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Grand ahistorical apologies for others can obscure one’s own actual sins.At any time in the 2,500-year history of Western diplomacy, has a head of state been advised by his host not to apologize for a long-ago act? I cannot think offhand of any instance until, apparently, two years ago. According to a controversial leak provided by WikiLeaks — and picked up in stories by news outlets from AP to NPR — Barack Obama’s administration was politely advised by the Japanese in September 2009 that there would be no need for the presidential entourage to go to Hiroshima, apparently to apologize...

Ex-president George W. Bush with accustomed candor once shrugged after the end of his eight-year presidency, “People were kind of tired of me.” That ennui happens eventually with most presidents. But in the case of Barack Obama, our modern Phaethon, his fiery crash is coming after 32, not 96, months. We can sense the national weariness with Obama in a variety of strange and unexpected ways. There is the self-pitying anguish of liberal columnists who scapegoat him for turning the public against their own leftwing agenda. The current silence of “moderate” Republicans and conservative op-ed writers who once in near...

In the latest sign of an increasingly antagonistic stand by Democrats against top GOP oversight official Rep. Darrell Issa, President Obama declined a request for a top economic adviser to testify before an oversight panel about the president’s economic stimulus law. Obama spokesman Reid Cherlin indicated the move will be part of a general policy against top White House aides testifying before Congress, potentially setting the stage for a showdown on later, more important hearings.

The White House Briefing Room was half empty when President Barack Obama delivered a statement Monday afternoon on a Senate vote related to the tax cuts legislation he's pushing. Reporters filled the first three rows for the president's appearance -- though a few were taking vacant seats. And almost every seat in the back four rows was empty. That kind of sparse attendance for a president's personal appearance is unusual, particularly for a president in his first term and one engaged in a high stales tax debate with Congress. Perhaps it was the short notice and late hour.

Obama 'Reaching for Hope' - There's NOTHING THERE! Reaching for Hope, Finding None

Christmas trees, decorations and carols are being banned from schools and businesses, leaving nothing but a commercial holiday.

SEOUL -- President Barack Obama will not announce his decision on sending more troops to Afghanistan before the Thanksgiving holiday, senior aides said on Thursday. (snip) "You guys make a pretty good photo op," the president said. (snip) He got a huge cheer when he told them he was increasing military pay. "That's what you call an applause line," he said...

What do these things have in common?

WASHINGTON -- If Barack Obama's presidential campaign was smooth and deep like the rivers, his first few weeks in Washington have been turbulent and shallow like the rapids. It began with the quick end of the Richardson nomination, revealing a vetting process with the thoroughness of a subprime loan application. Then came an inaugural address so flat that both supporters and detractors wondered if the flatness was intentional -- a subtle game of strategic mediocrity. Then the broad violation of an overbroad lobbying ban, which made no distinction between lobbying for the Iranian regime and lobbying against teenage smoking. Then...

Onion video on Obama win causes obsessive supporters to realize how empty their lives are.

I have zero doubt that Obama will use his 1/2 hour of network time to lay out a comprehensive economic plan. It will be chock full of lies, promising a chicken in every pot, every conceivable socialist giveaway. But... the most dangerous thing is that it will sound very slick and smooth. Team Pathological Liar does not care whether any of the plan adds up or is possible. They just want to create the last few days of buzz in the gullible sheeple how The Man Child Messiah has the solution to every economic problem. John McCain's team and the...

“But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed … when the roar of the crowd fades away … when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot - what exactly is our opponent’s plan?” –Sarah Palin at the 2008 Republican National Convention When Barack Obama was asked about his executive experience on Anderson Cooper's 360, he claimed that running a Presidential campaign was more "executive" experience than Governor Sarah Palin's tenure as mayor of a town in Alaska. Aside from the fact that Obama deliberately left out Palin's current executive experience...

ORANGEBURG, S.C. - Democratic presidential candidates criticized President Bush over the Iraq war Thursday night in the first debate of their campaign, and urged him to reconsider his threat to veto legislation to begin withdrawing U.S. troops. "If this president does not get us out of Iraq, when I am president, I will," said Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. In the debate's opening moments, Clinton also found herself on the receiving end of criticism, when former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards said she or anyone else who voted to authorize it should "search their conscience." Edwards, in the...

  based on the following news story:Is Obama all style and no substance?This cartoon/graphic is free for noncommercial use in emails, blogs, and forums. IowaPresidentialWatch.com

MANCHESTER, N.H. – With standing room crowds chanting for the star to show, Sunday's Democratic fundraiser could have been a rock concert. But it was only Sen. Barack Obama's first visit to the nation's first primary state. If Senator Obama should jump into the Democratic presidential primary, where he is now ranked just behind Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York in recent polls, Democrats in the land of retail politics wonder if there's a living room big enough to hold the throngs who'd come to hear him. "Right now, he's a rock star. Getting 1,500 people out on a...

