Free Republic

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, Luke 4:18 What if everything the Republican Party knows about elections is false? Our little group out in Oregon has been doing everything against the established methods and finding our methods win elections. In a Blue Tide which swept the Dems back into power in the state we not only won elections but won them in bigger margins than...

As we look back on the past year, we conclude that 2012 is a year that will go down in infamy.For the first time in history, the government has attempted to force Americans to pay for the ending of human life – even if abortion violates their religious beliefs.The issue came to a head this summer when the ObamaCare abortion pill mandate was scheduled to go into effect. The mandate forces employers to provide health insurance coverage that includes abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization. And many employers are compelled to provide these in spite of their sincerely held religious beliefs...

From SocGen: The scaled-down deal passed in the Senate addressed the fiscal cliff but did nothing to address longer term fiscal health of the nation. This puts the US rating at risk for a downgrade. However, credit rating agencies may decide to wait and see what emerges from the subsequent talks. There is an implicit new cliff at the end of February related to the sequester and to the expected exhaustion of extraordinary measures related to the debt ceiling. This date is expected to be used by Republicans as leverage for spending cuts. President Obama has already signaled that a...

“At least 20 House Republican members have gotten together, discussed this and want to unseat Speaker Boehner--and are willing to do what it takes to do it,” Meyer said. “That’s more than enough to get the job done, but the one problem these guys face is they need a leader to coalesce behind.” Meyer said the conservatives have considered House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) to take the helm after Boehner is knocked out. His opposition from the right to the Senate fiscal cliff deal that Vice President Joe Biden cut with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is a sign...

"Go f— yourself," Boehner repeated. Politico reports on the exchange: House Speaker John Boehner couldn’t hold back when he spotted Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in the White House lobby last Friday. It was only a few days before the nation would go over the fiscal cliff, no bipartisan agreement was in sight, and Reid had just publicly accused Boehner of running a “dictatorship” in the House and caring more about holding onto his gavel than striking a deal. “Go f— yourself,” Boehner sniped as he pointed his finger at Reid, according to multiple sources present. Reid, a bit startled,...

Congress has drastically trimmed the budget for U.S. spies and satellites for 2013, though not quite as deeply as the White House wanted. In one of the last votes of the year, House lawmakers voted Monday 373-29 in favor of a Senate-passed bill to slightly boost the president’s $72 billion budget request for intelligence agencies including the CIA, adding extra cash for the counterterrorism fight against al-Qaida, and the counterintelligence fight against foreign governments trying to spy on the U.S. … The bill was stripped of several measures meant to block the leaking of classified information, including a provision that...

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez is in an induced coma being kept alive by life support following complications during cancer surgery, it was claimed today. Sources at the hospital in Cuba where he is being treated told a Spanish newspaper he was showing 'very weak' vital signs, adding that doctors could decide to switch off the machines 'at any moment'. With rumours swirling that Chavez had taken a turn for the worse, Venezuela's Vice President Nicolas Maduro said the ailing president's condition remains 'delicate' three weeks after his cancer surgery. He did not provide further information about the president's condition and...

Japan's government is to take the unprecedented step of buying factories and machinery directly with taxpayer funds, the latest in a series of radical steps to lift the country out of its deep slump. Premier Shenzo Abe is to spend up to one trillion yen (£7.1bn) buying plant in the electronics, equipment, and carbon fibre industries to force the pace of investment, according to Nikkei news. The disclosure came just a day after Mr Abe vowed to revive Japan's nuclear industry with a fresh generation of reactors, insisting that they would be "completely different" from the Fukishima Daiichi technology.

On the One Hand… These should not be foreboding years. The U.S. is in the midst of a veritable energy revolution. There is a godsend of new gas and oil discoveries that will help to curtail our fiscal and foreign policy vulnerabilities — an energy bonanza despite, not because of, the present administration. Demographically, our rivals — the EU, China, Russia, and Japan — are both shrinking and aging at rates far in excess of our own. In terms of farming, the United States is exporting more produce than ever before at record prices. Americans eat the safest and cheapest...

Neither Congress nor the White House has proved itself capable of reaching a decision on how to begin trimming the $16.5 trillion national debt with which these two institutions have saddled the American taxpayers. They even have been unable to come up with a reasonable measure to avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff” they themselves constructed months ago. Yet, when it comes to expanding the power of the government to spy on American citizens without warrants, both the House and the Senate last week fairly tripped over themselves in a rush to pass legislation doing just that; with President Obama...

