Free Republic

Repeal the 2nd Amendment June 27, 2008 No, we don't suppose that's going to happen any time soon. But it should. The 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is evidence that, while the founding fathers were brilliant men, they could have used an editor. A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

“Exercise of editorial control” makes Obama 100 percent responsible for his site’s hate speech against Jews, pro-Clinton Black people, and seniors We created our own blog at my.barackobama.com, which carries the following disclaimer: “Content on blogs in My.BarackObama represents the opinions of community members and in no way should be interpreted as endorsed or approved by the campaign.” By deleting our blog and disabling our account, the Obama campaign just blew its disclaimer and can now be held 100 percent responsible for the anti-Semitic, racist, misogynist, and ageist hate speech it allowed to stand (in some cases for more than...

When there’s trouble in Idaho for Republicans, you know they’re hurting everywhere. We’ve already seen the grassroots revolt in the works on the part of Paul supporters. But the fissures in the Idaho party run deeper. At the core of the party split is a fight over Idaho’s primary system between the state central committee and many elected officials. The battle came to a head this week, causing one Idaho observer to take note of the strong contrast between a united Democratic party in Idaho, and the Republican infighting [sub. required]: With Obama at the top of the ticket, Democrats...

A REVOLUTION TO TAKE BACK THE US CONGRESS by Nelson Lee Walker of tenurecorrupts.com I am proposing that we create a popular, bloodless, political revolution in our country. I believe that it is very necessary, very possible, and very doable. The object of this revolution is the destruction of the professional political class which currently dominates and corrupts the US Congress. I am convinced, as are many, many voters, that the bulk of our country’s political problems arises out of this ‘permanent’ Congressional political class, and their devotion to party power and to the financial special interests keeping them in...

This is my first post here at Free Republic, I'm sorry if I'm not formatting it correctly! I realize that you don't agree with my of my views as an anarcho-capitalist. I'm not posting here to troll, get into debates I'll never win, etc., I'm here to beg you to support McCain! It wasn't until a few months ago that I understand why (as a libertarian) I always viewed the right with respect while viewing the left with disdain. I'll articulate it here: Leftist programs knowingly create perpetual votes; rightist programs don't create perpetual votes at all. Leftist view government...

WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton met her Waterloo at Tuzla. She'd been regaling audiences with tales of a dangerous landing under sniper fire in Tuzla 12 years ago and then running for cover. None of this occurred. When CBS provided the tape, she was forced to admit to "a misstatement." Now, confabulation is a fairly common psychological phenomenon. We all have internalized childhood stories so oft repeated by elders that we come to falsely "remember" the actual experience. Adult memories are less susceptible to such unconscious inventions, but past experiences embellished over time by repeated recounting can reach the point where...

No sooner had Luis Plata sat down then he started talking about the Irish economic transformation -- from impoverished ugly duckling to swanky swan of Europe in just two decades -- and why a similar growth model is just what Colombia needs. Some of the necessary policy adjustments are already under way in Bogotá, he said, and with any success, the reforms can be deepened. But the big question mark is whether the U.S. Congress will approve the pending Free Trade Agreement. The FTA, Mr. Plata explained, is as important to Colombia's growth as European Union membership has been to...

Today is the first day of spring. And this spring offers a spectacle that I thought I'd never see in my entire life: Murray Sabrin has a chance to win an election. I've been following Sabrin's career ever since he ran for governor in 1997. He was outspoken and principled, which of course made him persona non grata in either of the major parties. So he ran on the Libertarian Party ticket and managed to qualify for public funding and a spot on stage during debates with Republican incumbent Christie Whitman and Democratic challenger Jim McGreevey. Sabrin stood up there...

NYT March 10, 2008 McCain’s Daunting Task By WILLIAM KRISTOL Buried inside Sunday’s papers was a noteworthy election result. In a special election to replace former Speaker Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican, first-time Democratic candidate Bill Foster emerged victorious. George Bush easily carried the district in 2004, as has every recent G.O.P. presidential candidate. This Democratic pickup suggests that, for now, we’re in an electoral environment more like 2006 than 2004. Foster’s eight-percentage-point improvement on John Kerry’s 2004 performance in the district mirrors the general shift in the electorate from 2004, when Bush won and the Republicans held Congress, to...

McCain’s Daunting Task By WILLIAM KRISTOL Buried inside Sunday’s papers was a noteworthy election result. In a special election to replace former Speaker Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican, first-time Democratic candidate Bill Foster emerged victorious. George Bush easily carried the district in 2004, as has every recent G.O.P. presidential candidate.

