Free Republic

In preparation for the two recent back-to-back blizzards, D.C. residents were emptying the shelves of neighborhood grocery stores. Notwithstanding the pre-blizzard panic buying, what's interesting is that no one was freaking out about whether the stores would be adequately stocked after the blizzards. After all, think about it: there is absolutely no government planning that goes into what is stocked in grocery stores. No federal Department of Food. No local or state planning commission. No grocery boards. No bureaucrats or bureaucracies. No laws requiring grocery stores to be well-stocked. No rules and regulations dictating how much of each food item,...

"I try to avoid hyperbole, but I think Obama is possibly the most dangerous and destructive president we have ever had."—Nat Hentoff Nat Hentoff has had a life well spent, one chock full of controversy fueled by his passion for the protection of civil liberties and human rights. Hentoff is known as a civil libertarian, free speech activist, anti-death penalty advocate, pro-lifer and not uncommon critic of the ideological left.At 84, Nat Hentoff is an American classic who has never shied away from an issue. For example, he defended a woman rejected from law school because she was Caucasian;...

After 2 weeks of sleepless nights, I have finished reading all 1,017 pages of the Health Care Bill and writing a Synopsis. Unlike our elected representatives, I have an entire copy of the bill and have provided page numbers and line numbers in my synopsis making it easy for anyone to look up what I am saying. It's scary and we will all soon be in the public health plan. Please send this to as many people as possible. SYNOPSIS OF HR 3200 America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 The bill is a 1,017 page document broken out in...

PRESIDENT Obama promises that "if you like your health plan, you can keep it," even after he reforms our health-care system. That's untrue. The bills now before Congress would force you to switch to a managed-care plan with limits on your access to specialists and tests. Two main bills are being rushed through Congress with the goal of combining them into a finished product by August. Under either, a new government bureaucracy will select health plans that it considers in your best interest, and you will have to enroll in one of these "qualified plans." If you now get your...

There has been a great deal of chatter in both national and international circles concerning Obama’s deliberate omission of Kenya, homeland of his Muslim father, as he chose to go to Ghana instead on his African tour. The spinmeisters have crafted a crafty response, but once again, it’s just more Obama obfuscation and mendacity. In other words, he’s lying. “Ghana’s political pedigree as the first independent country in sub-Saharan Africa and kingpin of Africa’s liberation struggle, as well as its recent exemplary strides in democracy, political stability and good governance, might have been compelling credentials that made it a preferred...

It was a recurring theme of Barack Obama's presidential campaign — a call for openness: "Transparency and accountability, getting the American people involved, that's how we're gonna bring about change," candidate Obama said. And the theme continued on Obama's first day as president: "Starting today, every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information, but those who seek to make it known." But for advocates of open government, the new era of openness has yet to dawn. "Once all the pretty speeches were over in the first couple...

American Jews and Israel would do well to take a page from the book of Saul Alinsky, who provides the radical underpinning for much of how the Obama left sees the world: "As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be." It is time for American Jews to leave the Democratic Party, to see reality as it is and not how they wish it to be. To be a Jew in this world is dangerous ...and our president and his party are deliberately making it more so (even...

Foes of the global jihad are constantly accused of quoting the Qur'an "out of context," but when Barack Obama actually did so in Cairo yesterday, no one seems to have minded. He quoted one Qur'an verse in connection with speaking of our shared interests as human beings: As the Holy Koran tells us, "Be conscious of God and speak always the truth." That is what I will try to do – to speak the truth as best I can, humbled by the task before us, and firm in my belief that the interests we share as human beings are far...

I am afraid I no longer believe . . .…That we have an inquisitive American media as we once knew it. There has emerged something as bad as state-sanctioned coercion—which we could at least identify, and thus struggle against.Now comes a more insidious, brave new self-imposed censorship of the Orwellian mode. It is not just the perennial embarrassment Chris Matthews describing his Obama ecstasy on camera, or even Newsweek’s Evan Thomas comparing his President to God, or even CNN execs being exposed trashing the US abroad at Davos, or whitewashing Saddam, but rather a more incremental new groupspeak in which...

