallies are being held to protest, among other things, "higher taxes." (Higher spending is another matter.) There is a widespread perception that Obama is raising taxes willy nilly, so maybe this is...

WASHINGTON: South Carolina's Republican governor says his state may accept money from President Barack Obama's stimulus plan even though he is ideologically opposed to it. Gov. Mark Sanford says being against the plan "doesn't preclude taking the money."

I return periodically to the topic of how the right wing in America is murdering the English language, one word at a time. For instance, if you listen to them, you will find out that the words "appeasement" or "appeaser" are applied anytime a politician advocates any solution to an international disagreement other than a full military assault on the country with whom we have a disagreement. See an earlier article of mine on this here http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_steven_l_061013_appeasement___republ.htm The latest lexical victims are "Socialism" and "Communism". The Republican and Conservative right in America now liberally apply these words to anyone who...

The crimes of georgian's army in S. Ossetia.

Why didn't the press ask Physicians for Human Rights about how weak most of their evidence of torture by Americans turned out to be? Despite claims uncritically repeated in some media outlets, medical examinations of 11 former detainees of U.S. military prison facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Cuba advanced by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) do not provide open-and-shut examples of prisoner abuse. Instead PHR offers up one-sided accounts based largely upon allegations made by former detainees to an organization with a predefined political agenda and financed in part by Bush Administration opponent and convicted felon George Soros and his...

HOW bad does economic reporting get in a presi dential election year? Consider last week's performance by The New York Times. Exhibit No. 1: All the papers, not just the Times, made a huge deal out of job losses during last two months of 22,000 and 63,000. The latter figure, the Saturday Times exclaimed, is "the biggest monthly loss in five years." In fact, five years ago - January to August 2003 - nonfarm payrolls fell by 444,000. Did that massive job loss in 2003 mark the start of recession? Of course not.

Video raises question "Why is the left being cheerleaders for failure in Iraq?"

When the dust settles, the uproar over Barack Obama’s religious beliefs will have taught us little about the candidate and his loyalties that we don’t already know. If we look closely, however, we can learn a great deal about American Jews and their anxieties. More pointedly, we can penetrate the mystery of the power of the so-called Jewish lobby.Snip Reports of Obama’s supposed Muslim leanings began surfacing a full year ago, not in anonymous e-mail blasts but in signed articles published openly on conservative Web sites. One of the first appeared on FreeRepublic.com, an arch-conservative site based in central California....