Free Republic

There are a lot of things NOT to like about liberals, but you have to give them some credit. These are people who are badly, dangerously, and devastatingly wrong on almost every issue of consequence and yet, year after year, they hang in there at a rough parity with conservatives. So, they may do a lot wrong, but there are things we can learn from the Left. 1) Fight Harder: Liberals win a lot of battles just because they're willing to fight harder. Look at what happened to Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Komen decided not to keep giving...

Every year now for a number of years my wife and I watch the entire six disc extended version of the Lord of the Rings during the gloomy Northwest winter around the Thanksgiving-to New-Years time. It helps us through the winter gloom, but since Obama's election it also helps us maintain hope and courage. I grew up on Tolkien before he was well known, and it probably shaped me in ways I can scarcely appreciate. My wife on the other hand, from the Third World, had no inkling of Tolkien until this movie cycle came out. We are both very...

Bill Clinton's lessons for ObamaBy Julian Zelizer, CNN Contributor updated 5:05 PM EST, Mon December 19, 2011 **SNIP** The first is that President Clinton was very successful at counteracting Republicans when they attacked. One of President Obama's great frustrations has been the "messaging wars." He has frequently been frustrated by how the GOP portrays him to the public and defines his policies in unfavorable ways. Clinton didn't let the GOP do that easily. When Republicans painted the president as left of center early in his term, he responded by aggressively highlighting his centrist credentials, lowering the deficit in 1993 and...

Wanda Bridgeforth was hit hardest on the home front as a child, when her parents couldn't afford to keep her with them. At one point she lived with 19 people—in a six room house. It was in these situations that she learned to conserve what she had, and reuse what she found.

In Republican-leaning circles in Washington, the question of the moment has been "Does this Solyndra thing have legs?" -- in other words, will the news media keep running stories on the subsidized, politically connected solar power company that just went bankrupt? When Republicans ask this question, they mean, "Will this significantly detract from President Obama's re-election chances?" The brief answer is: Probably not, because too many Republicans are asking the wrong questions and drawing the wrong conclusions.

"Mrs. Judd? How come they flew into the towers?" Joan Judd spent her summer vacation preparing for questions like that from her fourth-grade class in Milford, N.Y.

Congressman Allen West said Wednesday the nation hasn't learned the lessons from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks largely because political correctness is hobbling political leaders from confronting the threat he sees from Islamic extremists. West, a Republican who represents Broward and Palm Beach counties, made his comments at a Washington, D.C., event at which he hosted the screening of a conservative Christian group's film "Sacrificed Survivors: The Untold Story of the Ground Zero Mega Mosque." "My fear is that maybe we could end up forgetting what happened on 9/11 because of certain things like political correctness or this desire...

GAZA, March 2 (UPI) -- Gaza's government has accused a U.N. agency of overstepping its role by including lessons about the Holocaust in U.N.-run schools in the Gaza Strip. The Hamas-led government said it would do everything in its power to prevent children from being taught about the Holocaust, the Palestinian Ma'an news agency reported. Gaza Education Minister Mahammad Ashquol said his ministry "will never allow teaching Holocaust to Gazan refugee camp children." The children are being urged to leave class if their human rights lessons include any information about the Holocaust, Ma'an reported.

During Knesset session ahead of Int'l Holocaust Remembrance Day, Netanyahu asks "Where is the fury, international uprising" of the world against Iran for calling for destruction of Jews? Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Wednesday slammed the international community, saying that "it has not put into practice the lessons learned from the horrors of the Holocaust." Speaking during a special session of the Knesset to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Netanyahu said, "One thing is clear. The fact that global anti-Semitism is increasing is a well-known phenomenon. New anti-Semitism is washing over the world and it is important to fight it."...

Children are to be taught about homosexuality in maths, geography and science lessons as part of a Government-backed drive to "celebrate the gay community". Lesson plans have been drawn up for pupils as young as four, in a scheme funded with a £35,000 grant from an education quango, the Training and Development Agency for Schools. The initiative will be officially launched next month at the start of "LGBT History Month" – an initiative to encourage teaching about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual issues. The lesson plans, spread across the curriculum, will be offered to all schools, which can choose whether...

Now that someone with mental illness has shot one of Washington's own, maybe Congress will start to pay attention to its abysmal failure to provide care for the most seriously mentally-ill Americans. We'll see. Lawmakers took a brief lunge in that direction after mentally-ill John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan in 1981, and an even smaller step in 1988 when Russel Weston, another mentally-ill man, entered the Capitol and shot two police officers. But most mentally-ill people are not violent -- and Congress seems content with ignoring those who are. I fear legislators will react to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' shooting by...

