Free Republic

Though Republicans oppose the so-called "public option," Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., is proposing the requirement to draw attention to the plan's alleged flaws. Republican Rep. Joe Wilson proposed an amendment Wednesday that would force all members of Congress to receive health insurance coverage through the government-run plan proposed in the House's reform bill. Though Republicans oppose the so-called "public option," the South Carolina gadfly -- who gained notoriety for shouting "you lie" at President Obama during his address to Congress two months ago -- is proposing the requirement to draw attention to what he sees as the plan's flaws. "They...

The National Education Association has made a glowing assessment of radical socialist community organizer Saul Alinsky and is enthusiastically recommending American public school teachers read two of his books, including one dedicated to Satan. On its website, the NEA dubs Alinsky "an inspiration to anyone contemplating action in their community! And to every organizer!" It recommends Alinsky's "Reveille for Radicals," a 1946 book about the principles and tactics of "community organizing," and "Rules for Radicals," a 1971 text that articulated a socialist strategy for gaining political power to redistribute wealth from the "haves" to the "have-nots." The NEA, the largest...

I have discussed with Freepers over the last 4 months that I am back in school earning my Masters degree. Today my head about exploded when not only my professor but people (grown adults) said Communism was a fear on paper but never a real threat to the U.S. Let me give you direct quotes taken from today's lecture. "Exactly where does communism fit in today's classroom, newspapers, and television sets? It doesn't, only the right wing fringe in this country wants you to believe that is the case, where is the proof? America feared communism based on it being...

ROME – The Vatican has denounced a ruling by the European court of human rights that said the display of crucifixes in Italian public schools violates religious and educational freedoms. Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi says the crucifix is a "fundamental sign of the importance of religious values" in Italian history and culture. He says the European court had no right intervening in such a profoundly Italian matter .. .. In Strasbourg, France, on Tuesday ordered Italy to pay a euro5,000 ($7,390) fine to a mother who wanted crucifixes removed from her children's classrooms. The Italian government said it...

Bill Gates took on the Famine Lobby while addressing a forum on the world food supply in Iowa. Speaking at the World Food Prize Symposium in Des Moines, Gates took aim at the chorus of environmental leftists and organic food advocates who believe Africans should starve rather than eat genetically modified (GM) foods. “Some voices are instantly hostile to any emphasis on productivity. They act as if there is no emergency, even though in the poorest, hungriest places on earth, population is growing faster than productivity,” he said.

I was just reading one of my daughters "history" books called, "Call to Freedom". (credit is given to "CNNfyi.com" so I knew this was going to spell trouble.) In a chapter called "The Great Society", the book brags about LBJ's accomplishments in poverty. Here's a quote..."Partly because of Johnson's Great Society, poverty in the US decreased. Overall unemployment levels stayed low and the percentage of Americans living below the poverty level dropped to about 12% by 1969. Americans' income levels rose more during the 1960's than they had during the prosperous years of the 1950's". There are chapters devoted to...

So now the cat is well and truly out of the bag. For years, as the number of immigrants to Britain shot up apparently uncontrollably, the question was how exactly this had happened. Was it through a fit of absent-mindedness or gross incompetence? Or was it not inadvertent at all, but deliberate? The latter explanation seemed just too outrageous. After all, a deliberate policy of mass immigration would have amounted to nothing less than an attempt to change the very make-up of this country without telling the electorate. There could not have been a more grave abuse of the entire...

A controversial provision of climate-change legislation currently moving through Congress will raise the cost of fuel for U.S. businesses and consumers by $3.6 trillion from 2015 to 2050, and raise diesel fuel prices by $1.4 trillion during that span, according to a report issued Oct. 21 by two Senate Republicans. The report, from Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) and Christopher S. (Kit) Bond (R-Mo.), said the provision, known as "cap and trade," will increase the cost of motor fuels by 24 cents a gallon by 2020 and by 95 cents per gallon by 2050. The estimates were derived by multiplying...

BILLIONAIRE investor George Soros at the weekend became the latest high-profile financier to wade into the bonus debate as he claimed the backlash against banking fat cats on lucrative pay deals is justified. Speaking in an interview about large profits reported in recent weeks by Wall Street’s biggest banks, Soros said: “Those earnings are not the achievement of risk-takers. These are gifts, hidden gifts from the government, so I don’t think that those monies should be used to pay bonuses.” He added: “There’s a resentment which I think is justified.” Soros, chairman of Soros Fund Management, also said in the...