Why all the pussyfooting about identifying Barack Hussein Obama for what he truly is, a despot? Now that his Muslim roots have emerged in time for Muslim Brotherhood members to attend his Cairo speech, you can make that, a Muslim despot. Just as surely as he had his own records sealed from public view, out on the campaign trail, he snookered at least some of his voters on hidden Muslim roots. For those who consider the despot tag too harsh, a president who works to take down his own country is a despot. This despot acts as though the United...

A tipster alerted me to an interesting assertion. A cursory review by that person showed that many of the Chrysler dealers on the closing list were heavy Republican donors. To quickly review the situation, I took all dealer owners whose names appeared more than once in the list. And, of those who contributed to political campaigns, every single one had donated almost exclusively to GOP candidates. While this isn't an exhaustive review, it does have some ominous implications if it can be verified. However, I also found additional research online at Scribd (author unknown), which also appears to point to...

I was not impressed by Sen. Barack Obama after the first time I saw him. At first I was excited to see a black candidate. He looked youthful, spoke well, appeared to be confident – a wholesome presidential package. It is so instinctive for most people to want to see blacks succeed. It is as if all humanity is carrying a collective guilt for what the ancestors of blacks endured. However, despite my initial interest in him, I was soon put off, not just because of his shallowness but also because there was an air of haughtiness in his demeanor...

She knew from the beginning. According to a CIA document compiled by the Director of National Intelligence summarizing briefings to Congress on the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on terrorist detainees, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca) knew from the very beginning that those techniques -- including waterboarding -- were being used on September 2, 2002. According to the memo the very first briefing listed is 9/4/02 with then Rep. Porter Goss & Pelosi. The summary of the briefing says: “Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of the particular EITs that...

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people. BREAKING NEWS Russia warns NATO not to rattle weapons near Russia's borders Barack Obama - the new Abraham Lincoln? Swine flu becomes new number one global danger The ultimate perfection More... True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and...

No president in modern times has managed to conceal so much of his biography as this one. The journalists assigned to the Obama beat seem to have lost their traditional avidity for digging out the missing details. We do not have a medical report, or a college transcript from Columbia, or a notion of how well he did in Harvard Law School. These things are not automatically significant, but they can be. Nobody thinks the president has some basic medical problem. He shows every sign of being in excellent physical condition. But so did John F. Kennedy, who turned out...

The DHS screed that Jonah and some of our Marked Men (Steyn, Hemingway and Krikorian) have weighed in on is entirely predictable. The only conceivable surprise is that it is so blatant and has happened so soon. But all they've done is commit to paper the same stuff they say to each other in conversation. (I'd love to see the email trail and the drafts that led to the final version.) I'm still digging out of my various pre-election hate mail piles — you know, "How could say Obama is a socialist who will redistribute wealth just because he used...

I am a student of history. Professionally. I have written 15 books in six languages, and have studied it all my life. I think there is something monumentally large afoot, and I do not believe it is just a banking crisis, or a mortgage crisis, or a credit crisis. Yes, these exist but they are merely single facets on a very large gemstone that is only now coming into a sharper focus. Something of historic proportions is happening. I can sense it because I know how it feels, smells, what it looks like, and how people react to it. Yes,...

In just the first 70 days of the new administration, a number of Obama supporters have expressed some dismay at their new president. Some find his ethically challenged appointments at odds with his soaring moral rhetoric. Others lament his apparent inability to stir up supporters in impromptu speeches, at least in the manner he did with set oratory on the campaign trail. And they worry about his occasionally insensitive remark. Many cannot quite figure out why, after lambasting George W. Bush for running a $500-billion deficit, Obama has outlined eight years of budgetary red ink that would nearly match the...