Free Republic

Feb. 6, 2012 - Vice President Joe Biden will speak at Florida State University later this morning and will talk about college affordability certainly; an important topic in a college town like Tallahassee. We're told that the Vice President will discuss the importance of tackling rising college costs to ensure America's students and workers can obtain the education and training they need. The Obama administration says this is crucial so that this country will have a workforce prepared for the jobs of the 21st century. In his State of the Union address, President Obama laid out a blueprint for an...

KABUL, Afghanistan – When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, Maulvi Qalamuddin headed the Committee to Protect Virtue and Prevent Vice, the religious police that shut down girls' schools, beat up men with insufficiently long beards and arrested those in possession of music or video tapes. Nowadays, the 60-year-old Taliban cleric is on a different mission: He is overseeing a network of schools that teach reading, writing and math to thousands of girls in his home province of Logar, an insurgent hotbed just south of Kabul.

Listen to Mark Levin rips Newt's critics a new one!

What follows is an article I am writing to dispell the myth's being bandied about by some very large liars regarding the Ethics complaints Newt was charged with in the 90's. I have sourced the material. It is a bit long. The formatting is for people with a short attention span and those who like to read.

NBC’s Brian Williams and Politico’s John Harris peppered the NBC News/Politico debate inside the Air Force One pavilion at the Reagan Library with questions from the left, repeatedly pressing the Republican presidential candidates with liberal talking points and Democratic agenda items. That’s time which could have been better spent advancing issues and concerns of Republican primary voters interested in differences amongst the candidates, not in forcing the candidates to defend conservative positions despised by MSNBC viewers and hosts. (Compilation video at link) Williams hit Texas Governor Rick Perry from the left on his state’s poor economic indicators (“no other...

Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina primary, 40 percent to 28 percent, over Mitt Romney. He also won every Congressional district and, in doing so, won all of South Carolina’s 25 delegates. Now the battle heads to Florida, which holds its primary on Jan. 31. Here are five things to look for as the race heads to Florida. 1. Momentum versus organization Newt Gingrich will come into Florida with momentum, gained from winning South Carolina’s primary, which every Republican presidential nominee has won since 1980. But Romney has a head start in Florida. He has hundreds of thousands of absentee...

In what could lead to a big reorganization of the federal government, the Associated Press reports that President Obama will ask Congress for the power to merge departments and agencies to help streamline government and improve efficiency. The president's first priority would be combine the trade and commerce departments, according to a senior administration official. The president would request fast-track consolidation authority that would allow him to propose agency mergers that would then be subject to an up-or-down vote from Congress within 90 days. Under the terms of the president's proposal, lawmakers would still need to grant the president the...

... The Director of CAIR's Florida chapter, Hassan Shibley, gave a more lukewarm and confusing response to news of the arrest. Although he stated that Osmakac "was no friend or supporter of the Muslim community" and that the Muslim community had played a "vital role" in his arrest, he also expressed "concern about a perception of entrapment."

.....[Economists] predict that the unemployment rate ticked up to 8.7 percent from 8.6 percent, which was the lowest rate since March 2009.

Mitt Romney's Multiple Political Personalities (John McCain's ad - 2008) Before his recent endorsement...John McCain didn't think much of Mitt Romney. He released this ad highlighting Romney's affinity for taking whatever position necessary to get elected. Paid for & approved my John MeCain! Mitt Romney's Multiple Political Personalities That was then, this is now. McCain raps Newt for 'liar' comment

New independent circulation numbers show a sharp decline in readership of Politico and other left-leaning news websites, an ominous trend for the suburban Virginia-based news outlet and its peers as Americans head into an election year. Recently published and publicly available Web traffic data indicates that “unique visitor” traffic to politico.com in November 2011 was 15 percent lower than in the previous month, and 31 percent lower than in November 2010. The data, from Compete, Inc., also show an overall two-year decline. Political websites gain and lose readers throughout election cycles, with presidential election years trending higher in unique Web...

