Free Republic

Damascus, year three of the civil war: The 4th Division of the Syrian army has entrenched itself on Kassioun Mountain, the place where Cain is said to have slain his brother Abel. United Nations ballistics experts say the poison gas projectiles that landed in the Damascus suburbs of Muadamiya and Ain Tarma in the morning hours of Aug. 21, 2013 were fired from somewhere up on the mountain. Some 1,400 people died in the attack -- 1,400 of the more than 100,000 people who have lost their lives since the beginning of the conflict. ........................................................ That, though, is likely only...

Two “Middle Eastern soldiers” training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri were arrested for trying to abduct a 12 year-old local girl for sex.KHOU reported, via Free Republic: Two men training at Fort Leonard Wood are in custody after deputies say they tried to abduct a 12-year-old girl in Pulaski County Friday afternoon.Mohammed Mahmoud Omar Mefleh, 34, and Antoine Clela, 31, were charged with enticement of a child and harassment.The victim told police she was playing with a sibling in her yard when Mefleh and Clela approached her several times and tried to lure her into their vehicle. She told...

Despite his ongoing campaign to promote his economic agenda, President Obama is having trouble persuading the country that his policies are helping the middle class. The latest Monmouth University poll finds that a plurality of Americans think Wall Street and other elites have been served better than the middle class by the president. Only 12 percent of Americans said middle class families have greatly benefited from Obama's policies, while 46 percent said they haven't benefited at all and an additional 39 percent say they have benefited only a "little." [READ: GOP Strategist: Obama in a 'World of Hurt'] There is...

First, the middle class organizer-in-chief was channeling the TOTUS from Knox College in Illinois. He sounded very persuasive and his speech had all the right accents and dramatic pauses.  Then, the TOTUS used its now traditional presidential vessel to deliver even more remarks in Jacksonville, Florida.  The speech was full of climaxes and denouements, protagonists and antagonists, and applause and laughter breaks interspersed with virtuoso precision. Today, the wealth redistributor par excellence came to us live from an Amazon warehouse in Chattanooga, TN where with dramatically rolled-up sleeves, Obama praised a vision of a full-time middle class to a fulfillment center...

Three hundred US Marines have been deployed to northern Jordan to pave the way for the West to arm Syrian rebels. A Patriot anti-aircraft missile system, designed to protect Jordanian territory from attack by Assad missiles, has also been moved into the area.

BALTIMORE — President Obama insisted Friday that he is focused on improving the lives of middle-class Americans, despite being buffeted in Washington by a trio of controversies that have threatened to distract him from his second-term agenda. Capping one of the most difficult weeks of his tenure, Obama left the Beltway for this city 40 miles north to try to change the subject from the problems of his administration and refocus attention on his efforts to create middle-class jobs. He toured an elementary school, manufacturing plant

Mithal Al-Alusi, whose two sons were killed in a Baghdad ambush soon after he visited Israel, tells The Times of Israel he feels betrayed by the superpower which allowed him to return to his homeland Mithal Al-Alusi is angry. He is angry with Iran for supporting global terrorism. He is angry with Syrian President Bashar Assad for oppressing and killing his own people. He is angry with his own prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq, for colluding with the two. But most of all, he is angry with US President Barack Obama for allowing this all to happen. “Obama has...

The good news: Initial jobless claims declined to 332,000 for the most recent week ending March 9. The expectations were for an increase to 350,000. The bad news: Initial jobless claims are back to where we were in March 2012. Remember, there are still 12,032,000 unemployment people in the USA. And we are back to the peak of the Carter-era recession. Continuing jobless claims fell as well. But this time it is back to the end of March 2012 levels. In terms of occupational growth rates, mid-wage growth remains negative leaving growth in only high-wage and low-wage occupations. Ah, the...

Obama Breaks Promise to Not Raise Taxes on the Middle Class. The headline news from the recent deal to avert the fiscal cliff is that Congress is raising tax rates on wealthy individuals for the first time in nearly two decades. Less noticed is something that may be equally momentous: Congress just raised taxes on the middle class as well.virtually every worker will still get a smaller paycheck in 2013, because of another tax measure that expired. Beginning in 2009, Congress cut the payroll tax—which helps finance Social Security—to put a bit of extra spending money in workers' pockets. The...

Why? It's a question the media never asks because they know the answer and they work furiously to obfuscate and cover up the why and the who. Everywhere Islam goes, everything and everyone must submit or .... die. Dhimmitude may be percevied as a third choice, but it is merely a slow and painful death. And all these churches and synagogues twinning with mosques. Why aren't these Pastors and Rabbis addressing with with Islamic clergy. Because these quislings are afraid to speak the truth. "Christianity 'close to extinction' in Middle East" Telegraph Christianity faces being wiped out of the “biblical...

