Free Republic

How lame is the energy bill that Speaker Nancy Pelosi had her House Democrats pass through the House on Tuesday? Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu said before the vote that Pelosi's handiwork would be "dead on arrival" in the Senate. This from a Democrat who's up for re-election in an oil-and-gas state that would seem to gain from the bill's much-ballyhooed expansion of offshore drilling? What gives? For starters, Landrieu knows that the limited drilling the House leadership allows in principle -- it opens up waters 50 miles from shore with state approval -- is made next to impossible in practice....

GOP candidates, convention steer clear of immigration BY REID J. EPSTEIN reid.epstein@newsday.com September 8, 2008 During the Republican presidential primary, immigration was such an important topic that candidates were tripping over each other to be seen as the toughest defender of the nation's borders. The issue became so hot that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the GOP presidential nominee, was forced to disavow his own immigration reform bill because it was seen by many Republicans as too lenient. But a parade of Republicans came to the convention podium in St. Paul last week with barely a mention of immigration. On Wednesday...

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) pauses during a ceremony in Janusz Korczak Square at Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, July 23, 2008. Obama began a visit to Jerusalem on Wednesday pledging staunch support for Israel and saying that if elected, he would work to reinvigorate the Middle East peace process. REUTERS/Jim Young (JERUSALEM) US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION CAMPAIGN 2008 (USA

This weblog does not belong to the Media Bloggers Association. This weblog had never heard of the Media Bloggers Association until yesterday, when the Associated Press made an announcement: AP to meet with blogging group to form guidelines The Associated Press, following criticism from bloggers over an AP assertion of copyright, plans to meet this week with a bloggers’ group to help form guidelines under which AP news stories could be quoted online. Jim Kennedy, the AP’s director of strategic planning, said Monday that he planned to meet Thursday with Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association, as part...

In a time when tele-evangelists seem to inundate the airwaves with their own cable channels and are just another stop in an evening's channel surfing, it's easy to forget an earlier time, when revival meetings were as exciting as the circus coming to town, and evangelists were treated like rock stars. For Los Angeles, the premiere evangelist of those days was Aimee Semple McPherson. She was born Aimee Elizabeth Kennedy in 1890 in Ontario, Canada. As a child, she traveled with her mother Minnie, who worked for the Salvation Army. Aimee's first husband, Robert Semple, was a Pentecostal missionary who...

Last night, Al Gore preached to the choir. The polar ice caps are melting at an alarming rate, droughts are dragging on, floods are getting stronger and today alone, an additional 170 million tons of carbon dioxide has been dumped into the Earth's atmosphere, he told a crowd of believers at Value City Arena. "The planet has a fever," he said. It needs to be saved, to be fixed immediately. "This is our home. We don't have another planet to go to. Don't let anybody tell you we're going to get on rocket ships and go to a new planet....

Mary Katherine Ham makes a great point about this Obama plagerizing story, which is getting a bit bigger today but I will get to that in a moment. First MKH: [W]hat the story takes a whack at, effectively, is Obama’s authenticity, which is his No. 1 selling point. Hillary’s camp is smart to play up the fact that the supreme orator, the Messiah of American politics, the man of change above all else, could really just be another politician with a flair for speechifying, a calculating player with no compunction about inspiring with rehashed copy if it suits his purposes.This...

NEW YORK - Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, elated by a strong collection of Super Tuesday wins, looked past Democratic rival Barack Obama to take aim at President Bush and his Republican allies. "You know tonight we are hearing the voices of people across America, people of all ages, of all colors, all faiths and all walks of life," she told supporters in a crowded Manhattan ballroom. The New York senator is seeking to become the first woman president, while Obama would become the first black president. Appearing onstage with her husband and daughter Chelsea, Clinton did not direct any criticism...

