Free Republic

The Missouri Capitol no longer has the only bust of conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh. Now, the front office of Limbaugh's Florida studio has one, too. Today, Limbaugh told his listeners that he received a giant replica of the statute from friends in honor of the 24th anniversary of his EIB Network radio show. Like the original, the copy was made by Kansas City sculptor E. Spencer Schubert, Limbaugh said. "You know, we ought to call the White House and tell ‘em we have this bust of me that we’d like to donate. We’d like to lend them a...

In a statement posted on the White House’s website on Tuesday afternoon, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer revealed an email he sent to Charles Krauthammer offering an apology to syndicated columnist and Fox News Channel regular over a back-and-forth about a bust of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Krauthammer asked that the apology — which even included an endorsement for Krauthammer’s favorite Major League Baseball team, the Washington Nationals — be made public, and Pfeiffer obliged: Charles, I take your criticism seriously and you are correct that you are owed an apology. There was clearly an internal confusion...

In a statement posted on the White House’s website on Tuesday afternoon, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer revealed an email he sent to Charles Krauthammer offering an apology to syndicated columnist and Fox News Channel regular over a back-and-forth about a bust of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Krauthammer asked that the apology — which even included an endorsement for Krauthammer’s favorite Major League Baseball team, the Washington Nationals — be made public, and Pfeiffer obliged: Charles, I take your criticism seriously and you are correct that you are owed an apology. There was clearly an internal confusion...

Lately, there’s been a rumor swirling around about the current location of the bust of Winston Churchill. Some have claimed that President Obama removed the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office and sent it back to the British Embassy. Now, normally we wouldn’t address a rumor that’s so patently false, but just this morning the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer repeated this ridiculous claim in his column. He said President Obama “started his Presidency by returning to the British Embassy the bust of Winston Churchill that had graced the Oval Office.” This is 100% false. The bust still in...

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (KMOX) - It’s official and it’s a done deal: Conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh is now officially inducted into the Hall of Famous Missourians. People might have wondered why he wasn’t doing his radio show today — it’s because he was in Jefferson City. Just before 1:00 p.m. the mad scramble in the halls of the state capitol began, barriers started going up and additional Capitol police and the Highway Patrol started drifting in. The word leaked out that today was the day for Limbaugh to take his place in Missouri history. Apparently the only people aware...

NEW HAVEN— Two Miami men have been arrested in the dramatic theft of $80 million in pharmaceuticals from an Eli Lilly Co. warehouse in Enfield two years ago, federal authorities announced Thursday. Amaury Villa, 37, and his brother, Amed Villa, 46, both citizens of Cuba who live in Miami, were arrested Thursday in Miami on conspiracy and theft charges related to their alleged participation in the theft. The thieves gained access to the 70,000-square-foot warehouse on Freshwater Boulevard by cutting a hole through its roof, descending into the interior on ropes hung from the hole and disabling the security system.

Watch a police officer stop this plane with his car John McLane's got nothing on this real Brazilian Federal Police Officer, who use his cop car to take down a plane loaded with smugglers and $150,000 of stolen electronics. Here is THE LINK.

Health care remains one of President Barack Obama's greatest political weaknesses. The issue remains an equally serious problem for Republican Mitt Romney. President Obama's program to centralize medical decision-making in Washington remains as unpopular as ever. Insurers are raising premiums and canceling policies. The president's promise that Americans can keep their existing coverage has turned out to be void. Health care providers and insurers are cutting back operations and dropping jobs to comply with the new law. Washington has been forced to issue temporary waivers — over 1400, as of mid-June — to moderate the legislation's impact. Moreover, ObamaCare has...

We are still living in the wake of the great 21st century bubble. That is the dominant economic and financial fact of 2011, which applies both to the American housing and mortgage debt, and to the European sovereign debt, crises. As the massive losses keep coming, there is a lot of negotiating, suing, whining and politicking among contentious parties over who will take which losses. Among the many losses imposed by the bubble is a well-deserved loss of credibility on the part of central bankers and economists. "Policy makers around the world didn't see the global financial crisis coming," columnist...

(CNN) -- A church called the Phoenix Goddess Temple has been accused of being a house of prostitution, and a six-month undercover investigation has resulted in the arrests of 20 women and men who worked there, Phoenix police said Friday. Authorities are still searching for 17 more people -- all of whom have been indicted -- in connection with the prostitution enterprise, said Sgt. Steve Martos, a Phoenix police spokesman. The 20 people arrested so far have been charged with prostitution or other offenses, police said. During a Wednesday search of the Phoenix temple and two church-related sites in nearby...

Trying to Repeat 1990s Defense Cuts When the World Is Much Different, Risks Growing Defense cuts in the 1990s led to direct consequences and casualties when America went to war after 9/11. When U.S. forces were sent to Iraq without adequate body armor protection or up-armored vehicles, the country was outraged. Families were forced to mail body armor to soldiers overseas, troop transports lacking modernized armor were left unnecessarily vulnerable to roadside bomb attacks, combat operations were doubled in length and possibly cost lives, and conditions at medical centers such as Walter Reed reached inexcusable levels.

