Free Republic

After the General Election of 2008 I made a conscious effort to give President Obama a chance. I wanted to give him an opportunity to be true to his word; to prove that he was committed to governing from the center. I also wanted to demonstrate that I was not of the same ilk as the Bush-hating, “he stole the election,” fact-ignoring Progressive malcontents that served to divide the country over the eight years of the Bush Administration. But now, a year after the election, and as we approach a full year of the Obama Administration, it has become abundantly...

Revolt in Westchester After a coercive housing settlement, angry voters toss out their county executive. 4 November 2009 Other issues, especially taxes, no doubt ranked high in the minds of Westchester County voters, who last night in a stunning upset threw out incumbent county executive Andy Spano in favor of Republican challenger Rob Astorino by an impressive 58–42 margin. But it didn’t help that county residents felt strong-armed by the federal government and private litigants into a controversial lawsuit settlement on low-income housing that cuts deeply into the county’s tradition of suburban home rule on development issues—or that Spano reacted...

The term “social engineering” never fit an entity better than it does the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). This intrusive, tenacious organization has spent years attempting to recast and transform American society to fit its own peculiar ideals. Its directors are missionaries in the full sense of the word, in that they relentlessly work to stamp onto the hearts and minds of the public a distinctive belief system, which teaches what is evil and what is not. This month, the Federation for Immigration Reform (FAIR) has published an excellent analysis of the SPLC’s attack on FAIR and other immigration reform...

Women should be allowed to serve aboard America's fleet of nuclear submarines, the nation's top military officer, Adm. Michael Mullen, quietly has told the Senate Armed Services Committee. If the Navy agrees to it, this would be a huge policy change and potentially a significant expansion of career opportunities for female officers and sailors. Women have been barred by Navy policy from submarines, even as the sea service began 15 years ago to integrate females into other seagoing combat roles including aboard surface warships and in fighter jets. Mullen, former chief of naval operations and a career surface warfare officer,...

The National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged, current and former officials said. The agency's monitoring of domestic e-mail messages, in particular, has posed longstanding legal and logistical difficulties, the officials said. Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns...

Psychological State of the Union Many Americans don’t feel the thrill associated with President Obama’s “Change” as it has an adverse effect on their “Psychological State of the Union”. They liked their country the way it was before it lurched to the political Left. For those who mourn and grieve the loss of their Country there needs to be some consideration of their emotional, psychological and mental health. After all, these are the people who bought into the “American Dream”. They fought in wars and went to a job they may not have enjoyed to put sustenance on the table...

RALEIGH, NC -- Venessa Mills is fighting a legal battle for the heart and soul of homeschooling in North Carolina. As reported on World Net Daily, on Friday, March 6, Judge Ned W. Mangum stripped her of the right to homeschool, and ordered her three children to enter public school. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=91397 Mills was forced to defend her right to homeschool during divorce proceedings brought on by her husband's unfaithfulness. Mr. Mills admitted, under oath, to repeatedly committing adultery. Even with abundant evidence showing the Mills children are well adjusted and well educated, Judge Mangum ruled overwhelmingly against Mrs. Mills on...

Hello, I am a long time reader and very rare poster, I apologize if I'm putting this in the wrong area. I don't think I've ever created a thread here before... Anyways, I am a college student and have been asked by student.com to become a "News & Politics" blog writer. I've been around that site since I was 15 or so(22 now) and accepted, and I was wondering if free republic would be willing to look over my articles before I post them? I'd appreciate your criticism much more than the criticism of high school students. I know you...

Lincoln, NE (AHN) - Nebraska Sen. Tony Fulton filed the Ultrasound Bill which seeks to require a pregnant woman contemplating abortion to undergo an ultrasound and see her fetus before she undergoes the procedure.Fulton explained that the aim of the legislation is to have an informed consent, especially for young women who are on the verge of making grave choices prior to an abortion. Nebraska is just one of 11 states contemplating on a mandated ultrasound. The other states include Indiana and Texas. Earlier, Wyoming legislators attempted to pass a similar law, but were defeated on the state House committee...

more as it becomes available...