Our president's analysis of why he received a shellacking at the midterms put the blame squarely on us: He may have failed to communicate how wonderful his programs were, but we were too thick-witted to understand that he was leading us to nirvana. Now the Congressional Democrats are offering their own analyses: Pelosi will lead Democrats "in pulling on the president's shirttails to make sure that he doesn't move from center-right to far-right," said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., a co-chair of the liberal Progressive Caucus in the House. "We think if he'd done less compromising in the last two years,...

Now that the dust has settled on the 2010 midterm elections, it’s slowly becoming clear just how monumental the results really are. We saw an extreme left-wing agenda suffer a crushing defeat. At the ballot box, voters took Obamacare and the stimulus and wrapped them right around the necks of those same House members and senators who had arrogantly dismissed the concerns voiced in countless town halls and Tea Party rallies up and down the country. Voters sent commonsense conservatives a clear mandate to hold the line against the Obama agenda. Does that mean Republican candidates can look forward with...

Dean 3.0: What the Tea Party Can Learn from Democrats in 2010 and BeyondAri Berman Oct 27 2010, 11:54 AM ET "The first rule of change is controversy," famed community organizer Saul Alinsky once said. "You can't get away from it, for the simple reason of, all issues are controversial. Change means movement, movement means friction, friction means heat, and heat means controversy." Alinsky is not the only liberal icon Tea Party Republicans now admire. They've also belatedly fallen in love with Howard Dean, who they generously mocked for the better part of a decade until Democrats picked up six...

<p>Unlike most of the world, Australia did not have a recession during the last two years. In fact, it has not had a recession in the last 19 years. Its economic growth rate is higher than in the United States, and the unemployment rate there is only 5.1 percent. From the middle 1800s until the early 1900s, Australia enjoyed a higher per-capita income than the United States. It then fell behind, but in the last couple of decades, it has gone through an economic revival. There are positive and negative lessons for the U.S. and the rest of the world from Australia.</p>

Lessons In Iconography : The Chi Rho - Christ The Chi Rho may well be one of the most recognized of Christian symbols, and it represents Christ himself. This simple symbol is made up of a superimposed "X" (chi) and a "P" (rho), the first two letters of Christ's name in Greek. Used from the earliest days of Christianity on lamps, liturgical objects, sarcophagi, and in catacomb painting, and still in wide use today, the Chi Rho is linked to the conversion of the Roman empire in the fourth century. In 312 AD, on the eve of his battle against...

  Lessons The most enduring memories I have of my father are the lessons he taught me. Dad taught me little things. Like how to tie my shoes when I was four. Or the time when I was around five, and he noticed that when I washed my hands, it was a matter of splashing them with a little cold water, then moving on. He showed me how to adjust the water temperature and scrub thoroughly with soap. Then there was the time when I was about ten when he noticed that I handled money by crunching bills in my...

1. Take a 10-30 minute walk everyday. And while you walk, smile. It is the ultimate anti-depressant. 2. Sit in silence for at least ten minutes each day. Talk to God about what is going on in your life. Buy a lock if you have to. 3. When you wake up in the morning complete the following statement, 'My purpose is to __________ today. I am thankful for______________' 4. Eat more foods that grow on trees and plants and eat less food that is manufactured in plants. 5. Drink green tea and plenty of water. Eat blueberries, wild Alaskan salmon,...

Republicans who were already planning their Nancy Pelosi retirement galas for November may want to cancel the caterer. The GOP lost the most important election that was held on Tuesday, and if it fails to learn from the experience the party will lose in the autumn too. The GOP lost the one race in which a seat in Congress was up for grabs, the contest to replace the late Jack Murtha in the 12th House district in southwestern Pennsylvania. John McCain had carried the seat with 49% of the vote in 2008, President Obama's approval rating was well below 40%,...

NEW ORLEANS -- A more soft-spoken and humble Michael Steele assured his party faithful Saturday that he has learned his lesson from the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) recent troubles. “In life, you realize that you can’t please everyone, but you can certainly make them mad at you the same time, and that’s a lesson well-learned,” Steele said at the outset of his speech to the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. Steele then offered a quasi-apology for the distractions that have plagued the RNC and led two members of the committee to call for his resignation. “Folks have been mad at us...