8 Share Print Email “Did Fast & Furious violate the Arms Export Control Act?” attorney and author David T. Hardy asks on his Of Arms and the Law blog. He’s referring to the Arms Export Control Act that “authorizes the President to define defense articles and regulate their export.” There’s no exemption from the State Department permit requirement for “official use” since no one is admitting walked guns are part of approved U.S. foreign policy, so the bottom line seems to be: Any person who willfully violates these provisions "shall upon conviction be fined for each violation not more than...

Nearly four years after JaMarcus Russell(notes) became the No. 1 overall pick in the NFL draft, his playing career may have completely bottomed out after “life coach” John Lucas asked Russell to leave Houston recently, two sources close to the quarterback told Yahoo! Sports...

Diplomacy: Well, it's out — the invitation list to the biggest U.K. royal wedding in three decades. A Mustique bartender merited an invite, but it seems the Obamas did not. It's pretty obvious the Brits are sending a message. Sure, the royal wedding is a ceremonial affair, and news that the U.S. president and first lady weren't invited to the nuptials of Prince William and Catherine Middleton on April 30 won't rupture normal diplomatic relations. Still, it's eyebrow-arching, given that U.S. presidents have always been invited up till now. And the slowly leaking list of people who did get invited...

If passed by the House and Senate and ratified by the states, the new Balanced Budget Amendment will: 1.Force Congress to balance the federal budget each year; 2.Limit federal spending to no more than 18 percent of GDP; and 3.Prevent tax increases Furthermore, the only way for Congress to get around these limitations is with a 2/3 super-majority vote in the House and Senate to waive them.

We're seeing more and more of this: NASHVILLE — The Senate Education Committee voted along party lines Wednesday to abolish collective bargaining between teachers unions and school boards across the state.The vote was 6-3, with all Republicans on the panel voting for the bill and all Democrats against.Sponsor Sen. Jack Johnson said passage of the bill — SB113 — will remove "an albatross from around the neck of our school boards across the state" and remove a roadblock to education reform. Labor unions are part of the free market. But their historical rationale is to protect workers from exploitation by...

Brett Favre's Sister Arrested in Meth Bust58 minutes ago by TMZ Staff Brett Favre's younger sister was arrested in Mississippi today when narcotics agents busted a meth lab hidden in a condo. Brandi Favre was among 5 suspects rounded up on the scene ... and according to WLOX, the perps were taken to a local medical center for decontamination before being thrown behind bars. It's not the first time Brandi's had a run-in with the law -- in the past, she's been arrested for shoplifting and unlawful use of a weapon. Story developing ...

Scarcely two years ago, the Democratic Party was in the driver's seat. Or so it seemed. Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/editorials/dems_deflated_dreams_Y3SeDJ6HOQrV4GANQfkWGM#ixzz18UTjPWOr

The Jackson County Sheriff's Office say they have discovered an “active, working� meth lab in an office behind the counter at Moonshine Mini-Mart, which also serves as a BP gas station, on Hwy. 107 South in Cullowhee, about three miles from campus. On Saturday and Sunday, officers from the Sheriff's Department, the State Bureau of Investigation and Probation and Parole served search warrants at two homes and one business, according to a release to the media from Captain Steve Lillard with the Jackson County Sheriff's Office. “Officers located in excess of 400 grams of methamphetamine inside the store doing business...

<p>SIERRA BLANCA, Texas -- A U.S. Border Patrol spokesman says country singer Willie Nelson was charged with marijuana possession after 6 ounces was found aboard his tour bus in Texas.</p> <p>Patrol spokesman Bill Brooks says the bus pulled into the Sierra Blanca, Texas, checkpoint about 9 a.m. Friday. Brooks says an officer smelled pot when a door was opened and a search turned up marijuana.</p>

In the course of arguing that our real national debt is around $130 trillion — as opposed to the official number of $14.7 trillion — I have frequently encountered the argument that I’m wrong to include unfunded entitlement liabilities in the total. Here’s a typical example from the comments to this post: Kevin Williamson, expected spending 75 years in the future, based on current policies and projects that are certain to change anyway, is NOT debt. No amount of calling it “debt” or calling it “our REAL debt” changes that fact. Project funding gaps are not debt. DEBT is debt....

Speaker at GZM Rally Witnesses Provocative Behavior from ABC News StafferPosted by Andrea S. Lafferty Aug 24th 2010 at 1:18 pm | Comments(76) On Sunday I was honored to be a speaker at the rally against building the mosque at ground zero put on by the Coalition to Honor Ground Zero. As the rally concluded, thousands of the participants marched the one block from the rally site to the actual site of Ground Zero. I noticed a man in black shirt with a phone camera aggressively questioning and haranguing a gentleman with the sign, “No Sharia Here.” He was very...

