Free Republic

Those of us who have read Ayn Rand can sometimes get too caught up in applying fiction to current reality. Yes, the state is overburdening, yes it will get larger and more obnoxious in the decade from 2010 to 2020. Finally, the man who would lead said state into a new era of statist dictates, doesn’t exactly surround himself with people who view America through a positive frame of reference. All of that stipulated up front, its enough to make paranoid people, well, more paranoid and more and more ready to Chuck the whole thing and light out for The...

With an African-American running for President this year, there has been a lot of chatter about the "Bradley effect," allowing the media to wail about institutional racism in America. Named after Tom Bradley, who lost his election for California governor in 1982 despite a substantial lead in the polls, the Bradley effect says that black candidates will poll much stronger than the actual election results. First of all, if true, this is the opposite of racism: It is fear of being accused of racism. For most Americans, there is nothing more terrifying than the prospect of being called a racist....

Last time we wrote this very article, it was 9/26/08. So, let’s take a look at whether any changes are in line. Revisions or changes will be in RED. Here is the Tracker –> Senate Race Table. (Our Methodology: We take the polling average of the 4 MOST RECENT polls and average them together to reach a real number of where the race is at, statistically. That prevents outliers from effecting our numbers too much and needlessly shifting races) We have listed THREE GUARANTEED DEM Pickups: Virginia, New Mexico, and Colorado. Out: Virginia, Senator John Warner and New Mexico Senator...

What is Sarah’s Law, the Child and Teen Safety and Stop Predators Act? Sarah’s Law is a constitutional amendment initiative currently gathering signatures to appear on the November 2008 ballot. Sarah’s Law requires a doctor to notify a parent, or, in case of parental abuse, another adult family member of an unemancipated minor 48 hours before performing an abortion on her. It also requires a doctor to obtain the personal consent of a minor before performing the abortion and allows for court intervention if a minor is being coerced to have an abortion. [top] Where did Sarah’s Law come from?...

Honestly, the news media is at a bit of a loss. It’s hard to write bad news about something that is so clearly a big success. Several reporters were so skeptical that a “million lawn sign grassroots effort” would really materialize. We could easily have used two million! So many supporters are calling in trying to get more signs, more bumper stickers, more wave signs, that the campaign is hustling to meet demand. In the Latino community, ad campaigns are sweeping through on the big networks and throughout television stations statewide. Radio campaigns will also be heard, with well-respected Latino...

Review: The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes By Lil Tuttle What happens if government intervenes in a nation’s economic crisis and makes it worse? Amity Shlaes tells such a story in her book, The Forgotten Man: a New History of the Great Depression (HarperCollins). School children are generally taught this standard history lesson about the Great Depression: The 1920s was a period of false growth, high living and low morals brought to a halt by the 1929 stock market crash. The crash led to crippling inflation and the nation’s economic collapse. President Franklin D. Roosevelt took control and ushered...

After committing a murder in Rome, the famous 17th century Italian painter Caravaggio went to Malta to avoid the death penalty. While there, the Great Master of the Order of the Knights of Malta commissioned him to do a painting for the chapel of the Co-Cathedral of St. John in Valletta. Caravaggio chose as his theme the martyrdom of John the Baptist. He produced The Beheading of St. John, his largest work, the only one he ever signed. No doubt the scene touched him personally.    Herod was married to Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife. Because John the Baptist preached against...

First I admit that I took the meaning of her name from another thread and expanded and documented it a bit, but it is truly very interesting. You entered: SarahThere are 5 letters in your name.Those 5 letters total to 20There are 2 vowels and 3 consonants in your name. What your first name means: Muslim Female Variant of Sara: Pure. Happy. Hebrew Female Princess. In the Bible, Sarah was the wife of Abraham and mother of Isaac. Her name was originally Sarai (quarrelsome), but God commanded that her name be changed to Sarah before the birth of her son. Biblical...

by Edward Hudgins Important truths about human nature and morality have been on display in the 2008 presidential campaign. Voters are angry as they watch the stock market and their retirement accounts collapse. They are angry as they see CEOs of collapsed financial institutions walking away with huge compensation packages, seeming rewards for their failures. And they are angry at Congress and the Bush administration further rewarding them with a $700 billion bailout. Voters are venting their anger principally on Republicans who they see as responsible for the current financial mess. Republicans deserve what they get, but not because they...