In 2013, conservatives can offer no greater tribute of respect to our Founding Fathers and our fellow citizens than to resolve, from this day forward, to relentlessly expose, ridicule, deride, mock and publicly shame arrogant progressives in a manner that, for the first time in our adult lifetimes, communicates this one undeniable founding truth: America was never supposed to be this way. The progressive left's ultimate weapon of choice in emasculating America's strength has clearly and undeniably been outed as radical debt accumulation. Progressives have masterfully promoted the toxic falsehood that infinite government money, services, and benefits exist simply for...

The roll call that gave Obama a Triumph. Check out the other GOP Traitors who voted with Boner to screw the American Public and give Obama a victory.

Someone is running amok at C-SPAN, the nonprofit network where political junkies get their kicks watching the inner workings of Congress. In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, as most of the country partied away the first few hours of the 2013, anyone who was watching C-SPAN at 1:27 a.m., breathlessly waiting for the Senate to pass a deal on the fiscal cliff, would have seen a somewhat odd caption over Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin: “Just Plain Dick.” The caption was memorialized by Erin Skinner Cochran on Twitter, and reported by Jim Romenesko on his media blog.

SALINAS, Calif. - Monterey County's first baby of 2013 was born at Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital at 12:06 on Tuesday morning. Mom and baby are doing well. Marisol Fernandez from Soledad delivered her 7lbs-13oz baby girl, named Maytte Arciga Fernandez. The father, Ernesto Fernandez, who is a dentist practicing in Mexico, witnessed the birth via mobile phone video conferencing.

At the White House once I was regaling him with local news from Champaign (which he was always ready to hear), and I said, 'Blank is dead; his extremely disloyal sentiments so provoked his neighbors that there was serious talk of inflicting vengeance on him, and he was found dead in bed—caused largely by fright.' This man was an old Whig friend of Lincoln, but the reason of his exit from life's trials amused him. His comment was, 'He died, then, to save his life, it seems.'"- Lincoln's Own Stories, Anthony Gross, HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON,...

Never mind the "fiscal cliff." America went bankrupt, technically, at midnight on December 31, 2012. We hit the debt ceiling of $16.394 trillion. Yet the U.S. government needs to borrow more money than is legally allowed. So Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is now juggling federal accounts via questionable extraordinary measures to squeeze out perhaps two more months. Uncle Sam has maxed out his credit cards. More than ever before, America now faces national ruin unless political leaders cut federal spending. However, Washington no longer understands what budget cuts are. Simply trim a few percent from every program -- here a...

Whatever ultimately emerges from the fiscal-cliff negotiations over the past 48 hours, the country will survive. But the damage can't be undone. Taxes are going up for all working Americans. And so is the size of government. Businesses have been waiting to see whether a second Obama administration will encourage the economy. During the fiscal-cliff negotiations, however, the president made clear that his goal isn't to get business going again but instead to expand government and redistribute income. He offered no real spending cuts and instead used the year-end deadline to divide America into classes—to the point of campaigning on...

You’ve got to admire the “ethics” of the Occupy Wall Street crowd. All that looking out for the humble 99 percent while going after the evil 1 percent must be exhausting. Thank goodness, then, for the 1.5 percenters who are actually in charge of the Occupy movement and put in the work to bring about the sort of change that’s so needed in this country. A couple of Occupiers were doing just that recently when “the man” nabbed them and charged them with making bombs and hoarding weapons. Morgan Gliedman and Aaron Greene were busted at their Greenwich Village apartment...

Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shootings, said: "The British are not coming. ... We don't need all these guns to kill people." Lewis' vision, shared by many, represents a gross ignorance of why the framers of the Constitution gave us the Second Amendment. How about a few quotes from the period and you decide whether our Founding Fathers harbored a fear of foreign tyrants. Alexander Hamilton: "The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed," adding later, "If the representatives of the people betray their constituents,...

While the tax package that Congress passed New Year’s Day will protect 99 percent of Americans from an income tax increase, most of them will still end up paying more federal taxes in 2013. That’s because the legislation did nothing to prevent a temporary reduction in the Social Security payroll tax from expiring. In 2012, that 2-percentage-point cut in the payroll tax was worth about $1,000 to a worker making $50,000 a year. The Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan Washington research group, estimates that 77 percent of American households will face higher federal taxes in 2013 under the agreement negotiated...