Free Republic

It was a very uncomfortable Thursday for Attorney General Eric Holder on Capitol Hill as he testified before the House Judiciary Committee about Operation Fast and Furious. If it wasn’t clear that Fast and Furious was implemented as a way to push more gun control measures without the consent of Congress, it’s crystal clear now. Continued stonewalling from the Justice Department had Rep. James Sensenbrenner talking about impeachment Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee Democrat John Conyers called for the enforcement of new gun control measures pushed through the Justice Department in July without the approval of Congress, requiring...

A Democratic lawmaker said Wednesday on the House floor that Republican legislators around the country are purposefully trying to deny blacks the right to vote by pushing for voter identification laws. “It’s no coincidence that a disproportionate number of these affected voters come from communities of color as well as the poor, the elderly and students,” said Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), a former chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus. “Having been born and raised in Texas, this certainly looks like a poll tax to me, which those of us remember as a way to prevent African Americans from voting. These...

Washington, D.C.—Nevada Senator Harry Reid issued the following statement after the U.S. Supreme Court announced it will consider the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.“Families, seniors and small businesses in Nevada and across the country are reaping the benefits of health insurance reform. Prescription drug costs for seniors are falling as the Medicare ‘donut hole’ closes, insurance companies can no longer deny coverage to children with pre-existing conditions, and business owners are taking advantage of tax breaks. Just last week, a conservative judge appointed by President Reagan ruled that this legislation is Constitutional, and I am confident the high court...

Vice President Joe Biden "educates" the 5th graders at a Tampa Bay school that the horrible economy is President Bush's fault.Video

Herman Cain leaving the campaign trail: Why now? Herman Cain is surging in popularity in a number of polls. So why is Herman Cain putting his campaign on hold for the next month? The Hermantor Experience is, by almost any measure, the hottest thing going in the GOP presidential primary (not named Chris Christie). < snip> But Cain seems destined to squander it. And here’s why. As NBC’s thoughtful First Read points out this morning, Cain's promoting a book - and appears to be taking himself off the campaign trail for almost a month. Cain won’t be back in the...

The allegations about the former Alaska Governor, who has been pursued by the tabloid press since running for the Vice Presidency in 2008, were originally published in the National Enquirer, which quoted publishing sources close to the book.

http://www.attackwatch.com/

Rep. Maxine Waters delivered a blistering defense of race-conscious politics on Sunday, telling thousands of delegates to the NAACP's national convention that conservative politicians are actively working to roll back the voting rights of African-Americans ahead of the 2012 presidential election. "With only 15 months left before the next presidential election, Republicans are rewriting voting laws to require photo identification at the polls, reduce the number of days of early voting and to enhance voting restrictions against ex-felons and out-of-state students," Waters said, citing legislation signed into law by GOP governors in Texas, Wisconsin and Florida.

I’ve been hearing whispers that Michele Bachmann’s husband, Marcus, is gay for a while. It’s now exploding into a full-on meme. Given my early bedtime, I’m always at least a day late on “Daily Show” bits. Last night, I saw this episode from Wednesday: CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO Now, I admit, Marcus Bachmann is pudgy and has a less-than-baritone voice. But, last I checked, those aren’t the distinguishing characteristics of homosexuality. Apparently, gay activist Dan Savage has started pushing the meme hard, too. And Slate’s June Thomas is calling him out: Dan Savage begins each of his “Savage...

Complete Proof of the $12 Trillion Republican Debt Just below you can see the calculation and the documentation links for the Reagan-Bushes $12 Trillion ($12,049 Billion) national debt as of September 30, 2010. You can download this as an excel spreadsheet by clicking: Download as XLS. Their debt has 4 parts, but the bulk of it is calculated from 4 inputs (yellow and tan) that you can check with the color coded links to the treasury at the bottom. This will verify the $3.4 Trillion Reagan-Bush debt and the $6.1 Trillion G.W. Bush debt. Together that's $9.5 Trillion. Now some...

These three Dem clowns are tag-teaming each other now live. They are promising that unless Obama gets his new taxes by 2 August, the country will be destroyed: no Boy Scouts, no IRS, no FBI, no Border Patrol, no school lunches for schools (indeed, all schools may be forced to close), no Social Security checks, no military retiree checks, etc. I am not making this up. In between these screeds, AARP is running terror ads telling seniors they will all die in the street without Social Security. I have never seen such a display of mendacity and outright fraud by...

Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) may have admitted that "Jim Crow was the wrong analogy to use" for photo voter ID laws, but that didn’t stop Bill Clinton from making similar comments just one month later. Clinton made the outrageous statement that “There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today.” Clinton continued to incite young listeners at a Washington conference this July by deriding what he called the “disciplined, passionate, determined effort of Republican governors...

President Obama on Tuesday said he cannot guarantee that retirees will receive their Social Security checks August 3 if Democrats and Republicans in Washington do not reach an agreement on reducing the deficit in the coming weeks. "I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd if we haven't resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it," Mr. Obama said in an interview with CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley, according to excerpts released by CBS News.

The president’s failure to demand a reckoning from the moneyed interests who brought the economy down has cursed his first term, and could prevent a second. fter 9/11, Rudy Giuliani went on Saturday Night Live to give New Yorkers permission to laugh again. But Mayor Bloomberg never did tell us when we could resume conspicuous consumption after the crash of 2008. And so, as we stumble through the second year of the official “recovery,” it’s been an improvisational return to high-end carousing in Manhattan. A case in point was the late-May celebration of the centennial rededication of the New York...

Chicago Police Chief Garry McCarthy told parishoners at Saint Sabina Church earlier this month that the easy availability of guns in the United States is the extension of a tradition of "government-sponsored racism" that began with slavery and Jim Crow. McCarthy -— like many urban police officials an advocate of strict gun control -- was speaking at a liberal, activist church whose priest, Father Michael Pfleger, drew national attention for mocking Hillary Clinton in 2008. "This is sensitive. You know, because everybody’s afraid of race. Have you noticed that? Everybody’s afraid of race," McCarthy, a former New York and Newark...

Gun ownership, carrying a gun linked to heavy alcohol use Large, multi-state study shows certain gun owners more likely to drink excessively June 14, 2011 (SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — Gun owners who carry concealed weapons or have confronted another person with a gun are more than twice as likely to drink heavily as people who do not own guns, according to a study by UC Davis researchers. Binge drinking, chronic heavy alcohol use, and drinking and driving were all more common among gun owners generally than among non-owners, even after adjusting for factors such as age, sex, race, and state of...

Austrian School economist Bob Murphy responds to Robert Reich's video, "The Truth About the Economy."

Things you need to know about American al-Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn, or, as I like to call him, Azzam al-Berkeley: He’s a bratty California kid, offspring of hippie parents, and steeped in the deeply ignorant suburban pop anti-Americanism that fuels protests against World Trade Organization meetings and the like. He is, like practically all of his kind, not too terribly well informed. Newspaper editors and mayors are not supposed to be like that. But when it furthers your political agenda, ignorance truly is bliss. In his latest statement, Mr. Gadahn repeated the myth that machineguns are widely available to American...

During a May 16, 2011, interview with Bloomberg television, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., praised President Barack Obama’s record on jobs while taking a shot at former President George W. Bush. "We got in this situation where we had tax cuts for the wealthiest people in our country, which did not create jobs," she said. "In the first year of the Obama administration, more jobs were created in the private-sector than in the eight years of the Bush administration, with all of the tax cuts that President Bush had." According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy shed...

COLLEGEVILLE, Minn. -- The battle for the Midwest is transforming American politics. Issues of class inequality and union influence, long dormant, have come back to life. And a part of the country that was integral to the Republican surge of 2010 is shifting away from the GOP just a few months later. Republican governors, particularly in Wisconsin and Ohio, denied themselves political honeymoons by launching frontal assaults on public employee unions and proposing budgets that include deep cuts in popular programs. Democrats in the region are elated at the quick turn in their fortunes. A few months ago, they worried...

Attack on Arizona Congresswoman Giffords The attempted murder of Congresswoman Giffords and the tragic killing of six others in Arizona has again exposed the political left. Before the assailant’s weapon had cooled off, leftists from all corners were scrambling to try to connect the madman’s act to Conservatism, talk radio, the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, the Tea Party and Sarah Palin. They have since been exposed as misinformed at the best, liars at the worst; the gunman has been shown to be one of their own. Yet their assault on the First and Second Amendments continues unimpeded by...