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Many U.S. troops in Iraq were overjoyed to see President Barack Obama take his oath, but some were unhappy about one thing the Democrat has promised to do: permit gay and lesbian soldiers to serve openly. Obama said during his campaign he opposed a 1993 law stating that homosexuals are not eligible to work in the U.S. military, widely referred to as the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" rule. This month, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs, when asked whether the new administration planned to scrap the law, replied on the president's transition website: "You don't hear politicians give a...

Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. endorsed a $2.30 tax increase on a pack of cigarettes this morning, giving Utah the highest state cigarette tax in the country with a goal of wiping out the remaining state sales tax on food. "I think that's a perfectly fair tradeoff," the governor said after publicly embracing the tax hike for the first time and going further than previous legislative proposals. Huntsman's target would more than quadruple the existing 70-cent tax on a pack of smokes. Legislative leaders were open to the idea, and said it will be among the topics discussed in the upcoming...

The ostensible subject was Caroline Kennedy. But in the course of, you know, discussing Kennedy's foundering effort to, you know, be anointed senator, Mika Brzezinski said something of more enduring interest. The Morning Joe co-host provided a telling glimpse into the liberal mindset, as Brzezinski cast her vote for Big Mommy government. Host Joe Scarborough observed that New York Gov. David Paterson was letting Kennedy twist in the wind. Rather than spending his time taxing everything in sight, the guv would be better off appointing Caroline or someone else, so the new senator could hit the ground running once Hillary...

Governor Paterson says he can raise $404 million in state revenues with a 15% tax on soft drinks (but not diet sodas, juices, milk, or water). The relevant section of the statute reads: "Create Sales Tax on Soft Drinks. Imposes an additional 18 percent rate of sales and compensating use taxes on fruit drinks that contain less than seventy percent of natural fruit juice and non-dietetic soft drinks, sodas and beverages. By increasing the price, it will discourage individuals, especially children and teenagers, from excessive consumption of these beverages. Revenues will be directed for health care initiatives." And here’s the...

In the social circles of the New York Times editorialists, it's OK to have one kid. Two is pushing the envelope. Three or more is tacky, and a threat to the survival of the planet. That being so, there's really no reason to let any car bigger than a Prius be built. Doing so just encourages the unenlightened to overbreed. And so it is that in its editorial of today, the Grey-but-barren Lady suggests that as a condition of the Detroit bailout, "Congress could consider demanding that Detroit simply phase out S.U.V.’s and vans by a certain date."

Social engineering by government always ends in disaster. Social engineering occurs when government passes laws and regulations that force citizens to behave the way government thinks they should behave. Prohibition is a great example of social engineering. In 1919, government decided that its citizens should not drink "intoxicating liquors." This "government-knows-best" idea produced more than a decade of lawlessness far worse than citizen intoxication. Prohibition was repealed in 1933. Free people in a free market always produce the best products, most efficiently, at the lowest price. Every time government "engineering" intrudes into the market, products, efficiency, price – and consumers...

We're beginning to get a sense of what the next four years will look like. It won't be a conservative era, that's for sure. Nor will it, despite appearances to the contrary, be a reprise of the Clinton era. Bill Clinton's version of economic liberalism meant slightly higher tax rates on income and capital, a slightly more burdensome regulatory apparatus, lower deficits, and a commitment to free trade. The public sector didn't meddle too much in the private sector. It was content, for the most part, to sit back and enjoy the tax revenue that the tech boom poured in....

A neighborhood grocery-store clerk was shot dead yesterday afternoon on a tranquil block in the shadows of Martin Luther King Jr. High School, and police are scrambling to determine the motive and identification of the gunman, while tracking down other weekend homicides.

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years. "Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10-...

While the state has seen demographic shifts in suburban school districts, the isolation and intense concentration of minority students in the 31 Abbott school districts is worse today than it was 20 years ago.  That's the basis for a "friend of the court" brief filed jointly by the New Jersey Black Issues Convention and the Hispanic Directors Association, two influential umbrella organizations. They are among nine groups challenging the state's overhaul of the school funding formula that guaranteed additional aid to the state's neediest districts. Locally, Paterson, Passaic and Garfield are classified as Abbott districts.   The court is scheduled...

A decision, made under pressure from Congress and investors, to steer Fannie Mae into dangerous corners of the mortgage market proved to be disastrous.