I drove up to Auburn Tuesday to see Tom McClintock rhetorically throw his hat into the ring. "The ring" in this case refers to the 4th Congressional District, and the cliché is historically appropriate. Apparently derived from a frontier tradition of throwing one's headgear into a boxing ring to announce one's pugilistic intentions, it was popularized as a political term by Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. "My hat's in the ring. The fight is on, and I'm stripped to the buff," Roosevelt said as he announced he would challenge a heretofore fellow Republican, William Howard Taft, for the presidency. Which is...

It would be simple for me to regurgitate the write-up about the book, but I am more interested in Michael Savage's record of accuracy. Savage, who has literally a world of experience and has authored 18 books, pegged this particular topic years ago. But Dr. Savage, like me, is more interested in gaining a visceral response from people - aiming for the soul and the gut - than a mathematically intellectual reality check. This, I believe, is why Savage is so amazingly popular among his listeners and not merely a cult of personality. Savage caught me in 2002 when a...

As Team Romney talked up the prospect of a Romney surge leading up to Super Tuesday, I envisioned my worst nightmare: A Hillary Rodham Clinton/Mitt Romney contest. A Clinton/Romney race, no doubt, was a Democratic operative's dream, starring the easiest Republican to beat. The Dems could have dusted off all of the 2004 campaign spots on John Kerry's flip-flops, and revamped them with Romney as the windsurfer, shifting positions on a number of issues - and I'd be stuck arguing that, flip-flopping aside, Romney would be better on Iraq. Now, I can breathe a sigh of relief. If Clinton wins,...

Ladies and Gentlemen, this speech not only needs to be read, but needs to be heard while you read it. It needs to be felt from the heart, as it was given from the heart. But most of all, this speech needs to be updated for today's CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT. I strongly recommend you open a second window to "http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ronaldreaganatimeforchoosing.htm" and play the windcows media player to watch and listen to Ronald Reagan give this speech ( 27 minutes 32 seconds long ). You have to go down that link about one page. RONALD REAGAN "A Time for Choosing" Given as...

If Fred Thompson is nothing else he’s honest, or at least as honest as politics will allow one man to be. Presidential candidates through necessity are forced to make promises they know they can’t keep. Occasionally a candidate will say something in an unguarded moment being totally frank with his or her audience they wish later they hadn’t. At a town hall meeting in Burlington Iowa Fred Thompson was explaining becoming president wasn’t an obsession of his. He had a life before he decided to run and he’ll have a life if he isn’t the voter’s choice. The media’s reporting...

TORONTO, December 17, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - With the Morgentaler acquittal on Jan. 28, 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada eliminated Section 251 of the Criminal Code, because it was not equally applied across the country, thus removing all protection for unborn babies. The court also stated that it was within the purview of Parliament to enact new abortion legislation, if it so desired, providing that it met the criteria of the court. Today, in Canada, any pregnant woman could legally have her unborn child aborted for any reason or for no particular reason, at any time during the pregnancy, right...

Whether they're sabotaging our troops' lifeline on the battlefield abroad or assaulting our citizens' sovereignty at home, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are doing everything imaginable to derail an otherwise promising election result for Democrats in November of 2008. Their politics appear to be all hunger and no foresight — like rotund diabetics waddling into a pie-eating contest.

Historians will define by abstract terms the year 2025 as the death of the United States of America; the year when sharia law superceded Constitutional law. These same historians will write that America followed the course of another great civilization, Athens, in their pursuit of self-indulgence and a grasp for humanism while ignoring the slow signals of erosion from within. Athens enemies took advantage of this internal weakness and absorbed them, as Islam accomplished with the United States slowly but inexorably.

This is the column in the school newspaper sent the principal into a panic ... running around and confiscating uncirculated copies of the column. Another 'modest proposal' by Justin Jones Published on: 10/23/07 For a millennium, the world has been plagued with stupid people corrupting society and bastardizing the value of life for all of mankind. The intellectually handicapped have been reproducing at a substantially greater rate than those with a fully functional brain. The problem of the unintelligent reproducing is, and has been, a serious threat to society that has gone unchecked for far too long. It is the...

think we can finally dispense with the talk of 2008 being another 2006 for Democrats. This hasn’t shown up in the national numbers, or likely will for weeks. I get the sense that right now is the time to sell the contract on Democrats winning the White House on Intrade. (Technical analysis alone would suggest this — check out the hockey stick-like buying pattern.) That isn’t to say they won’t win — but 63 will probably be their high water mark for quite some time. This is not a call for celebration. We are still laboring against a significant enthusiasm...