This article is the first in a two-part series on social assistance in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region based on data collected for the forthcoming World Bank MENA flagship report, "Inclusion and Resilience: The Way Forward for Social Safety Nets in the Middle East and North Africa." WASHINGTON, D.C. -- At least eight in 10 adults in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Tunisia say their respective governments should bear the primary responsibility for helping the poor in their countries, according to a forthcoming World Bank MENA flagship report. Far fewer residents identified other social actors, such as religious...

Obama has staked out a very dogmatic and inflexible position on class-warfare tax hikes and he obviously wants all of us to think only the “rich” will be impacted. I think it’s foolish to penalize investors, entrepreneurs, small business owners and other upper-income taxpayers. What nation, after all, has ever prospered by placing obstacles in front of those who create jobs? France? Don’t make me laugh.But I’m also amazed that anyone believes Obama isn’t going to screw the middle class as well. The simple reality is that there aren’t enough rich people to finance big government.There are some honest folks...

The scandal engulfing two of our top military and intelligence officers could not be coming at a worse time: the Middle East has never been more unstable and closer to multiple, interconnected explosions. Virtually every American president since Dwight Eisenhower has had a Middle Eastern country that brought him grief. For Ike, it was Lebanon’s civil war and Israel’s Sinai invasion. For Lyndon Johnson, it was the 1967 Six-Day War. For Nixon, it was the 1973 war. For Carter, it was the Iranian Revolution. For Ronald Reagan, it was Lebanon. For George H.W. Bush, it was Iraq. For Bill Clinton,...

New Yorkers love to complain about how expensive their city is, but a new study reveals that the Big Apple is more affordable for middle class families than places like Cincinnati, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan, or Portland, Oregon. New York is the tenth most affordable major city for middle-income homes -- thanks to high median incomes and the city's expansive transportation system, according to a report by the Center for Housing Policy and Center for Neighborhood Technology. New York wasn't the only surprise on the list. The most affordable city, according to the study, was Washington, DC, which is another notoriously...

Democrats have been saying — or, in the case of Joe Biden, trying to say — that Mitt Romney plans to raise taxes on the middle class. This claim is flatly untrue. The word “lie” probably is thrown around too casually in our politics, but this qualifies. Romney has no such plan, has forsworn taking such a course of action, and has in fact proposed to cut tax rates for the middle class — and everybody else who pays the federal income tax — by reducing all brackets by 20 percent. Romney’s plan would be revenue-neutral, making up for forgone...

Despite repeated promises that he would build prosperity from the bottom up, President Obama has presided over three years of income losses for the middle class, according to the latest household income data from the Census Bureau. Since 2009, the middle 20% of American households saw their average incomes drop 4%. In 2011 alone, they fell 1.7%. The poorest 20% have fared even worse under Obama, Census data show. Their incomes have dropped more than 7% since 2009, and are now lower than they've been at any time since 1985, after adjusting for inflation.

Overall, Obama leads Romney by just 3 points on the ballot (50 percent to 47 percent)–which before we rounded up, is actually a 2.6 point lead and only up a half-a-percentage point from the 2.1 point lead for Obama in our last Battleground poll in early August. In our latest POLITICO-George Washington University Battleground Poll with middle-class families,which comprise about 54 percent of the total American electorate and usually split in their vote behavior between Republicans and Democrats, Romney holds a 14-point advantage (55 percent to 41 percent). Middle-class families are more inclined to believe the country is on the...

It is one thing for tungsten-filled gold bars to appear in the UK, or in Germany: after all out of sight, and across the Atlantic, certainly must mean out of mind, and out of the safe. However, when a 10 ounce 999.9 gold bar bearing the stamp of the reputable Swiss Produits Artistiques Métaux Précieux (PAMP, with owner MTP) and a serial number (serial #038892, likely rehypothecated in at least 10 gold ETFs across the world but that's a different story), mysteriously emerges in the heart of the world's jewerly district located on 47th street in Manhattan, things get real...

This is why Pew found that "85% of self-described middle-class adults say it is more difficult now than it was a decade ago for middle-class people to maintain their standard of living." We're working just as hard as in years past, but we're behind the 8-ball because for most of the country, wages are not even set to meet the cost of living. Indeed, some of us are closer to being poor than middle class and don't know it. The 2011 middle class median income started at $39,418 for a family of three. Yet Pew found some families making less...

The Obama administration is taking steps it hopes will force Iran to reconsider almost stalemated nuclear negotiations - and forestall an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. So begins the lead article in the Labor Day edition of the New York Times, and part of that article is a repeat of the litany we've all become used to in the White House attempts to explain just how President Obama "has Israel's back" in the face of an Iran rapidly developing the capability to create nuclear weaponry and repeatedly stating it's deep desire to "wipe Israel off the face of the...