The Nobel committee can stop looking for next year's prize-winner in economics and hand the thing right now to Harold Myerson. The WaPo columnist's effort of today, Gods That Failed, is Krugmanesque, reading like an extended gloat at the expense of believers in free markets. Ha-ha, mocks Myerson, your god of unregulated capitalism is dead. Just like Communism failed, so has your system. You half-expect Myerson to end with a self-satisfied "nah nah nah nah nah!" From Myerson's opening paras [emphasis added]: In 1949, a number of famous writers, among them Arthur Koestler, André Gide, Richard Wright, Stephen Spender and...

Much has been made of Senator Obama's post-collegiate experience as a "Community Organizer" in Black (Negro) areas of the vast Chicago Southside. At the Republican Convention, the mere concept obtained some 'mileage' as a source for humor. The idea of an Ivy League College boy coming, full of the Leftwing theories & notions so popular in certain Colleges and Universities in post McKinley America, to tell those living in a large ethnic community how to organize that community is, admittedly, inherently funny. It is not humor in any way peculiar to the racial makeup of south Chicago; indeed, no different...

"Radicalism is a cause whose utopian agendas result in an ethic where the ends outweigh and ultimately justify any means. Like the Salvationist agendas of jihad, the Left's apocalyptic goal of ‘social justice' is the equivalent of an earthly redemption. A planet saved, a world without poverty, racism, inequality, or war - what means would not be justified to achieve such millennial ends?" - David Horowitz, former 60s Radical -- Unholy Alliance; p. 127 Saul Alinsky was the father of community organizing. Before Alinsky devised his diabolical plan to bring the international socialist revolution to America -- working within the...

Barack Obama is not being truthful about McCain's health care plan. McCain would provide a refundable tax credit of $5,000 to all families, and $2,500 for single workers, to be used to help buy health insurance. On October 4, Obama said in Newport News, VA, "Senator McCain would pay for his plan, in part, by taxing your health care benefits for the first time in history. And this tax would come out of your paycheck. But the new tax credit he is proposing? That wouldn't go to you. It would go directly to your insurance company -- not your bank...

He's "not necessarily" for women drafted into combat and not necessarily against it. Likewise, he's not necessarily for gay marriage and not necessarily against it. Shouldn't McCain ask the American people during Wednesday's debate if they want the last stages of social revolution? That's what they will get. The triumvirate of Obama, Pelosi and Reid means national gay marriage, an expanded culture of women in combat, and much more. The first hundred days under Bill Clinton were pretty ridiculous, full of outlandish comments and false starts toward radicalism. But they will look tame in comparison to Obama's.

Election Day is a mere twenty some days away. We are down to the last throws to win the hearts and minds of America. Voters cannot make intelligent choices without wisdom and truth. Often, it is a hard pill to swallow. But someone I know very personally said, "Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." (John 8:32) For weeks I have not written a column. I have been absorbing everything that has been taking place. I have been frozen with despair and shock along with so many others watching the current events unfold. However,...

In 1949, a number of famous writers, among them Arthur Koestler, André Gide, Richard Wright, Stephen Spender and Ignazio Silone, wrote essays explaining why they were no longer communists. The essays were collected in a volume entitled "The God That Failed." Today, conservative intellectuals might want to consider writing a tome on the failure of their own beloved deity, unregulated capitalism. The fall of the financial system has been so fast and far-reaching that there's been no time to fully consider its implications for the reigning economic theology of the past 30 years. But with the most right-wing administration in...