[In 2004, Daniel] Mudd, [new CEO of Fannie] made a fateful choice. Disregarding warnings from his managers that lenders were making too many loans that would never be repaid, he steered Fannie into more treacherous corners of the mortgage market, according to executives. ... Capitol Hill bore down on Mr. Mudd as well. The same year he took the top position, regulators sharply increased Fannie’s affordable-housing goals. Democratic lawmakers demanded that the company buy more loans that had been made to low-income and minority homebuyers. “When homes are doubling in price in every six years and incomes are increasing by...

Getting class-warriors to admit they're wrong about anything is always a struggle. Witness Bill O'Reilly's attempt to get House Financial Services Committee chairman Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts) to admit he was on the wrong side of housing policy for decades. Frank, a member of the kooky socialist Congressional Progressive Caucus, wouldn't give an inch in a recent interview even though his fingerprints (and those of some Republicans) are all over the current crisis on Wall Street. (See transcript from October 2 "The O'Reilly Factor" show here; video here) But let's look at the facts. Stanley Liebowitz, an economist at the University...

What if the current Mortgage/Credit Crunch is not just an isolated financial crisis, but in fact the signal for the death of one era, and the (painful) birth of another? If that is the case, it goes a long ways towards explaining the bizarre nature of what we’re seeing going on in Washington and on Wall Street… and suggests that we need a whole different set of solutions. Living out here in Silicon Valley, the heartland of American innovation, it’s hard not to be appalled by the events taking place 3,000 miles away in the seats of American finance and...

Think there's no such thing as too much parking? Take a look at Tysons Corner, where there's more parking than jobs, more parking than office space, more parking than in downtown Washington. That must change, said advocates and politicians seeking to transform Virginia's largest business hub from suburb to city. Reducing parking, charging for parking and finding new uses for the acres of parking that separate Tysons' buildings and the people inside is at the heart of plans to remake the area.... "Who wants parking spaces to be the hallmark of a development?" said Clark Tyler, chairman of a Fairfax...

Dr. Love is struggling.... Dr. Love's allies in the war on childlessness have fared no better. The Singaporean government's official matchmaking agency, the SDU -- the initials stand for Social Development Unit, but it's known to snarky islanders as "Single, Desperate, and Ugly" -- is situated just off the city-state's main shopping thoroughfare, and it doesn't seem nearly as popular as the nearby Emporio Armani.... The developed world is experiencing a wave of pro-natalist sentiment that threatens to bully the childless, tax the single, and reorient states toward the production rather than the protection of citizens. In most developed nations...

From Times OnlineApril 23, 2008 Executives harpooned by online 'whalers' Spies and conmen target bosses in e-mail attacks to install malicious software with access to most privileged data Jonathan Richards Corporate bosses have become the latest target of cyber-criminals, after a string of attacks in which senior management have been singled out to receive fraudulent e-mails. Internet fraudsters have taken to sending personally addressed e-mails to chief executives and other high-level executives with a view to installing malicious software on computers that have access to the most privileged company information. In the latest e-mail scam, known as "whaling" because it...

Compassionate fascism is just as anti-liberty as the other kind Perhaps you wonder how society's self-appointed hall monitors got the right to make you feel bad about the fries on your plate or the cigarette you're smoking, or outlaw listening to iPods while crossing the street. If so, you may also be fed up with being nagged about recycling, and be wondering why just because you don't think we're all responsible for global warming, you have been designated a pariah through that infelicitous phrase -- climate-change denier. You know what that's supposed to sound like. Worse, some of your accusers...

by Richard Lawrence Poe Friday, February 29, 2008 ArchivesPermanent Link I ADDRESS this column to that new breed of conservative, the Hillarycon. These are conservatives who support Hillary Clinton. Below I describe the three types of Hillarycon and explain why each is wrong. TYPE 1: The Innocent Hillarycon The first type is the most well-meaning, but possibly the most deluded. Innocent Hillarycons view Hillary as a weaker candidate than Obama, and thus seek to help Hillary win the nomination. They are wrong. Hillary's weakness is an illusion. She is playing rope-a-dope with Obama. By hanging on the ropes, and...

What the hell is going on here? Are are these models wearing the trendiest new berka ...are they supposed to look like Osama?

UNHAPPY couples used to stick together for the sake of the kids. Now they can make the best of a bad marriage in the name of being environmentally friendly. Scientists have quantified for the first time the extent to which divorce damages the environment. The researchers found that the combined use of electricity across the two new households created rose 53% while water use was up by 42%. Across America – one of 12 countries studied – divorced households used 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2005 that could have been saved if the families had not split up. That...