As most of us know, one of the most powerful weapons wielded by the Right, and particularly, we bloggers, are quotes from prominent “progressives.” If you remember, we were able to accomplish a great deal in exposing the intent of the public option that was to be included in ObamaCare by quoting President Obama, members of Congress, and other experts in heath care. Their own words were used against them, as they stated their intentions openly.

How do we know that grade-school students in Dallas spontaneously cheered the news that President John F. Kennedy was murdered in their city? Because it's been repeated ad infinitum for almost half a century. Therefore it must be true, right? It's a belief that's taken on the aura of holy writ to liberals, thanks to propapandists like radio host and lawyer Mike Papantonio in preserving its mythology for each new generation of true believers. You'd think someone who practices law would know better. Then again, you might not. Appearing on Ed Schultz's radio show Thursday, "Ring of Fire" radio program...

*F.O.C. = Full Of Cr@p.Congratulations, Bill Maher. You get to be the first one covered in this shiny new feature of the VM blog! Because, boy, are you F.O.C.! Mr. Maher has been flapping his gums a lot lately, especially in light of last week's terrible Tucson shooting. ... For some reason, on Wednesday this mental colossus got invited onto the Tonight Show (why, Jay Leno? Why???). On this show he actually faced an audience that disagreed with him! Here's what he said [via NewsBusters]: MAHER: ... [T]hat's the rhetoric they love. The right-wing loves, the go-to rhetoric for them...

The Southern Poverty Law Center has produced a video, “’Sovereign Citizens’ and Law Enforcement: Understanding the Threat,” warning police that traffic stops involving “right wing” citizens could end up as deadly encounters. I’ve embedded it in the sidebar video player. Go ahead and watch it before reading on. There’s no question the officers were murdered. The question is, do we blame an ideology or the individuals who committed the act? And if the former is a factor, what responsible actions have the finger-pointers taken to limit the blame to a narrow spectrum of violence initiation advocates—as opposed to conflating their...

De-fund NPR! In the wake of the firing of Juan Williams by National Public Radio, we've once again heard conservative voices issue that call. NPR representatives respond, as they always do when their dependence on government purse strings is noted, by arguing that only two or three percent of the service's money comes from the federal government. NPR apologist Norah O'Donnell recently threw out a one- to three-percent figure on MSNBC. We don't see these people volunteering to give up that three percent, but we have to admit that this amount of funding is not the gigantic boondoggle we might...

As if we needed anymore proof of Ron Paul’s anti-American treachery — and no, I am not speaking of his inclusion in the Democrats’ list of favorite Republicans (though it’s also quite telling), — he’s finally waded into the Ground Zero mosque controversy where — unsurprisingly — he’s chalked it all up to yet another conspiracy theory, fomented by those war-lovin’ neo-cons: “I think it’s a big distraction, a grand distraction from the real issues… To me it should have been a grand opportunity, and you really touched on the opportunity, because it’s really a property rights issue, and who...

Back in February 2010, Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised the American people that approximately 400,000 jobs would be created due to the passage of the healthcare bill. Remember Pelosi promised this: Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the health summit: “It’s about jobs. In it’s life, it [the health bill] will create 4 million jobs — 400,000 jobs almost immediately.” Well, it’s almost November and the economy still hasn’t gotten any better and we have no evidence of those jobs being created.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) posted a threatening warning on Twitter yesterday adressed to millions of Tea Party activists as news broke of statements by the NAACP accusing the Tea Party of being a racist group led by "hardcore white supremacists."Msg to Tea Party: We will not allow u to send bigots into the Capitol, call civil rts heroes epithets & act like you didnt send em #NAACP101 about 16 hours ago via twidroidThe NAACP is holding its 101st anniversary convention in Kansas City this week. A resolution falsely accusing the Tea Party of being...

Democrats are reportedly planning to raise $125 million for a campaign to sell Obamacare to the voting public. Apparently, the idea is that what 50-plus presidential speeches and statements and months of congressional debate could not do can be done by spending $125 million on everything from TV ads to community organizers. Maybe. But there seems to be a more fundamental problem here. The Obama Democrats didn’t set out to produce an unpopular stimulus package, an unpopular health-care bill, and an unpopular cap-and-trade scheme. They thought these initiatives would be popular. In their view, history is a story of progress...