A number of 12-year-old girls were beginning to use lipstick and would put it on in the girl's washroom. That was fine, but after they put on their lipstick, they would press their lips to the mirror, leaving dozens of little lip prints. Every night the maintenance man would remove them and the next day the girls would put them back. Finally the Headmistress decided that something had to be done. She called all the girls to the washroom and met them there with the maintenance man. She explained that all these lip prints were causing a major problem for...

I will start this with: Beltway pundits, especially so-called conservatives, are clueless. They have spent so much time in DC thinking all this stuff is a game that they could not recognize ideologues when it smacked them in the face.

WASHINGTON, March 19, 2010 – The Marja operation has served as proof of principle for operations in Afghanistan, and commanders are working to adopt the principles in other areas in the country, a senior military official said here today. The official, speaking on background, said that although much remains to be done, operations in Afghanistan’s Helmand province have proved that the counterinsurgency strategy does work. Still, actions in the region are in the early stages. Clear, hold, build and transfer are the steps in the strategy, the official said, and operations in the region are still in the hold and...

KABUL, March 8, 2010 – The Taliban flag no longer flies over Marja, and the operations in the central region of Helmand province have lessons for the rest of Afghanistan, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in the country said today. Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and Ambassador Mark Sedwill – NATO’s senior civilian representative in Afghanistan – spoke with reporters traveling with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates at International Security Assistance Force headquarters here. The Marja operation is a tactical and operational effort to liberate 75,000 Afghans from Taliban tyranny, the general said. “There was a Taliban flag...

Return to the Article March 07, 2010What I Learned from Obama's PopBy Jack Cashill "Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle!"  - Alice in Wonderland A little more than a month ago, I began my first descent into the rabbit hole of Barack Obama's origins, a place known to swallow reputations whole. What prompted my inquiry was an e-mail from a correspondent asking my opinion of "Pop," a poem published under the 19-year-old Obama's name in the spring 1981 edition of Occidental College's literary magazine, Feast. Having no prior bias going in, here is what...

The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire by Edward N. Luttwak Belknap Harvard, 498 pp. Civilization in the city of Rome was extinguished by the year 476, but scholars today recognize that the Roman Empire continued to thrive in its eastern capital of Constantinople, in what we call the Byzantine Empire. As Edward Luttwak notes, the Byzantines did not use the word "Byzantine." They called themselves Romans, and their enemies called them Romans as well. The Byzantine Empire carried on Roman traditions of civilization, commerce, law, and education for nearly a thousand years until they met a heroic end...

Government Reinforced Building Codes After The Most Powerful Earthquake in Recorded History Shook Chile in 1960. Saturday's 8.8-magnitude earthquake in Chile is tied for fifth place on the list of most powerful quakes ever recorded, 500 times more powerful than the one that shook Haiti last month. Though the death toll is still rising, CBS News correspondent Elaine Quijano reports lessons learned decades ago will prevent the casualties in Chile from reaching anywhere near the estimated 220,000 killed in Haiti. Unlike in Haiti, the epicenter of Saturday's quake was 70 miles off Chile's coast, far from big cities. Also, the...

Even automotive history repeats itself. Let’s compare Toyota’s sudden acceleration… "A top Toyota official claimed that a negotiated agreement with U.S. government auto-safety regulators prevented a widespread vehicle recall and saved the Japanese auto giant more than $100 million, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post after it was turned over to congressional investigators." To the Ford Pinto… "Cost-Benefit Analysis One of the tools that Ford used to argue for the delay was a “cost-benefit analysis” of altering the fuel tanks. According to Ford’s estimates, the unsafe tanks would cause 180 burn deaths, 180 serious burn injuries, and...

Idaho's Democrat Senator Frank Church[i] was one of my heroes when I was in high school. Church wrote a letter of recommendation for me to Harvard and offered to nominate me to an appointment to any of the U.S. military academies. In the summer of 1971, he took me to lunch in the dining room of the United States Senate, where, for the first time in my life, I tasted French onion soup[ii]. He asked me if I would like to serve as an intern in his office in Washington, D.C. when I graduated from high school. (It was an...

Things can get awkward when protesters have to put down their placards and tackle the business of building an organization — networking online and recruiting reliable volunteers, precinct captains and even candidates. The transition is even more uncomfortable when undertaken in the glare of the national media spotlight, as the national tea-party movement attempted to do at its first convention, held in Tennessee over the weekend. As with any protest movement, consensus proved elusive in two days of debate, but they seemed to agree on five key points: 1. Don't Tread on Me The tea-party folks are innately suspicious of...