WASHINGTON — Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has a message for Americans: Quit digging your grave with a knife and fork. Huckabee shed more than 100 pounds after being diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes in 2003. He has taken his personal health kick to the next level by running marathons and writing books like "Quit Digging Your Grave With A Knife And Fork." He is also using his success story to wage war on junk food in public schools in hopes of targeting childhood obesity rates. Other states, under pressure to encourage healthier eating habits for children, are developing similar school...

http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa?threadID=1000565444&start=0 Ebay was hacked today. Users complete credit card information was being posted today on eBay's Trust and Safety board including name, cc number, CCV, paypal info, etc. It took eBay over 90 minutes to finally pull down the Trust & Safety server to remove the publicly posted information. If you have an eBay or PayPal account, you might want to monitor the above link.

Victory for Britain's metric martyrs as Eurocrats give up the fightBy BENEDICT BROGAN and PAUL SIMS - More by this author » Last updated at 00:05am on 11th September 2007  Brussels will today give up the fight to make Britain drop pints, pounds and miles. The right of Britons to use imperial weights and measures will be enshrined in EU law under plans being announced by the European Commission. Traditional measures will remain legal "until Kingdom come", the Commissioner responsible for the move told the Daily Mail last night. Scroll down for more...Vindicated: The 'Metric Martyr' Steve Thoburn, who...

If California wants to achieve its goal of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions 25 percent by 2020 to fight global warming, it must find a way to cut down the biggest source of those pollutants: cars, trucks and other motor vehicles. Even though transportation contributes 41 percent of greenhouse gases, our society is too geographically dispersed and mobile to realistically expect that we can dramatically reduce the number of miles we drive, ride and fly. So that means our vehicles need to become far more fuel-efficient. The less gasoline per mile that a car uses, the less heat-trapping carbon dioxide it spews...

Lower tax rates for women would have a number of benefits, two economists argue. But their ideas, which get high marks for originality, have drawn doubters. Want to reduce the overall level of income taxes and see more women taking home paychecks?

For the second time in a month The New York Times is touting a 10-year old Mexican anti-poverty program that New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to import. The social engineering program essentially offers bribes to adults to get jobs, and to make sure their children stay in school (second item, The Daily Blade). According to The New York Times: The payments are tied to changes in behavior intended to lift families out of poverty. So the program requires families to keep their children in school and take them for regular checkups. Parents must also attend talks on health,...

Press Releases Contact: Brendan Daly 202-226-7616 For Immediate Release 04/24/2007 Pelosi: ‘Working Women and Their Families Deserve Equal Pay for Equal Work’ Washington, D.C. – Speaker Nancy Pelosi released the following statement this morning at an Education and Labor Committee hearing on equal pay: “I want to thank the Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller for convening this critical hearing today on Strengthening the Middle Class: Ensuring Equal Pay for Women. “I also want to recognize the leadership of Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, a champion for equal pay in the Congress, who for 10 years has been introducing the Paycheck...

The Return Of The Women's Equality Amendment By Ashley Herzog April 10, 2007 I didn't plan on writing another column about feminism, but I keep discovering more examples of pernicious ideas the so-called "women's rights activists" are pushing on society. Last week, the Democrat-controlled Congress reintroduced the long-dead Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which gained popular support in the 1970s but died when Americans found out what it actually entailed. Thirty years later, feminists in Congress seem to think we've forgotten. The language of the ERA, now renamed the Women's Equality Amendment, is deceptively simple: "equality of rights under the law...

It's 30 years since the TV drama Roots first screened. The show had a profound impact on black people in the US and UK, recalls Kwame Kwei-Armah, right, who spoke to others about their memories of the programme.Thirty years ago I was an 11-year-old growing up in West London. One evening I sat down with my family to watch a new television programme called Roots. It was a moment that changed my life. By the end of the series I had told my mother that I would one day trace my heritage back to Africa and reclaim an ancestral...