Activists around the globe are staging thousands of demonstrations Saturday aimed at prodding the world's policymakers to cut carbon concentrations to below their current levels, at a time when many U.S. officials and experts are trying to dampen expectations for international climate talks that culminate in Copenhagen in December.

Linda Finlay will not be giving up her dogs any time soon – despite a call from researchers to swap dogs and cats for pets they can eat, like rabbits or chickens. A longtime dog lover and dog training club member, Mrs Findlay couldn't imagine a life without Thomas, Zarah and Zoe – even if the Bernese Mountain Dog crosses and Alsatian labrador cross do have a carbon pawprint bigger than a Land Cruiser. "They're like part of the family," Mrs Findlay said. Victoria University professors Brenda and Robert Vale, architects who specialise in sustainable living, have recommended pet owners...

At a conference for environmental journalists in Wisconsin, Al Gore dodged questions on the many identified errors in his global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth. "We're very close to that political tipping point," Gore said. "Never before in human history has a single generation been asked to make such difficult and consequential decisions." While the audience of environmental journalists were largely in agreement with Mr. Gore's presentation and his positions, one Irish journalist and filmmaker asked Gore about the many scientific errors that were found in Gore's global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth. "A judge in the British High Court,...

President Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize ABC NEws

Welcome. Come on in. My name is Jay Shafer and since 1997 I have been living in houses smaller than some people’s closets. I call the first of my little hand built houses Tumbleweed. My decision to inhabit just 89 square feet arose from some concerns I had about the impact a larger house would have on the environment, and because I do not want to maintain a lot of unused or unusable space. My houses have met all of my domestic needs without demanding much in return. The simple, slower lifestyle my homes have afforded is a luxury for...

Arnold is going to "PUMP Obama UP"

There's more than one way to get cap-and-trade, President Obama's energy czar said today. Carol Browner, the former Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) administrator who now serves in the Obama administration's newly created role of energy czar, floated the possibility today of the EPA implementing cap-and-trade energy policies, during an interview at The Atlantic's First Draft of History symposium in Washington, DC. "We also have the reality of EPA, under current law, moving forward...to start the traditional regulatory clock," Browner said when asked, during an interview with Atlantic Media Political Director Ronald Brownstein, about the difficulties of passing the stalled energy/climate...

Obama science czar John Holdren stated in a college textbook that "illegitimate children" born to unwed mothers could be taken by the government and put up for adoption if the mother refused to have an abortion. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, argued that "illegitimate childbearing could be strongly discouraged" as a socioeconomic measure imposed to control population growth. As previously reported, WND has obtained a copy of the 1970s college textbook "Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment" that Holdren co-authored with Malthusian population alarmist Paul R. Ehrlich and Ehrlich's wife, Anne. The authors argued involuntary...

<p>TEGUCIGALPA (AP) — The de facto government of Honduras extended the curfew until Wednesday at 6:00 AM after dispersing with gas and nightsticks hundreds of supporters of deposed President Manuel Zelaya, who remains at the Brazilian Embassy.</p> <p>A defiant Zelaya stated from the diplomatic compound that, for him, the motto is "restitution or death, which is an allegorical phrase that has been used since the French Revolution....we are ready for anything: for risk, for sacrifice."</p>

In the local news program "Hoy Mismo" aired at channel 3, has been read a letter from the US embassy in Tegucigalpa asking the Brazilian embassy to hand Zelaya to them for "more protection".

NBC's Chief White House Correspondent Chuck Todd does not fault the state-run media for ignoring the communist-Truther Van Jones controversy. He says it was a waste of time. For the record-- Van Jones was in charge of doling out $80 billion of Stimulus money to selected green projects. He was certainly no low level czar as Chuck Todd suggested.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (BNO NEWS) -- The White House released the following excerpts from President Obama's address to a joint session of Congress later on Wednesday. "I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last. It has now been nearly a century since Theodore Roosevelt first called for health care reform. And ever since, nearly every President and Congress, whether Democrat or Republican, has attempted to meet this challenge in some way. A bill for comprehensive health reform was first introduced by John Dingell Sr. in 1943. Sixty-five years later, his...