You can’t throw a rock in the blogosphere without hitting a postmortem on Scott Brown’s decisive defeat of Martha Coakley for the Massachusetts Senate seat formerly infested by Ted Kennedy and, before him, JFK himself. I may as well add my own. Here are seven lessons to be drawn:

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.

This is one of those rare moments when the conventional wisdom in Washington is right. The Democrats are poised to have a bad year; the only argument is over how bad it will be. And that question rests on whether or not the Republican Party crafts an agenda voters will support So far the GOP has shrewdly been the "party of no." Since I disagree with so much of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda, I happen to think that "no" is the correct position on the merits. But that's not the point. Saying "no" has worked because that's what most Americans say,...

In terms of loss of life, the bombing of the CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan, may be the costliest mistake in the agency's history. So it's important to look carefully for clues about how it happened, and lessons for the future. CIA veterans cite a series of warning signs that the agency wasn't paying enough attention to the counterintelligence threat posed by al-Qaida. These danger signals weren't addressed because the agency underestimated its adversary and overestimated its own skills and those of its allies. The time to fix these problems is now — not with a spasm of second-guessing that...

Recent headlines seem lifted directly out of an Ayn Rand novel. President Obama decries the “fat cat bankers on Wall Street”. Harry Reid attacks insurance companies for making too much profit. House Democrat leaders call Tea Partiers “Racist, Nazi, Gun Nuts”. How about this nauseating statement made by Army General George Casey after the Muslim terrorist attack on Ft. Hood? "As great a tragedy as this was, it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well"Each of these headlines might well have been uttered by an Ayn Rand character.(snip)An epic demonstration of the inverted morality that...

Coming on the heels of the killing spree by Maj. Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood, the latest terrorist "incident," involving Abdul Mutallab on Northwest Flight 253, is yet another isolated but tell-tale sign that we must learn from: 1) If solidly middle-class Westernized Muslims mouth the al-Qaeda line of radical Islamic, anti-American boilerplate, please take them seriously — i.e., worry less about their feelings and more about the lives of innocents they may in the future seek to annihilate. The more upscale and the more the Western exposure, the more there is to worry about. 2) For the last eight...

Turns out there are real questions about the accuracy of that recent Quinnipiac poll showing President Obama’s approval rating at just 52 percent among Jewish voters. As the JTA’s Eric Fingerhut pointed out, the Jewish sampling “was derived from a sample of just 71 respondents, for a margin of error of plus or minus 11.6 percent — a sample size that pollsters generally say makes such surveys unreliable.” Actually, common sense and some knowledge of Jewish voting habits should be enough to render any such poll findings suspect at best. Obama enjoys two important advantages that make him almost a...

President Obama's complete lack of concern for the fraudulent science associated with global warming is contrasted with the common sense of Sarah Palin. The gutsy Alaskan suggested that Obama ought to hold his horses on the whole climate change thing until The real verdict is in. Of course, the smartest man in the world will have none of that. With the outrageous news of deceit, fraud and suppression of opposing evidence by top climate change "scientists," many conservatives had expected to see the story unfold a little differently (with actual reporting and investigating). Global warming, aka, climate change has been...

ABC’s Jordyn Phelps reports: President Obama may have a thing or two to learn from Tiger Woods’ golf game, according to an upcoming article in the January edition of Golf Digest. But In light of the recent controversy surrounding Tiger Woods’ car crash, there are likely more ways in which the President may wish to distinguish himself from the golf star. The article lists ten things that the President could learn from the ultra-successful golf star in improving his performance as president, and vice versa, from the perspective of several prominent writers and players. The magazine cover is a photoshopped...

The lesson from an unsuccessful pirate attack in the Gulf of Aden this week was simple: Guns talk. The Maersk Alabama, the American-flagged ship infamously attacked by pirates in April, was attacked again Monday when Somali pirates opened fire on the ship in an attempt to board it. But the pirates didn't get far this time, after a four-man security team aboard the ship fired back, thwarting the attack. It's the first time a large cargo ship with an armed security team aboard is known to have repelled an attack, says Vice Adm. William Gortney, who commands the Pacific region...

