Free Republic

The fight for the House majority is over. At least that’s the sense from a growing number of Democrats who are increasingly confident in their quest to seize control of at least one chamber of Congress six weeks before Election Day. The surging optimism among Democrats, usually shared in private, has begun to spill into the open as President Donald Trump’s approval ratings sink and the Republican Party struggles under the weight of the president’s self-imposed political crises and erratic behavior. […] But with the shock of Trump’s 2016 victory still fresh, some Democrats are painfully aware that significant factors...

"Instead of open minds and lively debate, I found dogmatic progressive ideology and groupthink. One attendee told me that I, a former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer, am “no better than Roger Ailes” because my company aggregates both liberal and conservative commentaries and thereby is “pushing a right-wing agenda.” Someone else said: “Trump supporters are so stupid . . . they think the tax bill was a good deal because they got back—what, a few thousand a year?” I don’t claim to have the answers. I am, after all, a card-carrying member of the liberal elite. I went to high school...

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Dec. 29 (UPI) -- U.S. Vice President Joe Biden recently boasted that al-Qaida's core leadership in Pakistan could no longer mount 9/11-scale attacks on the United States. That may be so and probably was in the cards anyway. But al-Qaida's strategy now is to wage a "war of a thousand cuts" and inspire Islamist insurgencies wherever possible.

Around the dexterosphere, the question about the coming election seems to be whether it will be more like 1994 or 1894. Amidst the confident babble, Instapundit has made a trademark out of the whisper, “Don’t get cocky, kid.” It’s not just that cockiness enrages the gods and lacks social grace. This year, in particular, there are solid reasons to doubt that November 2nd will be nearly as happy a day as we hope: 1. It’s not enough to win; you have to win by more than the margin of fraud. That concern ought to be obvious in states like Illinois...

Let's posit that conservatives have every reason for optimism in the coming elections. The Tea Parties are enthusiastic and powerful. Middle America is fed up with big government. The left is dispirited. The polls looks great. It therefore would take a real wet blanket to warn that the momentum could fizzle and the triumph be less than grand. Sorry, but this blanket is wet indeed. Before we go any farther, please understand: This is not a prediction; it's a warning.

Homeowners 'Overconfident' About Home Values: Zillow By: Brittany Dunn 05/21/2010 In just one quarter, homeowners have gone from being overly cynical about the state of their own home’s value to being overly confident. According to the Q1 Homeowner Confidence Survey conducted by Seattle-based Zillow, 50 percent of homeowners nationwide believe their own home’s value declined in the past year. But in reality, 65 percent of U.S. homes have dropped in value in the last 12 months. This overconfidence brought Zillow’s Q1 2010 Home Value Misperception Index up to 5, a jump from -2 in the Q4 2009 index. Zillow said...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Just two days before the U.S. presidential election, Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden smells victory for Barack Obama. Speaking at Florida State University in Tallahassee, his first in a three-stop swing through the battleground state of Florida on Sunday, Biden pointed to a dramatic bronze statue entitled “Unconquered” outside the university’s stadium. “This is a great place to have this rally in front of the ‘Seminole Unconquered’. I tell you, I don’t think you ever approach this stadium without smelling victory in the air,” Biden said. The statue depicts a spear-brandishing Seminole Indian astride a rearing...

Kim’s overconfidence undermined by miscalculation By TAKUJI KAWATA IN AUGUST 2000, North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il said he wanted to use the country's missile development programme as a diplomatic bargaining chip. “I made it a (diplomatic) issue. The smaller a country is, the more proud it should be and the more strongly it should stand up against big countries,” he reportedly told an assemblage of South Korean media organisation presidents during a lunch meeting in Pyongyang. At the time, US President Bill Clinton's administration was drawing to a close. North Korea had dragged the United States into bilateral talks by...

The real danger for Republicans now isn't ethics; it is that, like those 1994 Democrats, they seem to have grown more comfortable presiding over the government than changing it. No one typified this more than Mr. DeLay, who has always been more fiercely partisan than he is conservative. Among the GOP House leaders who took power in 1994, Dick Armey was the genuine idea man. Mr. DeLay provided the political muscle of fund-raising and vote-counting.

The 13 Riskiest Housing Markets By Dave Lindorff If your hometown is on this list, the value of your house may be in jeopardy. The real estate bug bit Karen Brodie a few years ago. She left her desk job as an accountant with Fidelity Investments in 2001 and teamed up with a cousin to buy a single-family house in the Boston suburb of Dorchester for $98,000. After spending $50,000 to upgrade the house, the pair sold it a year later for $278,000. Now Brodie and her cousin have expanded their operation to include two pricier three-unit buildings in Dorchester...

U.S. and British leaders have started to lose their tempers because of the tough Iraqi resistance against their invasion of the Arab country and this might prompt them to destroy Baghdad, according to Egypt's former defence minister. Marshal Abdul Halim Abu Ghazala said overconfidence was the coalition's biggest mistake in the invasion of Iraq and expected Iraq's elite Republican Guard forces to fight to death in their defence of Baghdad against the advancing allied troops. Writing in Arabic newspapers yesterday, Abu Ghazala said the U.S. had made a serious mistake when it thought it would easily crush Iraq as it...