Van Jones is an exceptional and inspired leader who has fought to bring economic and environmental justice to communities across our country. He has chosen to resign because he believed he was serving as a distraction to the president's agenda. I respect that decision. Van was working to build a common ground agenda for all Americans, and I am confident he will continue that work. Unfortunately, his critics on the right could find no common ground with him. Clearly, Van was the subject of a right-wing smear campaign shrouded in hypocrisy. Van's chief tormentor Glenn Beck, who spent weeks engaged...

The night Van Jones resigned, Newsreal editor David Swindle emailed me and said: watch how long it takes them to use the “L” word. That’s not for liberal, mind you; it’s for “lynch.” Destruction of the enemy is always the agenda of the left. While conservatives prepare arguments, assemble evidence, leftists are busy looking into their quivers for a poison arrow, which always turns out to be a tainted label, and always pretty much the same label: racist (or sexist, or Islamophobe). So it wasn’t surprising to see the following post from Carl Pope the radical head of the Sierra...

TeleSUR, Venezuela From 15 hours ago. (Van) Jones, special advisor for Green Jobs and Environment Innovation of the White House, submitted his resignation early Sunday, as the product of a great scandal generated when ventilating himself in support of an organization that offered that ex-President George Bush was complicit in the attacks on September 11th. This is an adviser of the current president of the United States, Barack Obama, and that worked in the Council of Environmental Quality office, had to apologize already in public, after the existence was known a recording in which he made offensive signallings against...

A mysterious YouTube member named, conveniently, “megwhitmanonvanjones,” has uploaded a May 2009 San Francisco Chronicle video of 2010 GOP California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, in which the former CEO of eBay and former adviser to Mitt Romney and John McCain gushes about suddenly controversial green jobs czar Van Jones. "There’s a guy over in Oakland, I think his name is Van Jones. And he and I were on a cruise last summer in the Arctic, on climate change. And I got to know him very well. And a lot of the work he’s doing to enfranchise broader communities I’m a...

Judging by some of the responses I've received to the previous posts in this health care series, I think it's important to make it clear that the illustrative features I talked about in my last post are not suggested components of some government run health care scheme. I oppose the government takeover of the health sector. It should also be clear from the ideas I've outlined that I oppose perpetuating the third party payer system in any form, whether as a single payer government run approach, or in continuation of the existing private corporate structure. One of the keys to...

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 will effectively phase out incandescent light bulbs by 2012-2014 in favor of compact fluorescent lamps, or CFLs. Other countries around the world have passed similar legislation to ban most incandescents. Will some energy be saved? Probably. The problem is this benefit will be more than offset by rampant dissatisfaction with lighting. We are not talking about giving up a small luxury for the greater good. We are talking about compromising light. Light is fundamental. And light is obviously for people, not buildings. The primary objective in the design of any space is...

"This is the cause of my life - new hope that we will break the old gridlock and guarantee that every American - north, south, east, west, young, old - will have decent quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege."

Here is video of a very emotional Vice-President Joe Biden today talking about the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy. Biden quoted Shakespeare, saying "we shall never see the likes of him again." . . . . . (Watch Video)

The Obama White House is behind a cynical, coldly calculated political effort to erase the meaning of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks from the American psyche and convert Sept. 11 into a day of leftist celebration and statist idolatry. This effort to reshape the American psyche has nothing to do with healing the nation and everything to do with easing the nation along in the ongoing radical transformation of America that President Obama promised during last year's election campaign. The president signed into law a measure in April that designated Sept. 11 as a National Day of Service, but...

http://www.reddirtreport.com/news.php?id=12076 OKLAHOMA CITY – The flyer is simple but informative. “Community Organizing at St. Charles.” Sounds innocuous enough. But upon closer inspection, it appears to be further attempts by ACORN-esque organizers to infiltrate well-meaning parishioners in the Catholic Church in the Oklahoma City area, among other places. The flyer reads: “Come to a special training in community organizing for Catholic parishes, presented by Oklahoma Sponsoring Committee and hosted by Our Lady of Perpetual Help parish.” Not much could be found about the Oklahoma Sponsoring Committee, other than a Grace Presbyterian Church flyer online that notes that “the OSC is a...

