Free Republic

Somewhere in our president's short inaugural address last week (it only seemed long), our newly re-elected chief executive paused to deliver a pious little sermon on the evils of name-calling -- and for good measure, the evils of delay, spectacle and absolutism, too. The Rev. Obama crammed all those sins into a couple of sentences that might have passed for a mini-homily from some less-gifted televangelist: "For now decisions are upon us, and we cannot afford delay. We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate." Well said, at least for an...

On Tuesday, January 29th, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will hold a Global Townterview at the Newseum in Washington, DC. This will be Secretary Clinton’s 59th town hall and an opportunity to engage with young people around the world in advance of her last day as Secretary of State on Friday, February 1st.

RICHMOND, Va. A humble 5-cent coin with a storied past is headed to auction and bidding is expected to top $2 million a century after it was mysteriously minted. The 1913 Liberty Head nickel is one of only five known to exist, but it's the coin's back story that adds to its cachet: It was surreptitiously and illegally cast, discovered in a car wreck that killed its owner, declared a fake, forgotten in a closet for decades and then found to be the real deal. It all adds up to an expected sale of $2.5 million or more when it...

David Cameron says UK will support French mission to drive Islamists out but insists forces will not engage in combat Britain is prepared to take the risk of sending a "sizeable amount" of troops to Mali and neighbouring West African countries as David Cameron offers strong support to France in its operation to drive Islamist militants from its former colony. As news emerged that insurgents retreating from Timbuktu had set fire to a library containing thousands of priceless historic manuscripts, Downing Street said the prime minister told François Hollande on Sunday night Britain was "keen" to provide further military assistance...

National Officers: Rex W. Tillerson Irving, Texas President Tico A. Perez Orlando, Florida National Commissioner Aubrey B. Harwell Jr. Nashville, Tennessee Treasurer R. Thomas Buffenbarger Upper Marlboro, Maryland Assistant Treasurer James S. Turley New York, New York International Commissioner Terrence P. Dunn Kansas City, Missouri Vice President— Council Operations Wayne M. Perry Bellevue, Washington President-Elect Randall L. Stephenson Dallas, Texas Vice President—Finance Lyle R. Knight Billings, Montana Vice President—Human Resources Nathan O. Rosenberg Laguna Beach, California Vice President—Marketing Jack D. Furst Dallas, Texas Vice President— Outdoor Adventures O. Temple Sloan Jr. Raleigh, North Carolina Vice President—Supply Earl G. Graves New...

When, in the 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev said, "We will bury you," and, "Your children will live under communism," Eisenhower's America scoffed. By 1980, however, the tide did indeed seem to be with the East. America had suffered a decade of defeats. Southeast Asia had fallen. The ayatollah had seized power in Iran. Moscow had occupied Afghanistan. Cuban troops were in Ethiopia and Angola. Grenada and Nicaragua had fallen to the Soviet bloc. Eurocommunism was all the rage on the continent. Just a decade later, the world turned upside-down. The Berlin Wall fell. Eastern Europe was suddenly free. The Soviet Union...

The Good News is that the Progressive ideology is insufficient to animate government for long after it has come into its own full flowering. It only can sustain itself temporarily and parasitically on a healthy organism before it succeeds in crippling its host and breeding intense enmity. I believe it so deficient a vision that I categorically state that it will soon come crashing down in America, as is occurring everywhere on earth. The nagging problem is that the entrenched Progressive ideology is tightly bound in a bastard amalgam of anti-theism and the rejection of the old moral order. Therefore,...

1) SELF: Political survival is much more important than doing what's right for the country. In representative government, it's much more important to do what is popular to ensure that I get re-elected, even if my vote subverts the constitution and leads to the eventual demise of the country. At least I got mine. I need media attention and may take a seemingly tough stance on certain issues (that I really don't believe) in, and I will back down at the last minute so I can claim that I was on the right side of the issue, depending on to...

For generations, presidents have used their inaugural address to unite the nation in aspiring to new heights of achievement. But earlier this week President Obama chose to deliver a harshly ideological, aggressively partisan speech more appropriate for the campaign trail than the solemn occasion of our nation's 57th inaugural address. Rather than bring all Americans together with a celebration of common ground, his address read like a liberal laundry list with global warming at the top. Although President Obama was sworn in with his hand on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible, he did not echo the tone of unity for which Lincoln...

In a newsworthy act of political cowardice, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta ran through the Pentagon's exit door as he announced he is striking down the 1994 Combat Exclusion Law. His timing means his successor, presumably Chuck Hagel, will inherit the task of defending the order to assign women to front-line military combat. Of course, Panetta doesn't want to be grilled about his order. It's lacking in common sense and it is toadying to the feminist officers who yearn to be 3- and 4-star generals based on the feminist dogma of gender interchangeability and on their desire to force men...

