Free Republic

We don't look at either of these gubernatorial races . . . as something that portends a lot for our legislative efforts," insisted White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on Tuesday, as New Jersey and Virginia voters gave Democrats a thumping. Unfortunately for the White House, its opinion no longer counts. On Jan. 20, Barack Obama began a race against time. The White House knew its liberal agenda would prove unpopular in many parts of the country represented by Democrats. So long as the president looked strong, those Blue Dogs and freshmen and swing-state senators would stick. Show them any...

Saturday's decision by Republican Dede Scozzafava to drop out of tomorrow's special Congressional election in upstate New York is a potentially big political moment that could help to return the GOP to first principles—or could lead to internecine ruin. Much will depend on how GOP leaders and conservative activists respond. Picked by GOP elites without a primary and with a voting record to the left of many Albany Democrats, Ms. Scozzafava faced a revolt by local and national conservatives in favor of businessman Doug Hoffman, who was nominated on the Conservative Party line. The longtime GOP assemblywoman saw herself falling...

An early progress report on President Barack Obama's economic recovery plan overstates by thousands the number of jobs created or saved through the stimulus program, a mistake that White House officials promise will be corrected in future reports," the Associated Press reports. Time magazine's Joe Klein has not yet labeled the AP's reporting seditious, but the Obama administration does seem to have added the wire service to its enemies list. Tommy Christopher of Mediaite.com reports Ed DeSeve, senior adviser to the president for Recovery Act implementation, complains that "the story draws misleading conclusions" and "looks at only a small portion...

Say you're sorry, Rush - or the the Rev. Al Sharpton is suing. The civil rights activist, angered by a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece written by Rush Limbaugh, threatened a defamation lawsuit Saturday against the conversative talk radio host. "Unless Mr. Limbaugh apologizes and clarifies his statements, attorneys for Rev. Sharpton will move forward with a lawsuit," said a statement from Sharpton. Limbaugh lashed out at Sharpton over his failed attempt to purchase a piece of the St. Louis Rams. Sharpton "played a leading role in the 1991 Crown Heights riot (he called neighborhood Jews 'diamond merchants') and 1995...

The National Football League, in which each Sunday men weighing 365 pounds slam headlong into men weighing 245 pounds, has decided it can't handle Rush Limbaugh, talk-show host, age 58. C'mon guys, show some guts. What began as a normal business deal—Mr. Limbaugh's participation in a group bidding to buy the St. Louis Rams NFL franchise—has degenerated into an unfortunate flap whose repercussions could extend well past Sunday afternoon football.SNIP What happened here, and is happening elsewhere in American life, is that Mr. Limbaugh's outspoken political conservatism is being deemed sufficient reason to ostracize him from polite society. By contrast,...

Allegations that Israel plunders and trafficks Palestinians' organs are ugly, false, and harmful to peace efforts. No less dangerous—such libels spread. The Aug. 17 story by Donald Bostrom in Aftonbladet, Scandanavia's leading daily, has quickly metastasized to mainstream Muslim media, spawning cartoons of Jews stealing body parts and drinking Arab blood. These have been published in Syria, Qatar, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman, to name a few. In early September, Algeria's al-Khabar newspaper echoed Mr. Bostrom in a new fantasy claiming Jewish-directed gangs of Algerians and Moroccans round up Algerian children, spirit them into Morocco and thence to...

NEW YORK — The Wall Street Journal has surpassed USA Today as the top-selling daily newspaper in the United States. The Audit Bureau of Circulations won't be releasing its latest figures until Oct. 26, but the Journal said Wednesday that it gained about 12,000 subscribers in the April-September period, compared with a year earlier. That puts its average Monday-Friday circulation at 2.02 million. The Journal claimed the top spot last week after USA Today released its circulation figures early, but had not given out specifics until Wednesday. USA Today, which has long been No. 1, said last week that it...

Congratulations to the staff of The Wall Street Journal! Despite the national trend, the WSJ continues to gain circulation. Americans don't like being lied to. Reporting the truth without the liberal spin has paid off for the Journal. As the state-run media continues to lose viewers and readers due to their biased and inaccurate reporting the Wall Street Journal is now the top-cirulating newspaper in the United States.