Anti-Americanism is a relatively recent phenomenon. The elites may have always despised American passion for individual liberties, but most common people admired America for exactly that. Upon gaining independence, a number of nations — from Uruguay to Greece to Togo to Malaysia — modeled their flags after the U.S. flag. Preambles of most Latin American constitutions closely resemble that of the U.S. Constitution, and the Latin American hero Simon Bolivar himself was an admirer of the United States and a believer in libertarianism and free markets, regardless of how his name and legacy are now being twisted by Hugo Chavez....

Generation X and Y may think Woodstock was just about the sex, drugs and rock and roll, but to our parents' generation, it was far more. For them, Woodstock was a chance to let their freak flags fly , their hair grow long, and perhaps most important of all, define themselves as a generation that didn't want anything to do with the values of their uptight, middle-class elders. Today, this self-described Woodstock nation has morphed into the very beings they rebelled against during that August weekend in 1969: Straight-shooting, buttoned-down, stressed-out parents , ABC News reports. "If that's your job,...

The editor of the Veterans of Foreign Wars' national magazine thinks the media have been irresponsible to throw around the term "defining a generation" as we near the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. In an article titled "GIs Died While Woodstock Rocked," Richard K. Kolb challenges giving mythological status to the (in)famous concert held Aug. 15-18, 1969. He takes umbrage at concertgoers frolicking in mud while an equal number of soldiers (following in their fathers' footsteps) were crawling through mud to protect the celebrants' freedom to party. Granted, Pete Townshend's guitar smashing, Country Joe's "We're-All-Gonna-Die Rag,"...

WE'VE seen mass hysteria before, but we weren't then mad enough to make it government policy. ..... But that's nothing when compared with today's galloping paranoia over invisible gases, which threatens to shut not just one airport, but entire industries and power stations. This is the mass hysteria over global warming - a hysteria caught by millions of Australians who can no more explain why they're sure the world is heating to hell than they can explain why it's now cooling instead. All this would be frightening enough - another sign of our retreat from reason - but what makes...

About 100 people turned out this morning to protest at the National Clean Energy Summit. They waved flags and carried homemade signs denouncing everything from carbon cap and trade proposals to reform for the nation's health care policy to the presidency of Barack Obama in general. The anti-Obama and Reid protesters remained in force on the corner of Swenson Street and Tropicana Avenue near the Thomas & Mack Center on the University of Nevada, Las Vegas campus, site of the summit. "How can you help the environment if you bankrupt the economy that has to do it?" asked protester Greg...

"One cause of the blunders that have made the Met Office a laughing stock is less widely appreciated, however. It is that the multi-million pound computer it uses to assist its short-term forecasting for Britain is also one of the four main official sources of data used by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to predict global warming. In this respect the IPCC's computer models have proved just as wrong in predicting global temperatures as the Met Office has been in forecasting those mild winters and heatwave summers." "In recent months, in fact, a curious little drama has...

What will it take to get developing nations to sign up to a global climate agreement? A critical part of the answer, it seems, is cold, hard cash. Wealthy nations are considering just how much poor countries should be paid to help combat global warming. Countries in poorer parts of the world like China and India are demanding that wealthier regions like the European Union and North America fund their efforts at developing clean energy technologies and help them adapt to the effects of climate change caused largely by accumulated emissions from the industrialized West. Money to fund these efforts...

If you can’t beat ‘em, quarantine ‘em . . . Unable to compete with Bill O’Reilly, who consistently thrashes him in the ratings, Keith Olbermann has come up with a better idea: accuse his nemesis of “incitement to murder” and propose the “quarantine” of Fox News. Olbermann used O’Reilly’s comments about George Tiller as his pretext to attempt to drive off television the man who drives him insane. View video here.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood defended the pro-mass transit policies of the Obama administration today, and fired back at conservative writer George Will, who devoted an entire column to attacking LaHood earlier this week. "We have to create opportunities for people who want to ride a bike or walk or take a streetcar," he said. "The only person that I've heard of who objects to this is George Will." Will wrote a column in Newsweek magazine criticizing the secretary, whom he dubbed "Secretary of Behavior Modification," for supporting measures to wean commuters off automobiles. LaHood, a former Republican congressman from Illinois,...