To understand leftism, the most dynamic religion of the last hundred years, you have to understand how the left thinks. The 2013 inaugural address of President Barack Obama provides one such opportunity. --"What makes us exceptional -- what makes us American -- is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'" What American does not resonate to a...

Higher Education: A new study finds almost half of Americans with college degrees are working at jobs that don't require one. It's the latest example of how federal subsidies are creating a massive higher-education bubble. The study, by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, found that an incredible 48% of college graduates — about 13 million of them — hold jobs that don't require a bachelor's degree. About 5 million have jobs that don't even require a high school diploma. There are, for example, roughly a million sales clerks, 300,000 waiters and 100,000 janitors with college degrees. This mismatch...

Overall union membership dropped by about 400,000 members from 2011 to 2012, a decline of 11.8 to 11.3 percent of the U.S. workforce. But the worst news for union leaders is where the decline occurred: in what had been their only growth sector, government workers. More than half of the loss came among government workers. The majority of union members are now government workers and government workers have a union membership rate of 37 percent, about five times higher than the private sector. An irony for private-sector labor unions has always been that their larger ideological aims of protecting workers...

Call The Rush Limbaugh Show program line between 12 Noon and 3PM Eastern Time at: 1-800-282-2882 E-mail Rush: ElRushbo@eibnet.com Fax Rush at: 212-445-3963 Write a letter to Rush and mail it to: The Rush Limbaugh Show 1270 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 Join This Ping List Now! Click Here To Join this Ping List! Image by Cool Text: Free Logos and Buttons - Create An Image Just Like ThisBecause I have to be out all the morning and early afternoon, need to set the Rush thread early so you can have this thread for early this afternoon....

Some political commentators are dancing on what they believe to be the grave of the Republican Party, claiming that the only way the GOP can have a viable future is for them to behave like Democrats. Last weekend, National Review magazine sponsored a "conservative summit" in Washington. They should have held it elsewhere. Prior to speaking at that event, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal addressed the Republican National Committee's annual winter meeting in Charlotte, N.C., where he proposed a new strategy for Republicans and conservatives that begins, not in Washington, but at the state level. Jindal said the Republican Party...

It's a classic MSM tactic: delegitimize opposition to a liberal proposal. Suggest that there can be no principled objections, only base motives. Take the current proposals on "the pathway to citizenship"—AKA amnesty—being floated. On today's Morning Joe, Politico co-founder and executive editor Jim VandeHei proclaimed that it was probably "the right thing to do," but fretted that it would be easy to "demagogue." View the video here.

The Land of Enchantment is a physically beautiful land indeed, yet one with the misfortune to be so traditionally misgoverned by our liberal Democrat majority as to be relegated too frequently to the very lowest rankings of the states when it comes to poverty, education, health, etc. Once in a while, however, we do find something besides our majestic landscapes to be proud of. A statement just issued by the New Mexico Sheriffs' Association and signed by 29 of 33 county sheriffs, declaring that their oaths of office don't require them to enforce federal laws they consider unconstitutional, provides New...

It isn't often that you get reading suggestions from a United States senator, but that's what happened this past weekend for those who attended the National Review Institute's summit meeting in Washington, D.C. The three-day conclave, part election post-mortem and part revival meeting (that is, reviving conservatism and America), featured a bracing dose of conservative intellectuals along with activists, campaign professionals and office holders. Newly minted Senator Ted Cruz of Texas spoke in his characteristic fashion -- fluidly without notes or podium. Cruz, while praising Mitt Romney in general and acknowledging that anyone can have a slip of the tongue,...

A group of Hillary Clinton supporters is launching a campaign to draft her to run for president — the first major push from an outside group for her to run. The group, “Ready for Hillary,” filed as a super-PAC with the Federal Election Commission late last week and plans to roll out a website in the coming weeks. It has already been active online, with nearly 50,000 Twitter followers and almost 30,000 people following the group on Facebook. The effort is being spearheaded by Allida Black and Judy Beck, two longtime Clinton supporters who were on Clinton’s Virginia Women’s Steering...

The hypocrisy of the government knows no bounds. I have said repeatedly, and continue to say, that I am against all gun control at the moment because our government is extremely violent and not only do I not expect it to protect the American people in general, I believe it is far more concerned with protecting the status quo from the people. It has become crystal clear that the political and financial oligarchs are quite intentionally attempting to disarm the populace while arming themselves to the teeth in anticipation of some horrible economic event they know is inevitable. From The...