YEAR PARTY SEATS 1988 Reform 0 1993 Reform 52 1997 Reform 60 2000 Canadian Alliance 66 2004 Conservative 99 2006 Conservative 124 2008 Conservative 143 In most Toronto ridings the CPC made strong second place showings. In my riding, York Centre, the trend is: YEAR Conservative Vote % 2004 26 2006 30 2008 38

Conservatism may be a busted flush south of the border (as the experts assure us), but up north Stephen Harper has survived as Prime Minister and modestly improved his position by some 20 or so seats. He was on course for a Tory majority government until the global financial Armageddon hijacked the news cycle halfway through the campaign. Still, he's an incrementalist and he'll be reasonably satisfied not just with the Conservative gains but also with the vote-splitting among the opposition. After all, one unstated goal of his campaign was to weaken Canadians' assumption that the Liberals are the country's...

According to the Florida Supreme Court, Amendment 2 does just one thing. It defines marriage as between only one man and one woman into the Florida Constitution. When an amendment to the Florida Constitution is submitted, it goes through an approval process that finishes with the court deciding whether the proposed amendment deals with only one subject. When Amendment 2 was submitted for review by the court, the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the language. It argued the amendment dealt with more than one subject. When the case was heard, the ACLU attorneys asserted six times that Amendment 2 would...

Sen. Barack Obama's views on life issues ranging from abortion to embryonic stem cell research mark him as not merely a pro-choice politician, but rather as the most extreme pro-abortion candidate to have ever run on a major party ticket. Barack Obama is the most extreme pro-abortion candidate ever to seek the office of President of the United States. He is the most extreme pro-abortion member of the United States Senate. Indeed, he is the most extreme pro-abortion legislator ever to serve in either house of the United States Congress. Yet there are Catholics and Evangelicals-even self-identified pro-life Catholics and...

ACADEMIC ADVANCES Forty years ago, when the data series analyzed here began, just three in ten college freshmen had fathers who had a college education. Now, a majority do. Young college students today have higher education goals than their predecessors did a generation ago. The changes have been particularly dramatic for young women, with a fivefold increase in the number who plan to become doctors, and a threefold increase in the number who plan to get a Ph.D. OBJECTIVES AND IDEOLOGY Over the past 40 years, college freshmen have changed their views about some objectives that will be essential or...

A look at the life of William F. Buckley, leader of one of the most successful intellectual movements in American history. William F. Buckley: Right From The Start

Many conservative voters in Florida and elsewhere accuse Democrat Barack Obama of having socialist tendencies, a charge increasingly hard to make while the federal government under the Bush administration is intervening in financial markets. The latest example: Bush said this morning Uncle Sam will help banks gain access to more capital so they can resume lending. His comments follow extraordinary measures by the feds to prop up some private institutions and consolidate others. Republican John McCain added his own form of intervention by proposing to have the government buy up troubled mortgages and refinance them. The socialism argument is mostly...

Instead, partisan animosity is growing rather than waning. Democrats charge, essentially, that the McCain campaign is engaging in character assassination against their candidate, Barack Obama. The Republican National Committee says it is spending $2 million to beef up security at campaign offices because of acts of vandalism and "violent intimidation tactics" by Obama supporters. Campaign rallies are turning ugly; charges of racism are starting to appear. Pollster Peter Hart has found some startling new evidence of high tensions. In surveying voters over the weekend, Mr. Hart found that more than a third of each candidate's supporters say they have grown...

The creepy indocrination of children in the art of Obama-worship continues: My 8th grade son is in an advanced English class at a public middle school here in Racine, Wisconsin. I just found out that my son's new (copyright 2008) Wisconsin - McDougal Littell Literature book has 15 pages covering Barack Obama. I was shocked - No John McCain, no Hillary Clinton, no George Bush - Just Barack Obama. I'm wondering how it is that Obama's story gets put into an 8th grade literature book? It would be one thing, if it was just the tidbit about his boyhood days,...