In any war, good intelligence is critical. It's difficult to defeat an enemy if you don't know what the enemy is planning to do. Yet, more than five years into the long war against terrorism, we still don't even know exactly how many enemy fighters we're up against. The recent leak of a portion of the National Intelligence Estimate led to newspaper headlines proclaiming that the war on terror is "creating more terrorists" than it's getting rid of. Then, when more of the estimate was declassified, many were left wondering, "How would we know that, and what does it mean?"...

Best-selling author and Muslim dissident Ibn Warraq argues that freedom of expression is our western heritage and we must defend it against attacks from totalitarian societies. If the west does not stand in solidarity with the Danish, he argues, then the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest. The great British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty, "Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being 'pushed to an extreme'; not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good...

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Tens of thousands of angry Muslims marched through Palestinian cities, burning the Danish flag and calling for vengeance Friday against European countries where caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad were published. In Washington, the State Department criticized the drawings, calling them "offensive to the beliefs of Muslims." While recognizing the importance of freedom of the press and expression, State Department press officer Janelle Hironimus said these rights must be coupled with press responsibility. "Inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this manner is not acceptable," Hironimus said. "We call for tolerance and respect for all communities and...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Washington on Friday condemned caricatures in European newspapers of Islam's Prophet Mohammad, siding with Muslims who are outraged that the publications put press freedom over respect for religion. "These cartoons are indeed offensive to the belief of Muslims," State Department spokesman Kurtis Cooper said in answer to a question. "We all fully recognize and respect freedom of the press and expression but it must be coupled with press responsibility. Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is not acceptable."

The federal government will no longer bring evacuees from the Gulf Coast to the St. Louis region despite an areawide effort to provide facilities for thousands. Eleven days ago, the federal government ordered agencies here to make preparations for up to 2,000 people displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Now officials are deciding what to do with a Boeing hangar at Lambert Field that hundreds of volunteers and dozens of agencies worked feverishly to turn into a virtual city. St. Louis County also coordinated an effort to transform the long-abandoned Gumbo Jail in Chesterfield for about 300 Katrina evacuees... That's not to...

Give Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger credit for not rushing to follow his counterparts in Arizona and New Mexico by declaring a state of emergency over illegal immigration. No doubt the anti-immigration zealots would be encouraging such a move. Schwarzenegger surely knows, as all Californians do, that illegal immigration has an enormous impact on the state. There are an estimated 2.4 million undocumented workers working on the state's many farms, in restaurants, on street corners and in homes. This shadowy and unknown subculture - the largest of any state in the union - causes uncountable impacts on the state in terms of...

There are 600 prison camps in the United States, all fully operational and ready to receive prisoners. They are all staffed and even surrounded by full-time guards, but they are all empty. These camps are to be operated by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) should Martial Law need to be implemented in the United States. The Rex 84 Program was established on the reasoning that if a mass exodus of illegal aliens crossed the Mexican/US border, they would be quickly rounded up and detained in detention centers by FEMA. Rex 84 allowed many military bases to be closed down...

The Democrats made huge errors in tactics and judgment during the last presidential campaign. But they thought that the patronizing contempt they held – and continue to hold – for the electorate would go unnoticed. Heady with the multimillions pouring into their coffers, with a monopoly on an old media that historically and unfailingly back leftists, and by mistaking their candidate's verbal contortions for substantive policy, they deluded themselves into thinking that the Oval office – as well as the Congress, Senate and a good many governorships – were theirs for the taking. What they failed to grasp was that...

I have been searching online in google a few hours searching for a quote. I have tried quite a few cobinations of words and I'm not even lukewarm to finding what I am looking for. I beleive the quote I'm looking for goes something like this: "the chruches are empty, the priests are ignored, the sacrements are forsaken and . . ." I'm working on a paper and I just can't seem to get the right key words to find this thing. I know someone on FR will know this quote and someone probably knows who said it too.