By Michael P. Tremoglie (author of the critically acclaimed novel A Sense of Duty available at Barnesandnoble.com) Liberals, generally, and liberal Democrats specifically, have always used ad hominems against their ideological or political opponents instead of arguing the merits of the issue. Very often they “poison the well” so to speak, by questioning the other person’s credibility either by claiming the other is ignorant (coupled with a veiled insult) or by alleging that their antagonist is motivated purely by a seedy self-interest. The most famous of these is the race baiting of conservatives and Republicans. Routinely liberals and Democrats label...

Saturday, November 17, 2007 CNN's six "undecided voters" were all Democratic operatives    UPDATES BELOW - CNN hits bottom and digs: All six debate questioners appear to be Democratic Party operatives. So much for "ordinary people, undecided voters". To paraphrase Junior Soprano, CNN is so far up the DNC's hind end, Howard Dean can taste hair gel. In a nutshell, CNN's six "undecided voters" were: A Democratic Party bigwigAn antiwar activistA Union officialAn Islamic leaderA Harry Reid stafferA radical Chicano separatist Wow. This looks "rather" like a scandal. Hot Air: ...You’d think the network’s audience might want to know who...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Rudy Giuliani assured a conservative legal group Friday that if elected president he would appoint federal judges who adhere to their principles. He also praised a judge who declared the capital city's gun ban unconstitutional and ridiculed efforts to eliminate the words "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. In a speech marking the 25th anniversary of the Federalist Society, Giuliani spelled out a conservative legal agenda in which he cited Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts as models for the judges he would appoint to the federal...

<p>Nicolas Sarkozy, the aggressively pro-American president of France, has spent two days charming President Bush, but he also has his eye out for the end of the current administration. Between a frenetic round of appearances today in Washington, Sarkozy found 15 minutes to place a call to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), the front-runner for the Democratic nomination.</p>

WASHINGTON -- The final version of the widely celebrated ethics bill, passed by overwhelming margins in both House and Senate a month ago, finally and quietly made its way last week from Capitol Hill to the White House. It surely will soon be signed into law by President Bush. What only a handful of leaders and insiders realize is that this measure, avowedly dedicated to transparency, actually makes it easier for the Senate to pass pet projects without the public -- or many senators -- being aware of it. Until now, one or two senators could block any provision that...

Call me a cynic but I find Al Gore’s emergence as this hundred-millionaire, successful businessman as a bit of a farce. I can understand the Oscar. When considering who gives out those trophies, I believe he would have won the Oscar if his “documentary” were shot by himself on a $300 camcorder. I remember when the 2,000 election was over and officially decided, one of my dear conservative friends (who shall remain nameless) actually said to me that she feels sorry for Al Gore. She felt sorry for him after hearing how after all those years in office, he was...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - When John Edwards pursued his crusade against poverty in 2005, he created a nonprofit center that allowed him to maintain a high profile - and avoid the legal scrutiny of presidential candidates. Not that Edwards was running for the White House at that point. Fresh from his loss as Democratic nominee John Kerry's running mate in 2004, he would not declare himself a candidate for president until late in 2006. However, the nonprofit Center for Promise and Opportunity offered distinct advantages to Edwards, its honorary chairman. The center's five officers all had worked for his previous...

John Edwards ended 2004 with a problem: how to keep alive his public profile without the benefit of a presidential campaign that could finance his travels and pay for his political staff. Mr. Edwards, who reported this year that he had assets of nearly $30 million, came up with a novel solution, creating a nonprofit organization with the stated mission of fighting poverty. The organization, the Center for Promise and Opportunity, raised $1.3 million in 2005, and — unlike a sister charity he created to raise scholarship money for poor students — the main beneficiary of the center’s fund-raising was...

AN DIEGO - Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton denounced President Bush on Saturday for his "Mission Accomplished" speech and said his conduct of the Iraq war was "one of the darkest blots on leadership we've ever had." Addressing delegates at the California State Democratic Party convention, Clinton said that if elected president in 2008, she would end the war. The New York senator also promised to "treat all Americans with dignity and equality no matter who you are and who you love." The pledge was clear bow to California's politically active and influential gay community. Taking on Bush's policies, Clinton contended...