(CNSNews.com) – Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.) falsely claimed that unemployment has not gone up under President Barack Obama. In fact, the unemployment rate was 7.6 percent in January 2009 when he was inaugurated and has remained above 8 percent every month of Obama’s presidency since February 2009, when it hit 8.1 percent. Wasserman Schultz, appearing on the Fox News Channel’s Fox and Friends program Monday, said that it was “simply not true” that unemployment had gone up during Obama’s presidency. Fox and Friends host Gretchen Carlson stated, “Unemployment has gone up precipitously since he...

This week in front of the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder doubled down, then tripled down, on Fast and Furious. He dug in, fought back, and pretended nothing is systemically wrong inside his Justice Department. Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) even accused him of potential contempt of Congress, a crime (2 U.S.C. 192). Holder’s testimony was not merely shameful, it was a maturing manifestation of a lawlessness which I first warned about in July of 2010 when I testified about the New Black Panther dismissal. Small acts of lawlessness have given way to larger ones. In the radio...

As the news came out on Friday morning, the headline reported that the unemployment rate dropped to 8.6% from 9%–at first glance, the rate looked like 98.6 on the economic thermometer. The analysts are still arguing over the meaning of this data, but for traders and investors the real outcome is meaningless. It may lead to foreign investors purchasing U.S. equities as America is seen to be a relatively stronger economy, especially when compared with the EUROPEAN CREDIT-STRESSED environment. The headline number is fraught with all types of data pollution as the bean counters strive to figure out how many...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department has provided Congress with 1,364 pages of documents detailing how the department gave inaccurate information to a U.S. senator in the controversy surrounding Operation Fast and Furious, the flawed law enforcement initiative aimed at dismantling major arms trafficking networks on the Southwest border. In a letter last February to Charles Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Justice Department said that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had not knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons to a straw purchaser

WASHINGTON—The U.S. labor market strengthened in November as private employers continued to add jobs at a healthy pace, and the unemployment rate fell to its lowest level since March 2009. Nonfarm payrolls rose by 120,000 last month, the U.S. Labor Department reported Friday in its monthly survey of employers. Private companies added 140,000 jobs

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton formally announced new measures to sequester Iran Monday evening, and she warned that more sanctions could come. “Today’s actions do not exhaust our opportunities to sanction Iran,” Clinton said alongside Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. “We continue actively to consider a range of increasingly aggressive measures.”

JUST done as a news alert. Experts were expecting 395,000. So look for Hussein worship to commence. I wouldn't be surprised if the regime held a fake news conference.

When I left the White House beat to cover Congress, I told people what the biggest difference was between the two beats. People in the White House and Congress lie to you, I would say; the difference is that on the Hill it’s not the same lie told by the same seven people. That was true until the super committee was created. Now, instead of politicians lying to their constituents and reporters, they are lying to themselves. Not rationalizing, or trimming the truth, or speaking in euphemisms. Lying. Bald. Faced. Lying. The super committee is a thought experiment gone awry....

The tar sandhills near Mills in north central Nebraska, through which the Keystone XL pipeline is planned to be built. The woman seated before the row of suited state legislators in her red Husker team hoodie was choking on tears. She had grown up on a farm in Nebraska. Her parents had grown up on farms, in the days before electricity and running water, and now she said generations of toil and sweat could be destroyed in an instant by a $7bn pipeline project. A leak from the pipeline, which would run from the tar sands of Alberta to the...

Her (INS Agent Mill's) instructions: Locate Elian, get him safely into a waiting van, and stay with him and allay his fears until federal agents reunited him with his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.After Elian was found in a closet, Mills told him in Spanish: ``I know this seems frightening to you now, but it will all be over very soon,'' said Russ Bergeron, director of media relations for the INS. ``She told him: `We're not going to take you to Cuba. We're not going to put you on a raft. We're taking you...