Christopher Buckley, the author and son of the late conservative mainstay William F. Buckley, said in a telephone interview that he has resigned from the National Review, the political journal his father founded in 1955. As a result, he wrote to Richard Lowry, the editor of the National Review, and its publisher, Jack Fowler, offering to resign, and “this offer was rather briskly accepted,” Mr. Buckley said.

Gov. Sarah Palin Johnstown, Oct 14, 2008 / 06:15 am (CNA).- Republican vice-presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin, in a speech at a Saturday rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, has attacked what she called Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama’s “extreme and troubling” stand on abortion. Palin argued that there are few issues more important than who is protected under law and insisted that everyone “belongs in the circle of protection.” “As defenders of the culture of life, John McCain and I believe in the goodness and potential of every innocent life,” Gov. Palin began. “I believe the truest measure of any...

    "Now the last safe haven for Christians is gone," said Canon Andrew White, the vicar of St. George's church in Baghdad. During the past week, twelve Christians have been killed and more than 3,000 have left the city of Mosul, once considered a safe zone for persecuted Iraqi Christians.   Mosul, on the plain of Nineveh in northern Iraq, has long been home to one of the largest remaining Christian communities in the nation. Furthermore, in recent years the city has been a destination for persecuted Christians.   Unfortunately, the safety of Mosul was only relative to...

BAM'S SPEECH POLICE By MICHAEL BARONE October 14, 2008 'I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors," Barack Obama told a crowd in Elko, Nev. "I want you to talk to them, whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face." Actually, Obama supporters are doing a lot more than getting into people's faces. They seem determined to shut people up. That's what Obama supporters, alerted by campaign e-mails, did when conservative Stanley Kurtz appeared on Milt Rosenberg's WGN radio...

Darwin called him, ‘My good and kind agent for the propagation of the Gospel—i.e. the devil’s gospel.’2 ‘Out of his provocations came … the West’s new faith—agnosticism (he coined the word).’3 Huxley, although an unbeliever, was thoroughly familiar with the gospel, and had little time for Christians who compromised their position by supporting the anti-biblical belief of evolutionary naturalism. He wrote: ‘I am fairly at a loss to comprehend how any one, for a moment, can doubt that Christian theology must stand or fall with the historical trustworthiness of the Jewish Scriptures. The very conception of the Messiah, or Christ,...

As far back as Harvard Law School, Obama dreamed of transforming America in the image of community organizations such as ACORN with whom and for whom he trained. In the May 3, 1990, edition of Chicago's Daily Herald newspaper, there's an article in which Obama, while attending Harvard Law School, gives his skewed view of American society and his plans for it. "I'm interested in organizations, not movements," the young Obama said, "because movements dissipate but organizations don't." Through these organizations, Obama hoped that "more and more people will begin to feel their story is somehow part of this larger...

Recently, Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate Joe Biden made the observation that past is prologue. Perhaps that’s why the Obama camp is courting Christians so hard this election year. Certainly, there is evidence from the past showing clearly that evangelical Christians can make the difference in the Presidential race. Back in November of 2004, the Washington Post ran a story that included this telling statement: “…Christian activists led the charge that GOP operatives followed and capitalized upon.” Staff writers Alan Cooperman and Thomas B. Edsall noted that grassroots activists in Ohio, Michigan, and Florida praised President Bush’s political adviser, Karl Rove, with...

Like it or not, Mayor Gavin Newsom is proving to be the gift that keeps on giving for the campaign to deprive same-sex couples of their right to marry. Newsom's hyperkinetic rally cry after the May 15 Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality - "The door's wide open now ... it's going to happen ... whether you like it or not," he shouted gleefully - made him the inevitable star of the Yes on 8 TV spots. I say "inevitable" because I remember my first reaction when I saw his gloating, taunting speech on live television that day. A man...