No Name Calling Week?     1/12/2005By Warren Throckmorton, Ph.D.Yes, name-calling is wrong. But this event’s sponsors reveal the agenda behind banning it. “There is a special place in hell for people like you!” These words were directed at me by a teacher during this past summer’s National Education Association (NEA) convention in Washington, D.C. This delegate to the NEA convention made his prediction in response to my presence at the NEA’s Ex-Gay Educators’ Caucus booth in the convention exhibit hall. His cheery salutation caught me off-guard given the message of tolerance and acceptance I had been hearing around the exhibit hall....

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

Empty Statements and Politicians We all hear politicians make statements on the campaign trail that when analyzed don't exactly add up to much. Often, they say nothing at all...but do sound good. Previously, we listened to what the news man told us and maybe protested here and there or wrote some letters, but it took some effort to tell the Emporer that he had no clothes. In this Internet Age, you can make your voice heard world wide by anyone that chooses to listen to you. When politicians make vague or misleading statements, they can be called out from the...

Welcome to Balloon World Thanks to an audio feed snafu on CNN at the end of Sen. Kerry's speech, in which the Democrat’s convention producer could be heard giving frantic directions to underlings, in order to assure that the American public had no doubts about the important “message” Democrats wanted to communicate to us, the pithy sound bite that will forever immortalize the 2004 Democrat National Convention/Presidential campaign rang out like the “shot heard ‘round the world” from a Boston suburb some 229 years earlier: “More balloons..... MORE BALLOONS!! MORE BALLOONS, DAMMIT!!! WHERE THE F*CK ARE THE BALLOONS?” While arguably...

The meeting in Beantown was listed as the Democratic party convention. However, the number of media and gunslingers far exceeded the amount of convention delegates attending. The gunslingers could be pacified with a doughnut or two a day. Not so with the scribbling set. Reporters tend to get a little testy if they are not provided comfort, free food, booze, and bathrooms -- usually in that order. But, the DNC didn't deliver. First, most media people had to go through security lines. Then, to save a few bucks, the DNC skimped on toilets for the media. On top of that,...

They're finally turning the lights out at MidAmerica Airport. But it's not what you think. For years, the empty passenger terminal at the money-losing airport has glowed after sundown - lit up like some sort of makeshift navigational beacon to passersby on Interstate 64. Now is time for a little austerity, St. Clair County officials said Thursday. Depending on which numbers you're looking at, the struggling airport next to Scott Air Force Base lost $3.5 million to $12.7 million in 2002. It's not clear how much it cost to keep the interior lights on at night, but the county already...

Hello Everyone, With Lent well underway, please Prayerfully consider becoming a missionary to empty Purgatory. This is an informal group of Religious & Lay people dedicated to Praying for the Holy Souls in Purgatory. Please visit the web site for Mission To Empty Purgatory ( http://www.MTEP.com ). You will find no adverts, no requests for money and no need to give out personal information. All we need are your Prayers. Please help the poor Holy Souls in Purgatory, they are in desperate need of our Prayers. As St Padre Pio says: "The Holy Souls are eager for the prayers of...

Two of the three documents/articles below were prepared within The Vatican. The first document/article focuses on the present day China's persecution of the Roman Catholic Church in China ( commonly referred to as China's "underground Catholic Church"). The second document/article quotes Cardinal Etchegaray, retired president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. He has frequently served as the Pope's diplomatic envoy. On 03 October 2003, he publicly denied the existence of a divide between the underground and Chinese government-recognized 'patriotic' Catholic Church. "There is only one Church with two faces," he said. "There is not one 'patriotic' Church and...

From an empty desert, springs the throbbing heart of a war machine By Terri Judd in southern Iraq 03 April 2003 A dirty green canvas city has sprung up from nowhere in Iraq's vast western desert in a matter of nine days. Within its sandbank and barbed-wire ramparts pumps the heart of the American forces supply chain ­ LSA Viper. Anyone who ever doubted the ferocious, greenback-fuelled might of the US forces need only observe the 60-mile pipeline that has snaked out of Kuwait in just over a week and now pumps millions of gallons of oil to the isolated...

Empty warheads are not the heart of the story Zvi Bar'elThe discovery last Thursday of 12 empty chemical weapon warheads at the Ukhaider complex south of Baghdad created a great stir that died down almost immediately. The Ukhaider Ammunition Storage Area, one of the biggest in Iraq, which was bombed during the Gulf War, is not a secret site. Even the 122mm warheads were not unknown weapons to those monitoring the Iraqi arms program. The previous inspection team had already uncovered some before being kicked out of Iraq in 1998. If there was anything interesting about these warheads, it concerns...