In a thought-provoking statistical analysis, Dr. Peter Tsigaris of Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC, Canada, concludes that whether or not climate change can be wholly attributed to human factors, it makes strong economic and environmental sense to treat it as human-caused and take action now. Despite the fact that the hundreds of scientists and reviewers on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced Feb. 2 in Paris that global warming is "very likely" caused by human activity, governments and other policy-makers may still justify inaction because of naysayers like Danish weather scientist Henrik Svensmark, who maintains that global climate...

DAMASCUS, Syria - President Bashar Assad on Thursday inaugurated the first stage of a joint Syrian-Iranian auto factory, test-driving one of the new cars and declaring that the project will boost cooperation between the allies. ADVERTISEMENT With Iranian Vice President Parviz Davoodi on hand for the ceremony at the Syrian-Iranian Company for Manufacturing Cars, Assad called the project a testament of their "historic" cooperation. "Our political relations are rooted, old and excellent," he said. "This project comes in the framework of boosting economic cooperation between the two countries. ... We are proud of this project." Marketing of the car —...

WASHINGTON --Four years to the day after voting to authorize war in Iraq, Senator John F. Kerry today asserted that the vote is his greatest regret of his political career, and said all lawmakers who voted for the war should admit that it was a mistake. "There's nothing -- nothing -- in my life in public service I regret more, nothing even close," Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, wrote in a dispatch on the liberal blog HuffingtonPost.com. "We should all be willing to say: I was wrong, I should not have voted for the Iraq War Resolution." snip...... Throughout his 2004...

July 18, 2006 Professor John Peter Maher of North-East Illinois University was scheduled to testify as a witness at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. Due to the untimely death of President Milosevic, Professor Maher was robbed of an opportunity to show the world what he witnessed in the Croatian city of Dubrovnik. In March of 1992, three months after the old city of Dubrovnik (a UNESCO heritage site) was allegedly "destroyed" by JNA artillery fire, Professor Maher visited Dubrovnik with a cameraman. He arrived to find that the old city was almost completely untouched. Professor Maher documents what little damage...

Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan began a hunger strike on Tuesday – and Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn and other stars are joining her in her "Troops Home Fast" protest. Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Iraq in 2004, had her last meal at 12 a.m. on July 4 in front of the White House and will remain on a diet of water, teas and juices until Sept. 1, International Peace Day. "Everything we do is to get the troops to come home," she told PEOPLE outside the White House on Tuesday. "We want to show the world that there are...

Washington, D.C. (CNSNews.com) - U.S. Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts on Tuesday told an audience at the liberal Take Back America conference that he was sorry for voting to authorize the war in Iraq, calling the entire mission "a mistake." "We were misled, we were given evidence that was not true," Kerry said. "It was wrong, and I was wrong to vote [for it]." Kerry, who led an unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 2004, said it was necessary to admit mistakes because "you cannot change the future if you''re not honest about the past." He criticized supporters of the...

Bill and Hillary Clinton flew to Chicago together last month to deliver speeches a few hours and a few miles apart. And like any couple, they thought about having dinner at day's end. But life is not so simple when you are married to a Clinton. The former president kept a low profile and left early for Washington, in part to avoid distracting the news media from his wife's speech. They decided later that dinner would not work, so Mr. Clinton did what he often does: He rounded up some familiar faces — former aides including Joe Lockhart and Mike...

When the subject of Bill and Hillary Clinton comes up for many prominent Democrats these days, Topic A is their marriage, the NEW YORK TIMES is planning to report on Tuesday Page Ones. "Democrats say it is inevitable that, in a campaign that could return the former president to the White House, some voters would be concerned and even distracted by the Bill Clinton's political role and his potential for the kind of episodes that led the House to vote for his impeachment in 1998." NYT reporter Pat Healy is filing a report this evening, newsroom sources tell the DRUDGE...