Yahoo!Finance reports Most of the unemployed no longer receive benefits Early last year, 75 percent were receiving checks. The figure is now 48 percent -- a shift that points to a growing crisis of long-term unemployment. Nearly one-third of America's 14 million unemployed have had no job for a year or more. Congress is expected to decide by year's end whether to continue providing emergency unemployment benefits for up to 99 weeks in the hardest-hit states. If the emergency benefits expire, the proportion of the unemployed receiving aid would fall further. Congress has extended the program nine times. But it...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A House subcommittee on Wednesday authorized a subpoena against the Homeland Security Department for information about illegal immigrants who have been identified but not deported. The authorization cleared the House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration policy and enforcement by a 7-4, party line vote. Democrats voted against the measure, saying it was premature to issue a subpoena because Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is cooperating with the committee. House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, says the subpoena authorization is necessary because the Obama administration hasn't responded quickly enough to his request, which was made in...

Herman Cain has been taking heat for his response to questions about Politico's story on alleged sexual harassment. But today on Morning Joe, it was Politico's own Jonathan Martin, lead author of the story, who was being evasive about the details of the allegations against Cain. Incredibly, when Willie Geist asked him to describe specifically what Politico is accusing Cain of having done, Martin hemmed, hawed then ultimately said "we're just not going to get into the details of exactly what happened with these women," beyond the sketchy generalities in the Politico story. View the video here.

Employees of the Long Island Railroad (LIRR) have defrauded that organization of over $1 billion over the last seven years. In as many as 500 cases, LIRR employees falsely claimed disability benefits to supplement their pensions, employing a sophisticated scheme involving special “facilitators� and doctors operating “disability mills.� Eleven defendants have been named so far, including a former president of the railroad union; each has been charged with conspiracy to commit health-care fraud and mail fraud. There were three doctors who participated in this scheme, and in return they received cash payments between $800 and $1,200 — along with millions...

:28 Chaffetz: When did you first speak with Eric Holder about Fast and Furious? Napolitano: I don't believe I have ever spoken with Eric Holder about Fast and Furious. 3:01 Why is that you, as the Secretary of of Homeland Security with one of your agents dead on the scene, did not get briefed about fast and furious? Napolitano: I do not know.

Shocking voter fraud allegations are rocking the mayor's race in San Francisco. District Attorney George Gascon has launched an investigation and demands are growing for federal authorities to move in. One campaign official fears the election could be stolen if nothing is done. Supporters of incumbent Mayor Ed Lee, who is running for a full four-year term next month, are accused of illegally handling vote-by-mail ballots. Witnesses say workers for the group, SF Neighbor Alliance, set up a makeshift sidewalk voting site in the city's Chinatown and accuse it of illegally casting absentee ballots for elderly Chinese voters. Read more:...

Bartlett, Tenn. - Herman Cain lashed out at his critics Friday, accusing detractors of his 9-9-9 tax reform plan of trying to slow his newfound momentum with baseless attacks. During his first campaign swing since surging in the polls, Cain told a tea party crowd near his birthplace of Memphis that the plan would grow the economy by five percent at minimum, and pledged to pass it in his first 90 days in office. “Can y’all see the bull’s eye on my back?” he joked to the crowd of several hundred supporters who had gathered in a city park here...

In a very bizarre turn of events, it seems that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is all riled up over Clint Eastwood's latest movie, J. Edgar. Which, of course, stars Leonardo DiCaprio as the FBI's founding director, J. Edgar Hoover. So when the bureau's not chasing down Scarlett Johansson's nude pics, it's all up in Clint's business! What's up with the FBI going all Hollywood these days? Color us not surprised it has everything to do with Eastwood's portrayal of The Hoov. And remember we first criticized Clint for failing to make the character "gay-enough." Now it seems the FBI...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. manufacturers are failing to fill thousands of vacant jobs, surprising when 14 million people are searching for work. Technology giant Siemens Corp., the U.S. arm of Germany's Siemens AG , has over 3,000 jobs open all over the country. More than half require science, technology, engineering and math-related skills. Other companies report job vacancies that range from six to 200, with some positions open for at least nine months. Manufacturing is hurt by a dearth of skilled workers. "What we have been saying for quite a while is that even though there is a high unemployment...

Ah hypocrisy, you've been around a lot lately. I've seen you next to Eric Holder when he was testifying about Fast and Furious and behind President Obama when he was touring the Solyndra plant last year. Looks like you're back again. You may have heard the news yesterday that Senate Democrats blocked President Obama's "Jobs" Bill. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell actually pushed for a vote yesterday, actually echoing Mr. Obama's cries to vote on the bill. "I'd like to give him that vote," Mr. McConnell said. No dice. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid blocked the vote. But because hypocrisy...