Gavin Newsom has always played a starring role in the same-sex marriage debate, but in recent weeks that role has turned decidedly unheroic. The mayor has become the reluctant face of the campaign opposing same-sex unions with the help of a prominent Yes-on-Proposition 8 TV ad. Conservative blogs have been atwitter about Newsom last week officiating at the wedding of a lesbian teacher whose class of first-graders took a field trip to celebrate with her.In many ways, Newsom has become the single best campaign tool for proponents of Prop. 8 - and that might have been inevitable, political experts said....

It is time to confront the unhappy fact about our country: There are now two Americas. Not a rich one and a poor one; economic status plays little role in this division. There is a Red one and a Blue one. For most of my life I have believed, in what I now regard as wishful thinking, that the Right and Left wings have essentially the same vision for America, that it's only about ways to get there in which the two sides differ. Right and Left share the same ends, I thought. That is not the case. For the...

In a violent display of intolerance, an opponent of Proposition 8 attacked and seriously injured a man who was volunteering on Sunday for the initiative to define marriage as between and a man and a woman. Prop. 8 supporter, Jose Nunez, 37, was brutally assaulted while waiting to distribute yard signs to other supporters of the initiative after church services at the St. Stanislaus Parish in Modesto. The assailant grabbed about 75 signs and yelled at Nunez accusingly, “What do you have against gays!” Although Nunez replied that he had nothing against gays, he was attacked anyway. The assailant punched...

Cognizant of the backlash that has accompanied past left-wing power grabs, and the tendency of Americans to reject radicalism, the Left is attempting to slip Obama past the American people - a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The ever-quotable Michelle Obama, a woman whose pride in her country appeared with its embrace of her radical husband disappeared from the campaign trail months ago. So did Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Jeremiah Wright, and other agitators from the civil rights industry. Quiet has been Kweisi Mfume, and restrained has been the NAACP. Gone too are the usual suspects from Hollywood: there have been...

We choose our own friends and associates. And this is significant in Obama's case in particular as we are trying to get a sense of who he is and what informs him. Obama is asking the nation to honor him with its highest office. Yet, during most of his adulthood, he has befriended some of the worst kind of people — many of whom detest the nation Obama seeks to lead. And when combined with Obama's own extremism on issue after issue (is there a left-wing position he does not embrace?), there can be no doubt that an Obama administration...

(CNN) -- Sen. Barack Obama has a sizeable lead over Sen. John McCain, polls show, but those numbers could be deceiving if the "Bradley effect" comes into play. The Bradley effect is named after former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, an African-American who ran for California governor in 1982. Exit polls showed Bradley leading by a wide margin, and the Democrat confidentially thought it would be an early election night. But Bradley and the polls were wrong. He lost to Republican George Deukmejian. The theory was that polling was wrong because some voters, who did not want to appear bigoted,...

Perhaps when you see the Sara Silverman hateful video called the "The Great Schlep" You take the time to forward this video that was done by Sara Silverman a fews years earlier that makes fun of elderly people in a nursing home and then it ends with the Grandma in a coffin in a funeral home. Any Rabbi or Jewish organization like the "Jewish Council for Education and Research endorsing a Whore like Sara Silverman probably has no sense of compassion toward people in need. So be sure and send this link to your aging Bubbies and Zadies (Grandma's...

Levi Johnston, who's having a baby with Gov. Sarah Palin's daughter, can't believe all the things he's hearing. No, he wasn't held against his will on the campaign trail. No, he's not being forced into a shotgun wedding with 17-year-old Bristol Palin. "None of that's true," Johnston, 18, said in a brief interview with The Associated Press. "We both love each other. We both want to marry each other. And that's what we are going to do." Standing in the driveway of his family home in this small Alaska town, Johnston spoke about the rumors swirling around him. The soft-spoken...

What has happened to America? Barack Obama says that we are no longer a Christian nation, but rather a nation of Christians, Muslims, Atheists. Say it is never so. But it is. As a Christian, I have been failing. If you are a Christian and are reading this maybe you have been failing too. God had a purpose for us, to proclaim the Good News, but too often I find myself proclaiming that a football coach should be fired or that a politician should be elected. I am ashamed to say that I spoke on things I shouldn't have and...