According to circulation records released Wednesday by the Wall Street Journal, the paper has surpassed USA Today for the top spot. It reports the average number of copies sold in the April to September period reached 2.02 million, up about 12,000 from the same period the year before. Wall Street Journal Becomes Top-Selling Newspaper

50 or more live linked articles, editorials on big government, big business RINO/Socialism/Romney/Hilary/Obama central health planning from the people that gave you public housing slums, lousy expensive highways, lousy expensive public schools....

Jan. 20, 2010 When American diplomats sat down for the first in a series of face-to-face talks with their Iranian counterparts last October in Geneva, few would have predicted that what began as a negotiation over Tehran's nuclear programs would wind up in a stunning demand by the Security Council that Israel give up its atomic weapons. Yet that's just what the U.N. body did this morning, in a resolution that was as striking for the way member states voted as it was for its substance. All 10 nonpermanent members voted for the resolution, along with permanent members Russia, China...

New Orleans Recent press reports and a big story in the Wall Street Journal have been sniping at the huge $85M set of contributions that the Service Employees International Union made on the Obama campaign. On one hand they seem to be insinuating crass influence buying and on the other hand they are hinting at financial mismanagement. Poppycock! Pundits, pols, and others can throw a lot of brickbats at SEIU and its leadership, but not for these decisions that actually show real leadership, risk taking, and exactly what it should mean to accept the challenge in these hard times to...

Critics of Obama Policies, Energized by Town-Hall Meetings, Will March SaturdayConservative activists from around the country are gathering in Washington on Saturday, seeking to continue their momentum in shaping the national debate on everything from health care to White House staffing.The demonstrators, who plan to march up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, are drawing their passion not from Bush-era fights over terrorism or gay marriage, but rather from Reagan-era debates over big government programs. The event comes on the heels of antitax events, dubbed tea parties, in April, and a series of congressional town-hall meetings nationwide last month that elicited...

1. Opinion: Sarah Palin: Obama and the Bureaucratization of Health Care 2. Opinion: Read the Union Health-Care Label 3. Opinion: Rove: Obama's Big Political Gamble 4. Obama Makes His Health Pitch 5. Jobs Takes Stage at Apple Event 6. Opinion: Norman Podhoretz: Why Are Jews Liberals? 7. Opinion: Henninger: It's Still the Economy, Stupid 8. Opinion: Obama Doubles Down 9. Rep. Wilson's 'Lie' Yell Sparks Backlash 10. iPhone Apps Help Users Find Way ---- ...and 3rd most emailed. Not bad for a "dumb undereducated hick" from outside the Beltway, or whatever it is liberal are calling her these days. btw,...

Breaking news: A politician has a speechwriter. Geoffrey Dunn writes: So what is this attempt at rebranding Palin all about? You can lay some good money down that here's what happened: The big boys — her attorney-agent Robert Barnett and probably her publisher, too, Rupert Murdoch — had a sit-down with young Sarah and told her she had better pull her mud together. They have a lot riding on the deal. Murdoch has anted up a seven-figure advance for a book written by someone who can't construct two cohesive sentences together. Barnett has staked his considerable reputation on the line....

California has a new endangered species on its hands in the San Joaquin Valley—farmers. Thanks to environmental regulations designed to protect the likes of the three-inch long delta smelt, one of America's premier agricultural regions is suffering in a drought made worse by federal regulations.

Unlike a prudential concern like national defense, for which government monopolization is objectively good—it both limits violence overall and prevents the obvious abuses to which private armies are susceptible—health care should not be subject to federal monopolization. Preserving patient choice (through a flourishing private sector) is the only way to prevent a health care monopoly from denying care arbitrarily, as we learned from HMOs in the recent past. While a government monopoly would not be motivated by profit, it would be motivated by such bureaucratic standards as quotas and defined "best procedures," which are equally beyond the influence of most...

WASHINGTON -- In briefing President Barack Obama one day this spring, White House economist Jared Bernstein delved into such arcana as the yields on different forms of credit relative to the risk. Later, Paul Volcker pulled Mr. Bernstein aside. "Why would the president want to know that level of detail?" asked the former Federal Reserve chairman. "That's what he wants," Mr. Bernstein replied. Many presidents have directed policy from on high, shunning the details of most issues. Mr. Obama has adopted a different style, particularly when it comes to economics, as he and his team wrestle with the worst financial...

The Wall Street Journal, which is also owned by Dow Jones publishing group, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, reported over the weekend that the company was in discussions with potential buyers of the business. Goldman Sachs has been appointed to lead the talks. News Corp bought Dow Jones for $5.7bn (£3.45bn) in 2007 but was recently forced to write down $2.8bn of the purchase price after its publishing operations were hit by the fall in advertising. Potential buyers of the indices business have been named as Bloomberg, FTSE – which is a joint venture between the Financial Times Group...