I tend to agree with one of our local talk show hosts who recently stated that while Rudy might be able to fool enough people during the primaries that he isn't all that liberal, you can bet when he goes up against Hillary she is going to make sure everybody knows his dirty little secret that most of the media including Fox News is trying to white-wash. I am what is known as a Social Conservative. I voted for President George W. Bush twice and do not regret either vote even though he has disappointed me and even though I...

Have you given to Jim Ogonowski yet? The Democrats are worried about this seat, and they should be. To be sure, Ogonowski is not the pure through and through conservative I'd like. But frankly guys, we can't expect that in places like Massachusetts if we want to get back in the majority. Sometimes, in some places, we have to accept that there are people to the left of us who still vote "R." I'm not saying I'd back Ogonowski if he were in Georgia or Texas or Missouri or even out in CA-04 where the incumbent Republican is to the...

Al Gore and James Hansen talk a lot about "tipping points" in the various climate-change scenarios with which they attempt to frighten the world's inhabitants into adopting their unsavory prescriptions for planetary salvation. If these critical balance points are passed, their rhetoric suggests that the earth would essentially find itself rushing headlong down the roiling rapids of a climatic river of no return, from which it would be next to impossible to extract itself and avoid the most dire climatic consequences. One such tipping point is related to the reduction of Arctic sea-ice extent and thickness that began in the...

This is a special election to replace the deceased Republican U.S. Representative Paul Gilmore. Whoever wins the Republican nomination on November 7 will be heavily favored to win the general special election on December 11. So let's send a "True Republican. True Conservative." HEY! That just happens to be State Sen. Steve Buehrer's campaign slogan! What a coincidence. According to the Club for Growth's profile in their endorsement of Sen. Buehrer, he fought against the now disgraced former Governor Bob Taft's runaway taxing and spending before it was cool. He did was what right, even though he knew it would...

The numbers are so staggering that they are hard to process mentally and impossible to process logistically: each month some 60,000 Iraqis are voting with their feet against the surge of U.S. forces by fleeing their homes. Since the invasion, more than 2.5 million Iraqis have left for neighboring countries, while 2.2 million have been forcibly displaced within Iraq - too poor to escape the country or blocked from transitioning through more peaceful provinces, which in recent months have erected checkpoints to keep them out. To put it in stark historical terms: the war has created the largest refugee crisis...

SIR, I don't know, actually": The fact that America's surrogate commander in chief, David Petraeus, could not say whether the war in Iraq is making America safer was all you needed to take away from last week's festivities in Washington. Everything else was a verbal quagmire, as administration spin and senatorial preening fought to a numbing standoff... ...This is why the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, including those more accurate than Mr. Bush's recent false analogies, can take us only so far. Our situation is graver than it was during Vietnam. ...Certainly there were some eerie symmetries between General Petraeus's...

I was willing to entertain the thought of you as a refreshing, charming, surprising second-tier candidate whose eloquence and wit would serve the party well (although trashing the Club for Growth was really pushing it). But a national smoking ban? You're not running a health spa; it's a country, and you will never win friends in North Carolina talking like that. These big-time pound-shedders cum health nuts. You applaud them as they get healthy, but be careful putting them in power-- they'll take your food and other vices away from you quick as look at you. Because they know what's...

Can someone really be considered the front-runner for a major party's presi dential nomination when he's barely known even to most members of that party? It sounds unlikely, but Mitt Romney, the former one-term governor of Massachusetts, is beginning to put together a pretty strong case that he's the guy to beat in the 2008 Republican race for the White House. Clearly, national polls don't yet support that idea. In a USA Today survey taken this month, Romney was favored by only 8 percent of self-identified Republicans. That left him a distant fourth to Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and John...

Watch out, Fred Thompson: By the time you get into the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney may have run away with your constituency. And while Rudy Giuliani and John McCain have decided not to compete in next Saturday's Republican straw poll in Iowa, they now have a powerful interest in preventing Romney from turning what they had hoped would be a nonevent into a meaningful victory. Look for maneuvering from Romney's top rivals to strengthen former Gov. Mike Huckabee and Sen. Sam Brownback so they can dilute Romney's share of the vote — and of the news....

T he Washington Post's recent series on Dick Cheney's vice presidency certainly got my attention. Having held that office myself over a quarter-century ago, I have more than a passing interest in its evolution from the backwater of American politics to the second most powerful position in our government. Almost all of that evolution, under presidents and vice presidents of both parties, has been positive -- until now. Under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, it has gone seriously off track. The founders created the vice presidency as a constitutional afterthought, solely to provide a president-in-reserve should the need arise....