How far are environmentalists willing to go to exploit the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster? I have proof that they're gushing outright lies about "Big Oil".

Chicago Mayor Regrets "Up Your Butt" Comment Richard Daley, Wielding Gun, Told Reporter "If I Put This Up Your Butt, You'll Find Out How Effective It Is" (CBS 2 Chicago) Mayor Richard M. Daley said Friday that he regrets his choice of words when he suggested he'd stick a rifle with a bayonet up a reporter's "butt," but he said he was trying to "shock" the media into exposing gun manufacturers who flood the streets with firearms. "I want to shock you, maybe scare you, to realize this is serious," he said. Asked if he was sorry for how he...

Folks, our country is in big trouble. What kind of man do we have in the White House? President Obama is a Harvard-educated lawyer. Thus, since he attended such a renowned school, I can only conclude that Obama willfully and knowingly distorted/lied about the plight of Hispanic-Americans in Arizona and the state's immigration law when he said, "...but now suddenly if you don't have your papers, and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you're gonna be harassed, ..." Obama's statement simply is not true. The Arizona law goes into effect only after a subject has or is...

The passage of the Arizona immigration law and recent May Day protests have been weighing heavily on my mind. As a “Latino,” the circumstances of my heritage have no effect on my opinions with respect to this new law, though this may make many liberals very angry. They expect me to vote my skin color and forgo careful analysis. I am glad to disappoint them. As an American, I find this law to be somewhat worrisome. To start, the continual influx of illegal immigrants and the exploitation of our broken borders by international criminal elements may eventually lead to the...

With all of the hysteria and claims of “fascism” surrounding the illegal immigrant bill. I thought that a look at the actual legislation might be in order. I took the legislation from KYETLaw. The site appears to be non-partisan in nature. "B. For any lawful contact made by a law enforcement official or a law enforcement agency of this state or a law enforcement official or a law enforcement agency of a county, city, town or other political subdivision of this state where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States,...

A special report on militia groups and gun owners who support Second Amendment rights and the Constitutional concept of citizen militias is scheduled to be aired on a major news outlet this Thursday evening. The report has all the markings of a smear job due to the fact that its main source of information is the leftwing front group, the Southern Poverty Law Center. In a series of ads announcing the upcoming report, News Channel 7, WSPA-TV, which serves one of the top 30 television markets in America, states that 'militia groups are growing and they are even right here...

Instead of attending the funeral of the Polish leaders killed in last week’s plane crash, President Golden Calf has been instead busy with other things, including playing golf—he’s now played more rounds of golf in his year-and-a-half in office than that evil uncaring W did in all his eight years—and stumping for his Dem cronies like Barbara “Call me Senator” Boxer. He’s also taken the time to remind the American people of one of the leftocracy’s biggest lies of the 21st century: That our current economic crisis in general, and the housing crash in particular, was the fault of unfettered,...

With all the talk of “threats” and vandalism lately, the MSM has continued to repeat the talking points that the GOP and the Tea Parties and guilty of racial slurs, threatening government officials and breaking windows at Democratic offices (even ones that are 30 stories up!). Now, there are no videos of this (other than the one that showed that the Congressional Black Caucus was lying). There have been no arrests, but the MSM keeps going along without evidence, just like they did last summer. I would also be negligent if I omitted the violence at the 2008 GOP Convention....

If you can’t stand the heat, manufacture a hate-crime epidemic. After years of covering racial hoaxes on college campuses and victim sob stories in the public arena, I’ve encountered countless opportunists who live by that demented mindset. At best, the fakers are desperately seeking 15 minutes of infamy. At worst, their aim is the criminalization of political dissent. Upon decimating the deliberative process to hand President Obama a health care “reform” victory, unpopular Beltway Democrats and their media water-carriers now claim there’s a Tea Party epidemic of racism, harassment and violence against them. On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued...

IOWA CITY, Iowa (AFP) – US President Barack Obama Thursday launched a sales blitz for his historic health care reforms, as Democrats battled deep Republican anger to finish a set of fixes to the law. Obama returned on Air Force One to Iowa, the cradle of his 2008 campaign, to proclaim he had made good on the political change he promised, by enacting reforms dreamed of by Democrats for generations, but never realized until now. The president was also expected to take on Republicans as they seek to define the historic bill as a costly, big government power grab, in...