Meanwhile, the majority of the economists The Wall Street Journal surveyed during the past few days said the recession that began in December 2007 is now over.

The White House is priming the defibrillator paddles to revive ObamaCare, and its new strategy is to talk about "health-insurance reform," rather than "health-care reform." The point is to make its proposals seem less radical than they are, while portraying private insurers as villains for supposedly denying coverage to the sick. Sounds like a good time to explain a few facts about the modern insurance market. Start with the reality that nine out of 10 people under 65 are covered by their employers, most of which cover all employees and charge everyone the same rate. President Obama's horror stories are...

With the health-care bill faltering in Congress, the ritual weeping has begun over the death, once again, of “bipartisanship.” The belief that the answer to any problem lies with “the center” may be the greatest superstition in the ever-magical world of American politics. Mostly it is journalists and pundits who propagate the notion that crazies on the left and right have neutered the problem-solving center, the moderates, the pragmatists. In fact, the bipartisan center has been dying every year since Congress passed the Medicare and Medicaid bill of 1965. The people who back then were staffers to the politicians and...

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-read-the-wsj-for-free-online-2009-6Check out the link______________________Other than the Denver Post, which got all the Rocky Mountain News subscribers when that paper shuttered, The Wall Street Journal is the only newspaper in the top 25 to add to its circulation this year.And though this turn of events probably has as much to do with subscription discounting as anything, everyone likes to say the Journal is adding subscribers at least in part because it's erected a paywall online. We've even come out and said the troubled New York Times should follow the Journal's lead.But all solutions have their problems, and it'd be unfair...

News Corp plans to introduce micro-payments for individual articles and premium subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal's website this year in a milestone in the news industry's race to find better online business models. "A sophisticated micropayments service" will launch this autumn, Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of Dow Jones and managing editor of the Journal, told the Financial Times. The move will position the Journal as the first big newspaper title to adopt a model many are studying cautiously as they seek to reduce dependence on plunging advertising revenues. It comes as John Kerry, the Massachusetts senator leading congressional hearings on...

(snip) With regard to Sen. Jim DeMint's comment that it's better to lose with 30 committed conservatives than it is to win with 60 unprincipled opportunists (or, what the media refer to as a "big-tent coalition of moderates"), he correctly reads the tax-day protest tea leaves. The Republican Party can't outspend or be perceived as more moderate than Democrats. Many conservatives and libertarians are prepared to bolt from the Republican Party at a grassroots level unless the GOP recommits to the limited government principles that Mr. Specter embraced only when politically expedient. The Journal's editors liken a 30-vote minority party...

Cast Your Vote Here: http://forums.wsj.com/viewtopic.php?t=5828&autoredirect=true&sid=ab43288eda8b3cbc796ae705229fd9e5

It must kill the New York Times to publish this report: The rate of decline in circulation at the nation’s newspapers has accelerated since last fall, as industry figures released Monday show a more than 7 percent drop compared with the previous year. Of the top 25 newspapers in the United States, all posted declines in circulation except for The Wall Street Journal, which eked out a 0.6 percent gain, according to the figures released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. For the others, the declines ranged from 20.6 percent for The New York Post, to a slight 0.4 percent...

The pace of lower-skilled migration has slowed due to higher unemployment. This could make it less contentious to ease the path to legalization for the 12 million undocumented workers and their families in the U.S. It's also a good time to ask why we turn away skilled workers, including the ones earning 60% of the advanced degrees in engineering at U.S. universities. It is worth pointing out the demographic shortfall: Immigrants are a smaller proportion of the U.S. population than in periods such as the late 1890s and 1910s, when immigrants gave the economy a jolt of growth. snip There's...

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Many U.S. hotel chains like to offer USA Today, The Wall Street Journal or their local newspaper as a courtesy to guests. Marriott International Inc will offer a different courtesy: no paper at all. Marriott said on Monday that it will stop dropping daily papers automatically at its guests' doors. Now, it will offer them a choice of papers or, if they want, no paper at all. Based on preliminary data, Marriott projects that this will reduce newspaper distribution by about 50,000 copies daily, or 18 million annually. Beginning June 1, guests at the company's full-service...