The transition from Candidate Obama to President Obama has been as predictable as Alaska's winter snow. We are now witnessing actions that will lead to a monumental shift away from free market capitalism and the strong work ethic that built this great country. 'Change' in this administration has meant rapid movement toward massive government growth, huge tax burdens on future generations, and an unprecedented reliance upon foreign countries. Today, we learned that Obama’s decisions continue to impact Alaskans; while we as taxpayers now own General Motors, Obama closes another dealership – this time in Soldotna as more of Alaskans’ hard-earned...

My name is George C. Joseph. I am the sole owner of Sunshine Dodge-Isuzu, a family owned and operated business in Melbourne, Florida. My family bought and paid for this automobile franchise 35 years ago in 1974. I am the second generation to manage this business. We currently employ 50+ people and before the economic slowdown we employed over 70 local people. We are active in the community and the local chamber of commerce. We deal with several dozen local vendors on a day to day basis and many more during a month. All depend on our business for part...

Future historians might well look back on events of the last week and see a milestone of decline in the waning saga of American freedom. The bridge between the free market and a command economy was likely crossed when, at government demand, thousands of car dealerships all across the country were put out of business. They were profitable, they were legal, they were useful, and the White House ordered them closed. A presidential panel, comprised of everyone except car-industry experts, demanded that Chrysler and GM cut off a third of their dealers’ heads. Hundreds of thousands will lose their jobs....

FURIOUS David Cameron tonight called for the dissolution of Parliament claiming that the political system in Britain is 'paralysed'. The Conservative leader said that the public 'wanted to pass judgement' on politicians in the wake of the expenses scandal and demanded a snap general election. As Commons Speaker Michael Martin refused to resign in chaotic scenes in the House, Mr Cameron said he wanted immediate action from Tory activists throughout the country to force the dissolution of Parliament. He also urged the general public, including Labour and LibDem supporters, to join in and start their own petitions or write to...

Europe is in its deepest recession since World War II, so reports the UK’s Telegraph.   “German economic policy is ‘bankrupt,’ economists have said.  The declaration was made as it emerged that Europe’s biggest economy has now suffered a worse ‘lost decade’ than Japan and is deeper in recession than any other major economy.  On a day of dismal news for the European economy, official figures also showed that Italy, Austria, Spain and the Netherlands are facing their biggest combined slump in post-war history.” Eurostat provides the raw data.  Here are real GDP growth numbers for some selected countries and...

Today, David Plouffe sent out an urgent message with an update on the fast brewing healthcare battle: We knew healthcare reform would face fierce opposition — and it’s begun. As we speak, the same people behind the notorious "swiftboat" ads of 2004 are already pumping millions of dollars into deceptive television ads. Their plan is simple: torpedo healthcare reform before it sees the light of day by scaring the public and distorting the President’s approach. We need the resources to take them head on with an urgent, grassroots campaign to pass real healthcare reform in 2009. When the swiftboaters flood...

Apparently the apocalyptic, doom-and-gloom, sky-is-falling liberal left is at it again with one of their anti-capital, America-hating indoctrination videos again, just like Al Gore and his "An Inconvenient Truth". "The Story of Stuff" is a huge Internet sensation and is now being shown around the country in our tax-funded public schools with the intent of scaring the hell out of the minds of our children about capitalism and America. Here is something that I hope becomes another Internet sensation. This video comes to us from the good folks at "How the World Works". It's the first part of their installment...

May 13, 2009 | In John Frankenheimer's taut 1964 film, "Seven Days in May," the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appalled at a disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, plot a coup d'état to remove the president whom they regard as too soft and naive about the evil of America's enemies. The screenplay by Rod Serling (based on a 1962 novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II) is filled with passionate lines that seem right out of today's talk radio -- "intellectual dilettantes" versus patriotism; America's loss of "greatness"; the superiority of military experience to civilian judgment and governance.

What I Wish For The World … we use plants for electricity … we make college free for everyone … we give health insurance to all who need it … we connect everyone by cell phone or computer Welcome to Doodle 4 Google, a competition where we invite K-12 students to play around with our homepage logo and see what new designs they come up with. This year we're inviting U.S. kids to join in the doodling fun, around the intriguing theme "What I Wish for the World."