'Middle-class families shouldn't pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires," repeatedly proclaims President Obama, arguing for his proposed $1.5 trillion tax increase over the next 10 years. "That's pretty straightforward. It's hard to argue against that." In fact, Mr. Obama's statement is anything but straightforward and not hard to argue against. Seeking to reverse his declining poll numbers, especially among his increasingly disillusioned base, Obama is attempting to give the impression that America's millionaires and billionaires are paying lower taxes than their secretaries. IRS data for 2008, however, the latest year for which the numbers are available, show that those...

WASHINGTON (KGO) -- Two top executives at bankrupt Solyndra have invoked their Fifth Amendment rights and refused to answer questions at a House hearing Friday. The Solyndra executives have sent letters to the House Energy and Commerce committee, saying they will invoke their Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.

President Obama was impressed by the memorial at the World Trade Center site in Manhattan, and he and the first lady were “particularly moved” by the readings during Sunday’s service there, spokesman Josh Earnest said. Earnest, speaking to the press aboard Air Force One en route to Shanksville, Pa., said the president “and the First Lady were particularly moved by the families of those were lost, who participated in the ceremony, in particular the children.” He also said Obama appreciated the way the memorial “meets the moment.”

Pusillanimous Iconoclasts © 2011 by Anthony James The term refers to a group of ignoble and even cowardly individuals whose goal it is to attack or tear down something held in reverence by the general public. It could be a hallowed American institution like our process of electing our leaders. Or, it could be a leader who is cherished by a large swath of the electorate— like Sarah Palin. Still another possibility is that it refers to both, which, in this case, it does. There is little more strictly and thoroughly American than a good political brouhaha, with fairly evenly...

Unemployment remains a huge concern, but the underemployment problem isn't as bad as it used to be. Fewer part-time workers are looking for full-time work -- because they don't mind working part-time after all.... The vast majority of part-timers, defined as those who work less than 35 hours a week, are happy with their status. Those who would prefer full-time work make up only 31% of all part-time workers, according to the Labor Department. That's still a lot higher than the 19% of part-timers who wanted a full-time job before the start of the Great Recession. But it's a modest...

NOAA said that maximum average wind speeds at landfall were 85 MPH, hurricane winds stretching outwards for 90 miles. In fact, only two locations even had gusts over 85 MPH.

In an op-ed article in the New York Times, Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, and David E. Campbell, a political scientist at Notre Dame, say they have collected data indicating that the tea party is "less popular than much maligned groups like 'atheists' and 'Muslims.'" But Campbell says the tea party was really an afterthought in their research. "We didn't go into this study to look at the tea party," Campbell said in an interview with The Ticket.

I want to thank Representative Nancy Pelosi for standing up and reminding Americans that the ethical core and the psychological heart of a progressive is to be a preening narcissist, camouflaged as a social redeemer. Thank you Rep. Nancy Pelosi for standing in front of the cameras and telling Americans and the world that Republicans, who say they want to cut government spending, are liars. Because it drives home the reality that you have burdened generations of Americans with an unaffordable health bill. You spoke forcefully to the cameras warning America that the Right wants to destroy food safety, clean...

According to an explosive document, investigators from the U.S. military’s top investigative office found evidence that a Pentagon survey pivotal to the [DADT] repeal was engineered months prior to its release, and was deliberately skewed in later media leaks, with the intention of swaying Congress towards repeal despite opposition from combat troops. An unredacted version of the April 2011 report by the Defense department’s Inspector General was leaked to the conservative Center for Military Readiness, and a slightly redacted version was confirmed as authentic by a Defense spokesperson to LifeSiteNews.com. The authors found that Jeh Johnson, a co-chair of the...