As we watch the tragicomedy in the U.S. Senate on immigration reform, it behooves us to hark back to the last time the Senate debated major immigration reform. It was in 1985. Why does it behoove us to learn this history? Because the promises being made today are exactly the same promises made back then. The bill that the Senate produced in 1985, which became law in 1986, was ambitiously titled the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). It is probably the most fraudulent legislation in American history, for it neither reformed nor controlled immigration. In fact, it actually exacerbated...

May 15, 2006 -- WASHINGTON - In his live, nationally televised address tonight, President Bush will tell Americans that it's impossible to deport the estimated 11 million illegal aliens living here. "We must reject amnesty, but recognize that it is not realistic to round up millions of people and send them home," said White House spokeswoman Maria Tamburri in a preview of Bush's speech. She said Bush plans to spell out his vision for sealing the border, enforcing the law, and "creating a rational system for workers to come into our country and to do jobs Americans won't do." Bush...

WASHINGTON, April 21, 2006 – A case in which several sailors face charges for arranging sham marriages to foreign women to boost their military housing allowances sends an important message to all servicemembers, a Navy lawyer told the Pentagon Channel. "You're putting in a claim for money that you are not entitled to, and that is a crime. And if you commit a crime, you can expect to be held accountable for it," said Capt. Jennifer Herold, the Navy's deputy assistant judge advocate general for criminal law policy. "This is something that each of the services take very seriously." On...

In this article I shall describe the Islamic Paradise or Jannat which was invented by Prophet Mohammed to bribe the Arabs into committing hedious crimes by promising them materialistic things which they couldn't obtain in the harsh desert. The paradise contains six important items: beautiful virgins, young boys, water, wine, fruits and wealth. To prove my point I have taken verses from the Koran and quotes from the Hadiths. Mohammed knew that sex would sell..snip Homosexuality was and is widely practised in Islamic conutries. To please the homosexuals among his followers he promised them pre-pubescent boys in Paradise.snip One of...

The networks are clawing for interviews with former Daily Egyptian editor Michael Brenner. But he's worried if he'll ever land a job in journalism. "Who's going to want to hire me after this?" Brenner asked in a telephone interview with The Southern Illinoisan from his grandparents' home in Indiana. The former editor of the Southern Illinois University Carbondale student newspaper is at the center of a media firestorm. ABC wants to fly him to New York City. So do NBC and CBS. CNN has called, too, he said. Friday afternoon, Brenner was fielding a constant barrage of calls from the...

It's the week preceding presidential elections. Candidates attack one another's credibility. Activists push to boycott the vote. Traffic and pollution choke the cities. Leftists support a no-win idealist. Preachers guide their flocks toward political starboard. The media have fallen under the grip of standing power, and should they defy it, they're imprisoned. University students promote human rights, while fundamentalists deny them. It is a culture in love with cinema. With Brad Pitt. Angelina Jolie. And anything Steven Spielberg. It is a nation of nuclear power, where the lobbies of the religious right effectively blur the lines between church and state....

One month after the ninth presidential elections in June, 2005, statistics have been released that not only confirm the widespread irregularities in the voting, but even corroborate the suspicions that the outcome of the elections would have been different if the rigging were prevented. During the first phase of the elections, people had noticed unlawful interventions in the elections process and had made their observations known. But few then suspected the extent of the manipulations and that they would actually be so gross as to alter the outcome of who got into the presidential palace. What Rafsanjani, Moin and even...

Well...we are 37 minutes into the supposed "global concert of a lifetime" and MTV has managed to show 12 minutes of commercials for reality programming,interrupted 3 performances,and have shown a highlights package from the UK with the biggest names of the day already performing. Yep. MTV has found a way to not show music on a day where music is all around them. So away with the Live 8 thread....