NEW YORK (CNN) -- President Bush isn't the only lame duck in our nation's capital. All 435 congressmen are up for re-election next year, and so are 34 of our senators. That's a total of 469 lame ducks, the way I see it. For the record, there are 245 Democratic and 224 Republican lame ducks in Washington. And with the rising registration of Independents across the country, next year may be a bad season for lame ducks. With the electorate asserting a strong impulse to be independent, and with populism exerting a significant influence in the 2006 midterm elections, there...

Jewish history throughout the ages has proven incontrovertibly that Zionism, the assertion of Jewish rights and control over the Land of Israel and the affirmation of Jewish national identity, is the solution to most of the problems that have beset the Jews since the time of Abraham. In the Land of Israel, as a nation of free men and women willing and able to assert and defend ourselves, the Jewish people flourish on every level. Disturbingly, with each passing day it becomes more and more obvious that the Olmert government does not believe that Zionism is important. To the contrary,...

Well, now we know what "compassionate conservatism" means. It means that if you're Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, and you're convicted of lying to FBI agents and a federal grand jury, you don't have to go to prison -- even when many others have for similar offenses.Lewis "Scooter" Libby was to be sent up the river, or so U.S. Attorney Peter Fitzgerald thought, after being found guilty of those lies in an investigation of a Bush administration leak by which Valerie Wilson had been revealed as a CIA operative. Her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, was a critic...

I lived in Michigan when the television news channels played the videos of Dr. Jack Kevorkian assisting his terminally ill patients nonstop, day in and day out. It was clear, as the parties involved spilled out their hearts and souls in the most dynamic of intense emotions, that the good doctor was responding sincerely, thoughtfully, professionally and with deep compassion to those seeking to end their agony. You will find no man who more than I is dedicated to the self-evident truth that human life is sacred. I value, respect and completely cherish the precious gift of life that God...

GOVERNOR MITT ROMNEY. Good grief. What have we done? Romney is no Bill Weld. He’s no Paul Cellucci. He’s not even a Jane Swift. Romney is a social conservative. The type of conservative that voters rejected back in 1990, when Weld was first elected over John Silber. But hostility toward reproductive rights, criminal-justice reform, and civil unions or marriage rights for same-sex couples is not the real danger we face over the next four years. No, the real danger lies in the state budget and what’s going to happen to it now. Romney has blithely promised to hold the line...

Family advocate James Dobson, widely considered an important GOP rainmaker, says he will not vote for former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani under any circumstance in the upcoming presidential elections because of his positions on abortion, domestic partnerships for homosexual couples and other moral issues. Dobson says today in an exclusive WND column, speaking strictly as a private citizen, "I cannot, and will not, vote for Rudy Giuliani in 2008." "It is an irrevocable decision," says the founder and chairman of Focus on the Family. "If given a Hobson's – Dobson's? – choice between him and Sens. Hillary Clinton...

Mother's Day is, to be honest, somewhat of an annoyance. It's manifestly one of those tedious Hallmark holidays wherein everyone is supposed to run out and support the revenue stream of cardboard manufacturers in the name of expressing gratitude to mothers, fathers, grandparents and anyone else to whom we might be related. I imagine it won't be long until Sept. 18 is declared Anonymous Sperm Donor's Day, which will probably be celebrated by giving matching card sets to one's two mommies and lighting a candle for dear old anonymous sperm donor, whoever he might be. Mothers are not only important,...

The Sky Movies Sci-fi & Horror Channel recently conducted a survey to tie in with the Sci-Fi London film festival. The question? What movies do you watch over and over again? The answers were very interesting. Sky broke up the results by gender lines. Men loved Sci-Fi movies, which is fairly obvious. Women, on the other hand, love movies with music (evidently). There is one exception though - "Star Wars"! Sci-Fi transcends all boundaries! Here are the detailed results of the survey. Men's Most-Watched Films 1. Star Wars trilogy 2. Aliens 3. The Terminator 4. Blade Runner 5. The...

There are few things that keep me up at night, but this is one of them. It may be cynicism, but more likely it’s the long sad experience of watching the courts over the years. So when your side finally wins one that should have you celebrating, and yet you walk away with a knot in your gut, it’s probably warranted. Senior Judge Laurence H. Silberman’s majority opinion in Parker v. District of Columbia was a thing of beauty, affirming armed self-defense as an individual right pre-existing the Constitution. It was almost hard to believe. Maybe that's what’s bugging me....

