Free Republic

On Monday, first lady Michelle Obama swooped in to Milwaukee to help reinvigorate a struggling Mary Burke for governor campaign. Weighed down by accusations that her staff plagiarized large portions of her jobs plan, Burke called upon Obama to do a little cheerleading for the Democratic base. "We need to be just as passionate and as hungry as we were back in 2008 and 2012," Obama told the crowd. "They're assuming we won't be organized and energized. And only we can prove them wrong." Well, not quite. Perhaps the first lady can be forgiven for not following Wisconsin politics that...

Kansas Tea Party supporters are threatening to sit out the state’s pivotal Senate election, potentially dealing another blow to the reelection hopes of Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.). Though schisms within the GOP base rarely have such an outsized impact on a general election contest, the lack of support from the conservative base could be devastating to the vulnerable Roberts’s chances against surging independent Greg Orman. Multiple sources tell The Hill that a group of Tea Party leaders in the state are meeting Wednesday to try to decide whether they should go to bat for the incumbent this fall or sit...

...By all logic, we should be working to sustain the boom. We aren’t, and therein lies a classic example of how good policy is held hostage to bad politics and public relations. What would promote continued exploration is a lifting of the current U.S. ban on exporting crude oil. Let producers sell into the world market. But that seems (wrongly) an unjustified giveaway to industry. The public perceptions are atrocious. Hardly anyone expected the oil boom, with some notable exceptions — prominently Harold Hamm, who pioneered North Dakota’s Bakken field. “Fracking” (the injection of pressurized water into fields to make...

SHENANDOAH, Texas - A quick-thinking, local police officer protected a string of drivers from a car going the wrong way on the highway. Shenandoah police Sgt. Gary Sharpen started zig-zagging back and fourth on Interstate 45 northbound when the Montgomery County Sheriff's deputies called saying there was a driver headed the wrong way against traffic Friday night.

The information leaked by Edward Snowden last year raised the public consciousness quite a bit about user privacy and security in using certain services (not to mention the hope that companies won’t be that willing to acquiesce to government requests for user information). In recent weeks, Apple CEO Tim Cook has been emphasizing a new focus on user security and encryption. Both Apple and Google have implemented stronger data encryption so it’s harder to compromise user data. The problem is, however, that it would be harder for law enforcement to access that data too. And FBI Director James Comey isn’t...

In his first inaugural address, Obama promised that "those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account." Maybe he'll get around to that after his 200th round of golf.

On Tuesday, Rosie O'Donnell, the obnoxious 9/11 truther who has made her share of racist comments, thinks that a 15-yard penalty against Kansas City Chiefs safety Husain Abdullah for a Muslim prayer in the end zone on Monday night is reflective of a systemic anti-Muslim bias that can propel the country to war.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEjqRLjP7Io "You are not Mary's cause and you are certainly not her charity. You are just a vote - nothing less, nothing more. You are just a means to an end, so that she remains in power."

Just heard on the radio (WBAP) that a family member of the man with Ebola is now sick with the stuff.

After Kansas City Chiefs safety Husain Abdullah was penalized for "going to the ground" and engaging in an Islamic prayer after returning a Tom Brady interception for a touchdown on Monday Night Football, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) pressured the NFL to "clarify its policies" on "unsportsmanlike conduct" penalties.

Glenn Beck presented a theory Tuesday about why the United States bombed targets from the Khorasan group last week, saying it’s possible that the United States did it to help prop up the Iranian government in return for increased cooperation from Iran’s leaders. “It is a theory, but remember, my theory was that you were being lied to in great detail on Benghazi,” Beck said on his television program. “I think this is going to fall in the same thing. I have an answer that nobody else does. [But] I want you to know again, it is a theory.” Beck...

".....Why wasn’t the White House, which knew for months that Eric H. Holder Jr. was itching to leave, ready to roll with a successor? More important, given Holder’s foot inching toward the door, why did it not time this departure more intelligently — rather than having it arrive just before an election and the prospect of Democrats losing control of the Senate? Once again, this being baseball playoff season, can’t anybody here play this game? After six years, apparently not. These questions matter not because of what they tell us about the Holder situation but because of what they say...

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 THE NEWS OF THE WEEK IN REVIEW18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

A top Boeing official criticized Congress on Tuesday for failing to pass a long-term reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank. He also argued that an extension of the Bank’s charter until next summer leaves supporters in a worse position than they were in before. “Mostly far-right political consultants, think tanks and congressmen banded together in a fit of ideological road rage to kill the bank,” Boeing senior vice president Timothy Keating said in prepared remarks at an aerospace conference in Everett, Wash. “The temporary extension recently enacted in many respects leaves us worse off than before,” Keating continued. “The extension is...

p>Government beneficence is mostly a myth based on the following assumptions: It is necessary.It is good.It makes outcomes better than they otherwise would be. Point number one, the necessity of government, is true up to a point. There is arguably some limited set of functions that might better be performed jointly rather than separately. Extreme libertarians believe otherwise, suggesting there is virtually no role for government. Our Founders disagreed and provided for a quite limited role in the founding documents. The second two conditions, at least given what our government does today, are increasingly disputed by those who look at...

Last week, President Obama spoke to the United Nations about the growing threat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. In the course of that speech, he discussed a wide variety of threats to Western civilization, ranging from Ebola to global warming, from chaos in Syria to China’s incursions in the South China Sea. The speech seemed unfocused, meandering. But it held together thanks to one common thread: Barack Obama believes that words solve everything. Particularly his own.Obama’s narcissism isn’t mere arrogance. It’s messianism. It’s pure faith that his verbiage can alter the course of history. “We are here,”...

Unlike his predecessor, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani does not talk of wiping Israel off the map or claim that homosexuality does not exist in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Yet, what he told the world from the podium of the UN General Assembly last week, and in an interview with CNN during his stay US stay, was no less shameless and false than the outrageous comments of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the man who occupied the Iranian presidency just before. Since his election in June last year, Iranians and the world have watched Rouhani with cautious optimism. They have been waiting to...

Two Taliban suicide bombers hit army buses in Kabul on Wednesday with initial reports of six people killed in the twin attack, police said, one day after the new Afghan government signed a deal for U.S. troops to stay in the country. The Taliban, who strongly opposed the U.S. agreement, claimed responsibility for the two early-morning attacks on vehicles carrying military employees to work in the capital. “There have been two suicide attacks targeting buses carrying Afghan national army personnel,” Farid Afzali, chief of the city’s police investigation department, told AFP. “Initial reports say six military people and civilians were...

Activists say ISIS militants have beheaded nine Kurdish fighters, including three women, captured in clashes near the Syria-Turkey border. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Wednesday that the nine Kurds were captured during fighting over the northern Syrian town of Kobani, also known as Ayn Arab. There have been fierce clashes around Kobani since mid-September, when ISIS launched an assault to seize the area. The Observatory also says that dozens of militants and Kurdish fighters were killed in clashes overnight.

Navy sailors harbor “widespread mistrust” in the admirals who command them, complaining of poor leadership and a disciplinary environment that tolerates absolutely no mistakes, says a survey of the fleet. The disgruntlement runs deepest in the officer corps, where scores of commanders have been relieved of duty in recent years.