Congressman Says Fast & Furious Was Obama Administration Conspiracy To Regulate and List Gun Owners Calls On Holder to Resign http://www.theblaze.com/stories/congressman-says-fast-furious-was-obama-administration-conspiracy-to-regulate-and-list-gun-owners-calls-on-holder-to-resign/

Everyone’s heard that Moody’s has threatened to downgrade our bond rating unless the debt ceiling is raised. We get that—crisis pending, yada, yada, yada. But if you read the announcement closely, there are important new points they added to the mix. First, Moody’s really doesn’t believe–that the President really will let Geithner default on our Treasury bonds—despite all of President Obama’s foot-stamping, scaremongering, and high stakes “This may bring my Presidency down” retro-drama. Moody’s says that “there is a small but rising risk of a short-lived default” (emphasis added), that “the probability of a default on interest payments is low,”...

...Don’t overlook Nikki Haley, the exciting new governor of South Carolina. Perry and Haley have today together signed an op-ed in The Washington Post titled Break the spend-and-borrow cycle. Perry first nationally challenged federal bailouts in December 2008. He and then-governor of South Carolina Mark Sanford challenged other governors to join them in opposition. It was a revolutionary moment and became prelude to the Tea Party. They wrote then in The Wall Street Journal: "As governors and citizens, we've grown increasingly concerned over the past weeks as Washington has thrown bailout after bailout at the national economy with little to...

Bloomberg: link only! http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-14/obama-said-to-consider-camp-david-summit-this-weekend-for-deficit-talks.html

A Chicago woman who played witness to a beach melee on Memorial Day weekend wants Chicago police and officials to come clean about what happened along the lakefront in May. City officials said they closed North Avenue Beach on May 30 because of excessive heat, but Amy Schwartz says no one is talking about the excessive violence that prompted her to call 911 that day. "There's a fight breaking out on the beach because there's nothing but animals covering this beach today," Schwartz phoned into the police. "What the hell is going on?" Schwartz said she was walking from Oak...

The original WH transcript found at whitehouse.gov (I grabbed a cached version from yahoo.com; see my red brackets below) says the DNC participants LAUGHED after Obama said "we've created 2.1 million new private sector jobs in the past 15 months. Now, whitehouse.gov has changed the word "laughter" to "applause." Original version (yahoo cache):http://74.6.238.254/search/srpcache?ei=UTF-8&p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.whitehouse.gov%2Fthe-press-office%2F2011%2F06%2F20%2Fremarks-president-dnc-event-0&fr=yfp-t-701&u=http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=http%3a%2f%2fwww.whitehouse.gov%2fthe-press-office%2f2011%2f06%2f20%2fremarks-president-dnc-event-0&d=207206940761&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=3f176b25,cd268517&icp=1&.intl=us&sig=YwoTaKsztkXVtdKV0ajhPQ-- Changed "doctored" version:http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/06/20/remarks-president-dnc-event-0

He says there was nothing indecent going on. Do we have any reason to believe anything he says, though? I’m just spitballing here, but he may, just may, be only admitting to as much as he absolutely has to. And with Patterico’s prosecutorial brief, lying about not tweeting with any minor at all became untenable. Rep. Anthony Weiner sent private electronic messages to a 17-year-old Delaware girl but maintains there was nothing inappropriate in his communications with her. In a statement to Roll Call Friday evening, the New York Democrat’s spokeswoman Risa Heller said, “According to Congressman Weiner, his communications...

Rep. Anthony Weiner has achieved something by behaving so spectacularly shamefully. Unless I miss my guess, he has revived the concept of sexual morality. Even for a jaded nation, this is one sex scandal too far. We've had it. Our capacity to remain non-judgmental on sexual matters -- as we've been tirelessly instructed to do for 40 years -- seems to have reached its end point. The national reaction to Weiner's conduct, in contrast to previous sex scandals (and there have been too many to count in the past two decades), has been not amusement (though jokes made the rounds)...

Obama rigs the statistics to create appearance of border security As the adage goes, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” But according to the Obama administration, if at first you don’t succeed, manipulate the results. This especially applies to its border security plan. During a recent hearing of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano unveiled plans to develop a “border security index” to measure enforcement progress along the southwestern border. According to Miss Napolitano, the border security index will include crime, immigration and economic data. She thinks this new...