This is a quite big deal that most of us totally missed last night: John Edwards doesn't believe there's a "global war on terror," at least not in the simple-show-of-hands sense. This is something a lot of Democrats say privately -- and something mainstream pols everywhere else in the world say publicly -- but it contests a Bush administration premise in a way very few American politicians have been comfortable in the last five and a half years. His stance -- though it doesn't seem to have been all that deliberate -- matches the recent comments of a prominent British...

Michael Ramirez's cartoon comment on today's Supreme Court ruling on partial birth abortion is here.

As we all know the two front runners for the Democrat Presidential nomination are Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton. Objective evidence suggests that Field Marshall Rommel was given a better choice when Hitler demanded that he choose between a cyanide cocktail and a trial for treason. On the surface, going to trial doesn’t sound that bad. Of course Hitler’s judicial system and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had a lot in common. A judiciary that valued ideology over justice meant that the end result of a trial by the Nazi Kangaroo court would be that the good Field Marshall,...

When Bob Hunter, a Riverside, Calif., businessman, would hear of a conservative's campaign that needed volunteers, he would pile his family into the station wagon and drive off to ring doorbells. Hunter's son Duncan grew up believing in retail politics. When Hunter returned home after serving as an alternate Goldwater delegate at the 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco, he told Duncan about chatting with another alternate, an amiable fellow, some actor, named Reagan. Who two years later was elected governor. Duncan learned early on about rapid upward mobility in politics. In 1969, he dropped out of college, joined the...

The forces related to the current global warming debate swirl with political agendas, even on the international scale. As it has evolved global warming has become much more of a political issue than a scientific one. Global warming is badly muddled featuring the exaggerations of the media, Hollywood, and Al Gore would do anything for the environment except take a science course. As a result the media, Hollywood, and Al Gore have not done well in their “science� movies. The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been a major power behind much of this, and as we...

The other shoe has dropped concerning global warming. Fasten your seat belts: an "international authortity" to act as enforcer has been demanded. Concurrent with the release of the International Panel on Climate Control's "report" (actually a twenty-page "summary for policy makers" with the report itself to be released eventually, maybe in April, maybe in May), we have a demand for an international authority to be set up to police compliance, voiced by none other than Jacques Chirac and seconded by no less than 45 countries. As yet no goals or specific regulations have been designated. But rest assured that "experts"...

Friday, January 26, 2007 From A Naval Academy Graduate To Senator Webb Posted by Hugh Hewitt | 6:17 PM An essay from an active duty officer with more than 25 years of service, addressed to his fellow USNA alum, Senator James Webb. Senator Jim “Copperhead” Webb Why did the new Democratic majority select Senator James Webb (D-VA) to give the Democratic response to the president’s State of the Union Address? Since when does this privilege fall to a freshman, even a freshman senator? It’s seems that despite the bad experience with nominating John Kerry to be their standard bearer in...

Yesterday FReeper Dark Skies posted an editorial by Andy Martin from Political Gateway with the following lead comment: “Swift boating" is a term that came into use during the 2004 presidential election to reflect Senator John Kerry’s flaccid response to attacks on his wartime record in Viet-Nam. The term, a noun, adjective and verb, has entered the political lexicon and is usually invoked when liberals and Democrats are stung trying to defend themselves against unpleasantly truthful accusations hurled by conservatives. I took exception to that definitiion and emailed my objection to Mr. Martin as follows: "Swift boating” is a term...

AUGUSTO PINOCHET, who died Sunday at the age of 91, has been vilified for three decades in and outside of Chile, the South American country he ruled for 17 years. For some he was the epitome of an evil dictator. That was partly because he helped to overthrow, with U.S. support, an elected president considered saintly by the international left: socialist Salvador Allende, whose responsibility for creating the conditions for the 1973 coup is usually overlooked. Mr. Pinochet was brutal: More than 3,000 people were killed by his government and tens of thousands tortured, mostly in his first three years....

University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman is offering students an interesting lesson: Never let the law prevail over your own vanity. Just one day after Michigan voters overwhelmingly passed Proposal 2 - thereby ending racial and gender preferences in the state's public sector, Coleman said she'd do everything possible to avoid incorporating racial equality into her school's admissions policies.

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" - Benjamin FranklinThe response was predictable. After sending our alert last Thursday regarding the passing of the Military Commissions Act, we received a flood of email. Many were supportive, but others took exception: "Don't you care that terrorists want to kill us?" "Olbermann's obviously a left-wing nut who wants conservatives out of power." "The act isn't that bad..." It is bemusing to watch certain conservatives -- conservatives who once screamed that Bill Clinton was going to suspend the Constitution, establish martial law,...