In recent years, legal scholars have produced a voluminous literature on the rule of law in indirectly controlling social norms and individual preferences. Smoking bans provide on of the favorite "success stories" of those who laud the use of legal rules to change norms and preferences. According to these scholars, smoking bans affect behavior, even if under-enforced, because they change the social norm regarding smoking in public. With the advent of smoking bans, non-smokers who previously felt embarassed about publicly expressing their distaste for ETS are speaking up. By providing a de facto community statement that public smoking is unacceptable,...

Martha Stewart was not an accident of history. She came along in the late 20th century as a kind of spirit guide to a society whose bad choices and misinvestments had led to the wholesale destruction of any place in America that people called home. And by this I mean the towns, neighborhoods, and city districts of our land, not just the individual dwellings. By the 1980s, America had been converted, with monstrous efficiency, into what I have called a geography of nowhere, a panorama of identical highway strips, malls, big box warehouses, fried food out-parcels, and free parking wastelands...

Six-year-old Karlind Dunbar barely touched her dinner, but not for time-honored 6-year-old reasons. The pasta was not the wrong shape. She did not have an urgent date with her dolls. The problem was the letter Karlind discovered, tucked inside her report card, saying that she had a body mass index in the 80th percentile. The first grader did not know what “index” or “percentile” meant, or that children scoring in the 5th through 85th percentiles are considered normal, while those scoring higher are at risk of being or already overweight. Yet she became convinced that her teachers were chastising her...

Until June, the (Seattle) school district's Web site declared that "cultural racism'' includes "emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology,'' "having a future time orientation'' (planning ahead) and "defining one form of English as standard.'' The site also asserted that only whites can be racists, and disparaged assimilation as the "giving up'' of one's culture. After this propaganda provoked outrage, the district, saying it needed to "provide more context to readers'' about "institutional racism,'' put up a page saying that the district's intention is to avoid "unsuccessful concepts such as a melting pot or colorblind mentality.'' The Supreme...

SEATTLE -- This city's school district decided in 2000 that because the son of Jill Kurfirst and the daughter of Winnie Bachwitz are white, they should be assigned to an inferior and distant high school. If they had not left the Seattle school system, this would have required them to rise at 5 a.m. in order to leave home by 5:30 a.m., alone and in the dark, to take the first of three buses, returning home between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., with almost no time left for homework, family activities and adequate sleep. The parents argue that the racial...

HARD-WORKING families face crippling new bills as the Government fights global warming with a raft of stinging taxes. Shadow Environment Secretary Peter Ainsworth said last night: “We don’t need a programme of green taxes: We need a green programme, full stop. He was speaking after it was revealed that Environment Secretary David Miliband had already drawn up sweeping green tax plans which he has put to Gordon Brown. The move came on the eve of today’s publication of a major study on climate change — which some experts blame on harmful man-made emissions. Tony Blair describes the report — drawn...

Secret green tax blitz planned for cars, air travel and consumer goods By SIMON WALTERS, Mail on Sunday Secret plans for a multi-billion-pound package of stealth taxes on fuel, cars, air travel and consumer goods have been drawn up by the government to combat global warming. The proposals, leaked to The Mail on Sunday, show that the Government is considering introducing a raft of hard-hitting 'eco-taxes' that will have a devastating effect on the cost of living. Families with big cars could end up paying more than £1,000 a year extra in tax. And nearly every household in Britain will...

"Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee for Health Protection, Nikolai Gerasimenko, suggested the introduction of childlessness tax to improve the demographic situation in Russia. “It is about time we should think about childlessness tax. If you do not want to think about your social duty for your fatherland than you will have to pay for it,” Gerasimenko said. The official added that State Duma deputies were currently considering the issue about the introduction of such a tax in Russia. As soon as deputies think the idea through, the law-makers will develop an adequate document on the matter. "

There’s been a lot of talk about identity theft in recent days, and a lot of technology is being thrown at the problem. But with all the technology that’s out there, it’s still pretty easy for a good social engineer to steal an identity and exploit it swiftly, even if they only have a single piece of personal information. In a recent project, my penetration testing firm was able to gain an alarming amount of access to personal information — and even financial accounts — with only a birth date to go on. We were hired by a private college...

Yugoslavia is dead. The multinational federation, once consisting of the republics of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Montenegro, is no more. The last chapter in the country's break-up was written recently when tiny Montenegro voted to secede from its union with Serbia. The result consigns the last vestiges of former Yugoslavia to history after the bloody wars of the 1990s had already led to Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Macedonia leaving the federation.