South Carolina's governor is touchingly naïve. BY THOMAS FRANK Mark Sanford, the Republican governor of South Carolina, is the conservative of the moment. For months he has been the object of national attention thanks to his refusal to accept a portion of funds set aside for his state in the $787 billion stimulus package. Conservatives love him: Here is another brave South Carolina nullifier, putting high principle before low, craven politics. Mr. Sanford sees nothing unusual about his stand. "I've got a 15-year pattern of doing exactly this kind of thing," he said last month. I would go even farther:...

Major U.S. companies are cutting jobs and wages. But many are still spending on innovation. Wary of emerging from the recession with obsolete products, big U.S. companies spent nearly as much on research and development in the dismal last quarter of 2008 as they did a year earlier, even as their revenue fell 7.7%, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. The sampling looked at 28 of the largest U.S. R&D spenders, excluding deeply troubled auto makers and the drug industry, where R&D spending is dictated by government requirements. Big R&D spenders say they've learned from past downturns that they...

ETObama Abroad A transcript of the weekend's program on FOX News Channel. Paul Gigot: Up next on "The Journal Editorial Report," Barack Obama abroad. The president makes his first big international trip amid rising tensions with North Korea. Plus, a Spanish court takes steps to indict Bush officials for torture. How will the current administration respond? And Obama's auto ultimatum. Is the threat of bankruptcy real? "The Journal Editorial Report" begins right now.* * *Gigot: *snip*Ambassador Bolton, good to have you here with us on the panel.Let's start with the trip--the meeting with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. What is...

Nassim Taleb is an unlikely choice to play the Jimmy Stewart role in a 21st-century remake of the Depression-era classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington [1]. But the tale of a naive do-gooder who tries to remind a corrupt political class of its obligations was re-enacted this week when Taleb attended the Wall Street Journal's Future of Finance conference in Washington, D.C. A French- and Arabic-speaking former options trader with a taste for obscure Greek philosophers and the ambition to be seen as a literary figure, Taleb has grown famous for his book The Black Swan [2], which has sold...

President Obama joined yesterday in the clamor of outrage at AIG for paying some $165 million in contractually obligated employee bonuses. He and the rest of the political class thus neatly deflected attention from the larger outrage, which is the five-month Beltway cover-up over who benefited most from the AIG bailout. Taxpayers have already put up $173 billion, or more than a thousand times the amount of those bonuses, to fund the government's AIG "rescue." This federal takeover, never approved by AIG shareholders, uses the firm as a conduit to bail out other institutions. After months of government stonewalling, on...

U.S., China Seek Healthier Relationship By MARK GONGLOFF MARCH 13, 2009 AHEAD OF THE TAPE Wall Street Journal Us Trade Deficit with China going down ? LOOK AGAIN.

EXCERPT: Note to White House: don’t let the president see today’s issue of the Wall Street Journal. Tell him the dog chewed it up. Tell him the delivery boy threw it on the roof. Tell him they’re still drying it out because it got rained on. Come up with any excuse you want, but don’t let him see the paper.

RUSH: Okay, I'm going to bow to pressure. I'm going to bow to popular demand and I'm going to share with you the op-ed today that I wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "Mr. President, Keep the Airwaves Free." It's an open letter to President Obama. (interruption) What are you mouthing at me? What are you...? (interruption) Well, it's tough to prove, Dawn, but it is strange. I submit -- by request, by the way. The Journal asked me for this, so I said, "Okay. I'll set something up and I'll get it to you on Wednesday night." Let's see....

Whistleblower Harry Markopolos testified to Congress on Wednesday that he brought his evidence about Madoff to the Washington, D.C. bureau of the Wall St. Journal in 2006. He said that a reporter was ready to fly to Boston after reviewing his material, but WSJ editors stopped any further work on the story. See:http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/index.php?main_page=product_video_info&products_id=283836-1Who at the WSJ stopped the story from being told in 2006?

January 21, 2009 # Note: The following text is a quote: http://knoxville.fbi.gov/pressrel/2009/kx012109.htm Suspicious White Powder Letters Postmarked from Knoxville Received in New York and Massachusetts On Wednesday January 21, approximately 13 powder-laden envelopes were received at the office of the Wall Street Journal in New York City. The letters reportedly bear a Knoxville, Tennessee postmark. New York City Police Department's Emergency Services Unit and the FBI responded to the scene and are testing the letters to determine whether they contain a hazardous substance. An additional letter was also received today at Harvard Law School addressed to Alan Dershowitz. This letter...