Now that the news media are finally being forced to admit that Iraq was a success, here are the top ten falsehoods liberals have used to destroy public support for this war.

Using tactics straight out Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has released a scathing report attempting to isolate and ridicule the Tea Party movement. Filled with leftist talking points and blanket statements, the SPLC report, “Rage On The Right: The Year in Hate and Extremism,” asserts Tea Party alignment to “Timothy McVeigh and Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph,” “hate groups,” “furious anti-immigrant vigilante groups,”and ”so-called ‘Patriot’ groups.” In the eyes of the SPLC, the average American citizen is “shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism.”

From People Weekly Magazine Edition April 26, 1999 The "Animal" chronicle, Page 117 "He's a little ball of fire" says U.S. Customs officer J.J. Trevino of Popsicle (Receiving a significant Seizure medal in March) During an arrest two years ago, Buffalo policeman Ron Clark, Jr. opened an abandoned freezer on a known drug dealer's back porch and found a bulging black garbage bag. "I poked my flashlight at it," he recalls, "and it started moving. My worst fear was that it was a baby." In fact, it was a puppy, a pit bull who would be known as Popsicle and...

Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s quest to piece together Abraham Lincoln’s complex life takes him from Illinois to Gettysburg to Washington, D.C., and face-to-face with people who live with Lincoln every day – relic hunters, re-enactors, and others for whom the study of Lincoln is a passion.

A reporter trying to question Massachusetts Senate candidate Martha Coakley was involved in a scuffle with one of her aides. John McCormack of the Weekly Standard fell Tuesday night as he tried to speak with the Democrat while simultaneously videotaping her and trying to pass a metal grate on a Washington sidewalk. Photos and video of the incident show Coakley aide Michael Meehan trying to help McCormack up. A scuffle broke out as Meehan tried to block McCormack and determine if he was an operative of a rival campaign. Coakley is seen ignoring McCormack. The trip prompted criticism, since Coakley...

Brrrrrr! Ignore the record shattering freezing weather surrounding you. Global Warming is happening. Please believe me. Oh, pretty please! That is pretty much the theme of an article by Michael McCarthy, the U.K. Independent environment writer. With this cold weather it must be tough to plead the case for global warming but McCarthy takes a desperate stab at it: You might think the current weather conditions are almost Siberian – and you'd be right. Britain's most prolonged spell of freezing weather since 1981 is being caused by a huge mass of intensely cold air over north-east Russia, with easterly winds...

As you start to read all this, you'll laugh at how incestuous it all gets. Let's start with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which as I've noted in the past is tied in with the Soros foundation. Together, the two worked on something called The Project on Death in America.(PDIA) http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2341083/posts And speaking of Mr Soros, he himself(his foundations) have given directly to NPR. Compared to some of the other numbers I'm seeing, it's a small amount of $250,000. But it doesn't matter. Soros money is soros money in my book. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2396058/posts Additional information about RWJF can be found here....

PORTLAND, Maine – A storm packing blustery winds and driving rain knocked out power to thousands of homes and businesses in the Northeast on Thursday before giving way to sunny skies and record high temperatures — all in the same morning.

While the left in the media and in Washington are ignoring the plain-as-day fact that Malik Hasan's religion was the major factor pertaining to his shooting up Ft. Hood, they are shuddering over the perceived risk of rising Islamophobia. What did Obama's DHS director Janet Napolitano do following the Ft. Hood shootings? She went to the United Arab Emirates and assured the Muslim world that she and her administration was doing everything in their power to thwart any American backlash against Muslims. She said “We object to, and do not believe, that anti-Muslim sentiment should emanate from this. This was...

The Left loves to talk about Sarah Palin's church, but not so much about its burning. And please don't mention to them that before he became president, Barack Obama sat in a church for 20 years while one of his mentors, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, preached Marxist Liberation Theology. As with all things, libs want to have it both ways. Like many other leftist hate sites, Planet of the Chimps 2 mocks Palin and Wasilla Assembly of God, a church she no longer attends: "One of the musical directors at the church, Adele Morgan, who has known Ms. Palin since the...