In 1985, Barack Obama traveled halfway across the country to take a job that he didn't fully understand. But, while he knew little about his new vocation--community organizer--it still had a romantic ring, at least to his 24-year-old ears. With his old classmates from Columbia, he had talked frequently about political change. Now, he was moving to Chicago to put that talk into action. His 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, recounts his idealistic effusions: "Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots. That's what I'll do. I'll organize black folks....

Return to the Article October 13, 2008What an Obama Administration Might Look LikeBy William Tate With the media having all but declared Barack Obama the winner in the presidential election, it could be time to consider what an Obama administration might look like. The Vice-President, of course, would be Joe "I'm not the guy" Biden, but here are some suggestions for other positions. Secretary of State: Barack Obama. Since Obama has already committed to meeting directly with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the rest of the world's worst despots without pre-conditions, he has for all practical purposes named himself Secretary of State....

Two solitudes In Canada, the expression "two solitudes" was traditionally used to describe relations between the English and French, two founding "nations" (in the French sense of the word) "warring within the bosom" of our one "nation" (in the English sense). This has become somewhat dated, for under our official state policy of "multiculturalism," today it would be more accurate to refer to "innumerable solitudes." The idea of "two solitudes" itself we lifted from Benjamin Disraeli (our invisible Father of Confederation, in so many ways), who applied it to the "two nations" he thought had formed within early Victorian Britain,...

Gone are the days of the old Republican Party- a party that supported the principles of less government, low spending, low taxes, the rule of law, and the United States Constitution. Nowadays, Republicans spend as much as Democrats, burdening future generations with inevitable tax hikes, and making our federal government larger and more powerful than one could have imagined possible just a few years ago. Both parties waste billions, but the main difference is the Republicans are now wasting it overseas nation-building and being the world’s policeman. Sad to say, if it is going to be wasted, I would rather...

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) - Calling him the true reformer in the presidential contest, members of Reform Party USA endorsed Sen. John McCain for president on Saturday. Party Chairman Frank MacKay said representatives from 27 states voted to endorse McCain, the Republican nominee and Arizona senator. None voted for Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois. "It's a good day for reform," MacKay told The Associated Press. "Whether (McCain) wins or loses, I believe we did the right thing and it gives independents the best chance out there to elect one of our own to the White House." MacKay said the...

Pierce Flanigan died suddenly of a stroke. Wednesday of this week. He was my lifelong friend. But this is about his life, not his death. To save much time in a complex story about the Flanigan men, I wrote part of this story in 2005, with the title, “Condi Rice & Pierce Flanigan’s Father’s Hat,” about Pierce’s father’s death. It also introduces the one story about Pierce when he was 12 years old, that I offer as a symbol of the man, Our fathers, who were friends, had installed us both in Troop 35 at the Church of the Redeemer...

With credit markets in New York in crisis last week, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sent an extraordinary letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson asking for $7 billion. Although the governor has since withdrawn that request, it testifies to the dire state of his budget. Yet days before penning his note, the governor told an audience at the Commonwealth Club of California not to worry about the state's budget crunch and to approve $9.95 billion in new debt on the November ballot to build a bullet train to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco: "Just because we have a problem with...

A mini asteroid collided safely with Sudan this week, but mega disaster looms with nearly 1000 hazardous near-Earth objects roaming our universe—plus even more dangerous ones we haven't spotted yet. With no response plan for the worst-case scenario in place anywhere on Earth, four-time shuttle astronaut Thomas D. Jones offers a call to arms against the coming cosmic storm. Early last Monday, Richard Kowalski, a University of Arizona astronomer at the Catalina Sky Survey team's 60-in. search telescope atop Mt. Lemmon near Tucson, flashed word to NASA of the discovery of a new Near Earth Object (NEO). The small asteroid,...