This author argues that the once great body of ideas called 'Liberalism' has now become little more than a shared faith, a pose, a stance designed to flatter the narcissism of the true believer. It is rooted in a utopian fantasy that Liberalism would be the happily shared multicultural faith of all, were it not for the malevolent Bush administration, the Christian 'right', and the evil neo-Con propagandists. After all, aren't liberals 'good', 'kind' people who believe in Peace and the United Nations? ....

In recent months, the cause of freedom has made enormous gains in the broader Middle East. Millions of people in Afghanistan and Iraq defied terrorists to cast their ballots in free elections. Palestinians voted for a new president who rejects violence and is working for democratic reform, and the people of Lebanon reclaimed their sovereignty and are now voting for new leadership. Across the Middle East, hopeful change is taking place. People are claiming their liberty. And as a tide of freedom sweeps this region, it will also come eventually to Iran. The Iranian people are heirs to a great...

FAIRFAX, Va., June 8 /PRNewswire/ -- Reza Pahlavi of Iran, in response to a direct invitation by political prisoners in Iran, pledged his solidarity and announced his plans to go on a three day hunger strike starting Friday, June 10. "Solidarity with political prisoners of Iran and support for the legitimate quest for freedom, human rights and economic opportunity in Iran transcends all political boundaries and ideologies," said Reza Pahlavi, opposition leader to the clerical regime of Iran. Yesterday, in a communique, signed by numerous political prisoners, in Iran, the June 17 presidential elections were rejected as "sham and undemocratic."...

PARIS, 3 June (IPS) Prince Reza Pahlavi joined his voice to other Iranian dissidents inside and outside Iran to urge Iranians not to participate in the coming presidential elections and do not give popular legitimacy a “discredited regime”. “With more than 20 million votes, (outgoing President) Mohammad Khatami was not able to implement his reform program, what can a Hashemi Rafsanjani do, a man who is also very unpopular?”, the 45 years-old son of the late Iranian Monarch observed during a press conference held in Paris on 2 June on the invitation of the French-American Press Association, referring to reports...

Social Security's Sham Guarantee by Michael D. Tanner May 29, 2005 Michael Tanner is director of the Cato Institute's Project on Social Security Choice. How many times during the recent debate over Social Security reform have you heard someone refer to Social Security's "guaranteed benefit"? The AARP says "Social Security is the guaranteed part of your retirement plan." Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House, touts the system's "guaranteed retirement benefit." The liberal activist group ProtectYourCheck.org, headed by former Clinton chief of staff Harold Ickes, is running ads calling Social Security "a guarantee you earned." But Social Security benefits...

A state senator already under scrutiny for ethical allegations, was indicted today on bribery charges along with three lawmakers, a former lawmaker and two others in a federal probe of his business dealings. Tennessee state Sen. John Ford, a Memphis Democrat from a powerful political family, is charged with the five others for taking bribes from undercover investigators to influence legislation concerning a sham company set up by the FBI. Ford and former state Sen. Roscoe Dixon appeared in federal court today handcuffed and shackled at the ankles, according to The Tennessean newspaper. "He's shocked as you can imagine," Ford's...

Students perform play based on hate crime By NAOMI L. JENKINS Bucks County Courier Times Middletown - Matthew Shepard, 21, had been a University of Wyoming student for only a few months when he was the victim of a hate crime in 1998. Few in the town of Laramie knew him as well as his former roommate and good friend Romaine Patterson. The two previously lived together in Denver. She talked publicly about Shepard, who was gay, for three minutes at a vigil the day after he died - five days after the attack. "Once I got up and spoke...

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Iraqi militants claimed in a Web statement Tuesday to have taken an American soldier hostage and threatened to behead him in 72 hours unless the Americans release Iraqi prisoners. The posting, on a Web site that frequently carried militants' statements, included a photo of what appeared to be an American soldier in desert fatigues seated with his hands tied behind his back. A gun barrel was pointed at his head, and he is seated in front of a black banner emblazoned with the Islamic profession of faith, "There is no god but God and Muhammad is...