Iraq looks good compared to the Korea that Harry Truman left behind. In August 1951, with a little more than a year left to Harry S. Truman's presidency, historian Henry Steele Commager published an essay in Look magazine with this prediction: "By all normal standards, [Truman's] Administration has been one of almost . . . unparalleled success . . . the verdict of history will not be the same as the verdict of contemporary critics." At the time, Truman's popularity hovered in the low 20s and most Americans considered his presidency a failure. Today, President George W. Bush leaves office...

The next day, I got an email from the retired Navy Seal buddy who'd talked me into speaking at NSWF. He shared a picture of the sign the wounded Seal put on his Baghdad hospital door. On it, the Seal had scrawled that visitors shouldn't "feel sorry" for him. "The wounds I received," he wrote, "I got in a job I love, doing it for people I love, supporting the freedom of a country I deeply love. I am incredibly tough." And on his sign he promised "a full recovery" and wrote that his hospital room was a place of...

The Department of Defense is preparing budget cuts in response to the decline in national income. The DOD budgeteers and their counterparts in the White House Office of Management and Budget apparently reason that a smaller GDP requires belt-tightening by everyone. That logic is exactly backwards. As President-elect Barack Obama and his economic advisers recognize, countering a deep economic recession requires an increase in government spending to offset the sharp decline in consumer outlays and business investment that is now under way. Without that rise in government spending, the economic downturn would be deeper and longer. Although tax cuts for...

Remember Wade Sanders? He was one of the "band of brothers"--Swift Boat veterans who supported John Kerry's presidential campaign and appeared onstage at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Sanders was one of Kerry's nastiest surrogates. In August 2004, he likened the president to a "trapped animal." In September, he compared Karl Rove and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth chief John O'Neill to Josef Goebbels. He repeatedly referred to the president and his men as "chicken hawks," an especially nasty term because it is slang for a child molester as well as a derisive term for a nonveteran who favors a...

OK! I said last week I would try to find some holiday cheer for this week, after sharing with you the depressing discovery that the union payoff legislation, or “Employee Free Choice Act,” from the Democrats in Congress would eliminate secret ballots and a vote altogether. Under this proposed legislation, if union organizers can persuade a majority of a company’s employees to sign cards supporting unionization, the union is automatically certified and no vote is taken. Well I did find some cheer! It is Richard Epstein’s article in the Wall Street Journal last Friday – “The Employee Free Choice Act...

Here is the article from Bloomberg.

OPINION -- NOVEMBER 3, 2008 What We're Fighting For Protectionism and tax hikes are wrong for the economy. By JOHN MCCAIN The presidential election occurs at a pivotal moment. Our nation is fighting two wars abroad, suffers from the greatest global financial crisis since the Great Depression, and is facing a painful recession. I believe in the greatness of America. I believe in our capacity to prosper, and to be safer and remain a beacon of light on the global stage. But we cannot spend the next four years as we have spent much of the last eight: waiting for...

The facts for this article, but not the legal conclusions, come from an article in the Wall Street Journal today, 1 November, 2008. The title of this article is, "Will this Election be Stolen?" It was written by Hans A. von Spakovsky, who is a visiting legal scholar at the Heritage Foundation, also has served as a former federal election commissioner. It is a long article, going deep into the elective history of the United States, from Framers who passed out whiskey to voters who supported them, to Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed in New York, to recent convictions of...

O +8, was O +10 two weeks ago.

There is something odd -- and dare I say novel -- in American politics about the crowds that have been greeting Barack Obama on his campaign trail. Hitherto, crowds have not been a prominent feature of American politics. We associate them with the temper of Third World societies. We think of places like Argentina and Egypt and Iran, of multitudes brought together by their zeal for a Peron or a Nasser or a Khomeini. In these kinds of societies, the crowd comes forth to affirm its faith in a redeemer: a man who would set the world right. As the...

Acorn, the liberal "community organizing" group that claims it will deploy 15,000 get-out-the-vote workers on Election Day, can't stay out of the news.The FBI is investigating its voter registration efforts in several states, amid allegations that almost a third of the 1.3 million cards it turned in are invalid. And yesterday, a former employee of Acorn testified in a Pennsylvania state court that the group's quality-control efforts were "minimal or nonexistent" and largely window dressing. Anita MonCrief also says that Acorn was given lists of potential donors by several Democratic presidential campaigns, including that of Barack Obama, to troll for...