<p>As many people know by now, or are waking up to this morning, yesterday 39-year-old Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, went on a shooting spree at the Fort Hood Army post in Texas killing 13 and injuring at least 30. While Hasan is in critical condition and unconscious, some are speculating that the motive for the shooting was concern over his upcoming deployment to Afghanistan.</p>

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Despite the best efforts of the White House and much of the media to portray this week’s elections as a meaningless barometer of the public’s mood toward the Obama administration, the results were clear. The voters were communicating buyers’ remorse. One year after reaching its zenith, the Democratic Party is now grappling with what could be the beginning of the end of the Obama era. In Virginia, former Attorney General Bob McDonnell, a solid pro-family, pro-life conservative, won a landslide victory, as did down-ticket conservative candidates. Repeated Obama visits to his own backyard did...

Lessons learned from the horrific Virginia Tech shootings in 2007 are credited with averting an even bigger massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, Thursday afternoon when police officer Kimberly Munley confronted the gunman without waiting for backup and took him down with four shots. Reviews in the aftermath of the shootings at Virginia Tech, where 32 died, found that first responders' decision to be careful and wait for backup probably cost lives as that gunman moved unchecked from classroom to classroom as law enforcement massed outside. Those findings had found their way to Fort Hood's Special Reaction Team, which had practiced...

The Lesson of Bob McDonnellby Charlie SpieringA week before the election, Virginia candidate for governor Bob McDonnell was asked in a radio interview if he would veto state funding for Planned Parenthood.“We shouldn't be doing that (funding Planned Parenthood) in Virginia,” answered O’Donnell. “That's common sense I think, and that will be part of what we get done.”Pro-choice activists were furious and quick to condemn his remarks. To them it was one more reason why McDonnell was “out of step and out of touch with voters.” But McDonnell, with his common sense approach to politics, proved that you can still...

After losing Virginia's governorship for the first time in eight years, some Democrats are trying to console themselves that Virginia is at its core a "red" state. This ignores not only that they won back-to-back governorships but also that Democrats defeated a sitting senator in 2006, took control of the state Senate in 2007 and won an open Republican Senate seat and three House seats in 2008 while carrying Virginia's electoral college votes for the first time since 1964. Some in the White House are trying to deflect blame for the defeat by saying that Sen. Creigh Deeds lost because...

My Wednesday Examiner column, written as the 2009 election returns were coming in, stands up pretty well. But let me add some observations written as the course of the elections became clearer. First, in the governor elections in Virginia and New Jersey, the Democratic candidate ran far behind Barack Obama’s percentages in 2008 and the Republican candidates ran ahead of George W. Bush’s percentages in 2004. The numbers are pretty daunting. In Virginia Creigh Deeds won 41% of the votes, way behind Barack Obama’s 53% in 2008. And in New Jersey Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine won 45% of the votes,...

Lessons from Virginia for the GOP By Ed Gillespie Thursday, November 5, 2009 After losing Virginia's governorship for the first time in eight years, some Democrats are trying to console themselves that Virginia is at its core a "red" state. This ignores not only that they won back-to-back governorships but also that Democrats defeated a sitting senator in 2006, took control of the state Senate in 2007 and won an open Republican Senate seat and three House seats in 2008 while carrying Virginia's electoral college votes for the first time since 1964. Some in the White House are trying to...

With Obama set to go weak on the "Good War" in Afghanistan, we need to recall some lessons of history. There is no such thing as a humane war. Indulging in such fantasies, with CNN enforcing the rules, has made the world a more dangerous place. GANJGAL, Afghanistan — We walked into a trap, a killing zone of relentless gunfire and rocket barrages from Afghan insurgents hidden in the mountainsides and in a fortress-like village where women and children were replenishing their ammunition. (Source: Jonathan Landay, a real battlefield reporter for McClatchy) David Warren, trenchant thinker and writer from Canada,...

Former Secretary of the Navy under Reagan, and member of the 9/11 Commission, John Lehman spoke tonight on the campus of St. Joseph's University. His topic was "The Lessons of 9/11: What we have learned, what have we accomplished, and what remains to be done."

Spare Change Day of Reckoning: My Two Cents on Learning from 9/11 David J. Aland 11 Sep 09 I survived 9/11 without a scratch. I didn’t even get my uniform dirty. Through nothing less than the grace of God, I was not where I was supposed to be when the terrorists slammed an airliner into the Pentagon. Friends, colleagues, and shipmates of mine died that day, but I lived. In the hours, days, and weeks that followed, my hands joined the thousands that picked up, reconstituted, and continued the work of those that had been killed. To this day, I...