When Hugo Chavez was running for President, he emphasized that he did not believe in representative democracy, but in participatory democracy. So much so, that Chavez refused to sign the declaration after the Quebec Summit, because it used representative rather than participatory. I had to wonder what happened to that when the Venezuelan National assembly named this week a committee to choose a replacement for Central Bank Director Manuel Lago. Despite the fact that the National assembly is split almost 50/50 between pro-Chavez and anti-Chavez Deputies (there is a difference of only three Deputies out of 160), there is not...

The government of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez will expropriate its first farm, taking Venezuela straight down Zimbabwe road. The grab was announced this morning and will happen Saturday. The chavistas' first target is a British-owned cattle ranch. The move is a bold beginning for the chavista communists who will roll out both military and police forces for the seizure, beginning the first in a series. The communists' mendacious rationale is that a British company, Vestey Group, did not have proper title to 3000 hectares of its 13,000-hectare cattle ranch. So they are taking it all. But the owners of the...

The grieving father of a teenager who died after taking the abortion pill has become a powerful ally of anti-choice activists in the fight to ban the drug. Planned Parenthood says Holly's death is a tragedy but that medical abortion is safe. SAN FRANCISCO (WOMENSENEWS)--Monty Patterson lost his daughter Holly just a few weeks after her 18th birthday last September. Holly had taken RU-486, an abortion drug that has been used by more than 1 million women worldwide and is widely viewed as a safe alternative to surgical abortion. But Holly died tragically of a massive infection after taking the...

Here's the question California taxpayers need to ask themselves before Nov. 2: "If Prop. 71 is such a good idea, why aren't investors rushing to pour their own money into biotech companies doing stem cell research?" Moral concerns over the destruction of human embryos led President Bush to limit taxpayer funding for embryonic stem cell research to stem cell lines already in existence. Researchers were counting on taxpayer funding to conduct research on embryonic stem cells - and then rake in millions of dollars from investors. The National Academy of Sciences was even enlisted to report on the prospects for...

Putin: Ally or Terrorist? by William F. Jasper Counting Vladimir Putin as an ally against terrorism ignores his career in the murderous KGB/FSB and his ongoing support for terrorist regimes and organizations. ‘‘Lena Goncharuk, aged 38, said that she was the only one to survive out of a group of six who were ordered out of the cellar where they had been hiding and shot at point blank range. Resting in her hospital bed, her voice barely rising above a whisper, she said she had survived only by pretending to be dead." So reported Paul Wood from the Chechen border...

Want to meet my mom?" Tom Cruise asks as we walk through the halls of the Celebrity Centre, ground zero for Scientology in Los Angeles. Um, sure. We round a corner and enter the president's office, where Mary Lee (a.k.a. Mom) has just ordered a salad. In town from Florida, she is leaning against a door frame near Lee Anne DeVette, Cruise's sister and publicist, and Tommy, who manages Cruise's philanthropy work. Mom is thin and tan, and she beams an even toothier smile than her son when she is introduced. Considering that she is a practicing Catholic, it is...

Everyone knows by now that John Kerry served for four months on a "swift boat" in Vietnam. Don't say you haven't heard, unless you've spent the last year in a cave. Kerry mentions it several times per minute in every campaign speech he intones. He deflects nearly every question asked of him by holding up his Naval service in 1968 and 1969, especially questions about his plans for national security and defense should he become President. His campaign ads feature pictures of him in uniform. Former servicemen flank him at every campaign stop, some of whom even served with him....

I have a hard time keeping up with what happens with this thing.It seems to me there is some loop hole by which any candidate can operate in, but I'm not that good at understanding (nor remembering) what.One syllable words work best.