The debate in the popular press and on blogs about the efficacy of the 2009 stimulus bill generally has been superficial on both sides. Those who tout the bill point to a study by liberal economists Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi purporting to show that the fiscal stimulus enacted under Presidents Bush and Obama lowered the unemployment rate by approximately 1.5 percentage points. However, as Lawrence Lindsey points out in the Weekly Standard, this study assumed that the recent stimulus has been roughly as effective, dollar for dollar, as past programs. It then multiplied past measures of job creation by...

Artist Sculps Barack Obama’s Rear, Calls It “The Immaculate Conception” Famed Sculptor, Christopher Wanker, has had his hands on one rear or another for years now—sculpting a lifeless rear, and bringing it to the brink of artistic perfection. Until now, there has always been something missing, something that has left him empty inside, searching for the next creation of perfection. Now, however, the sculptor has created perfection personified. He has sculpted the rear of Barack Obama. It’s so perfect that Wanker is calling it “The Immaculate Conception.” Many argue that the art is in bad taste, but Wanker points out...

Despite a coordinated hype campaign between left-wing pro-illegal immigration activists and the mainstream media, turnout was a bust at May Day marches in two bellwether American cities where crowds were much lower than expected. In Los Angeles, the turnout was a mere tenth of the half-million that marched there four years ago.In a preview article published yestereday, Reuters said of the pending Los Angeles march:Marches across the state on Saturday will show whether Latinos are energized. The standard will be the rallies in March 2006, when some 500,000 people took over downtown Los Angeles to oppose a tough federal bill...

China Boom, Or China Bust? By Ian Mathias 01/08/10 Baltimore, Maryland – Is the great hope of the investment world little more than hype? We like to visit the “China boom or China bust?” debate every once in a while, and the argument today is pretty one-sided… the “busts” have it. “Bubbles are best identified by credit excesses, not valuation excesses,” famous short seller Jim Chanos begins, “and there’s no bigger credit excess than in China.” He’s clearly made up his mind, calling China “Dubai times 1,000.” Given his history with Enron, then Tyco, then homebuilders, then banks and then...

A BUST of Russia's muscle-flexing strongman Vladimir Putin is being created as a gift for ex-Hollywood bodybuilder and California's current governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The bust is currently being made in Putin's home city of Saint Petersburg on an order of Russia's Bodybuilding and Fitness Federation and will be delivered to the movie star-turned-politician in March. "Putin is such a complex personality. He's left no one indifferent," Alexander Chernoshchyokov, a Saint Petersburg-based sculptor who has been working on the Putin bust since June... In 1991 the Russian artist made a sculpture of Schwarzenegger and Vladimir Dubinin, the president of the bodybuilding...

CHARLOTTE -- A monument to the financial crisis is rising amid this city's thicket of skyscrapers: gleaming, glass-walled trophy tower that was intended as a fitting headquarters for Wachovia's national banking empire. It will open instead as the headquarters of a regional power company. Wachovia, unable to survive a run of bad decisions, was swallowed by San Francisco-based Wells Fargo during the depths of the crisis last year. Few American cities prospered more over the past two decades than Charlotte, its growth propelled and gilded by Wachovia and its crosstown rival, Bank of America. Executives shoehorned gaudy mansions into old...

Michael Crabtree celebrated his 22nd birthday Monday. As an unwanted gift, multiple reports surfaced that the 49ers are poised to drop their offer to the No. 10 overall pick out of Texas Tech. Citing team sources, Michael Silver of Yahoo! Sports wrote that Crabtree's continued absence makes him less valuable to the 49ers on a prorated basis and added, "Translation: The team just reduced its offer and will continue to do so with each passing week." A day earlier, Jay Glazer of Fox Sports reported that the 49ers sent a letter to Crabtree "modifying" their offer. Responding to the Fox...

It has been nearly a month since the car-buying frenzy of the Cash for Clunkers program ended, and many area auto dealers are longing for the good old days of July and August. Like consumers nationwide, Massachusetts residents rushed to take advantage of the federal voucher program, which offered them up to $4,500 on old gas-guzzlers to be put toward the purchase of new, more fuel-efficient vehicles. About $65 million worth of vouchers were handed out statewide during the monthlong program that ended Aug. 24. But once the federal money dried up, so did the sales rally. Now, customers at...

Finance ministers are now simply papering over cracks having squandered the opportunity to make real changes to the way the world economy works. There is a hideous hissing noise escaping from the world economy, the piercing sound of deflating ambitions. Any hopes that, in this crisis, we would find an opportunity to redesign our system of capitalism and finance are all but forlorn. Any prospect that the leading nations would overhaul either the banking system or the wider framework that ties our economies together, and so prevent another crisis, has pretty much disappeared. We know this because, this weekend, finance...

DEARBORN, Mich. -- The Arab American National Museum in Dearborn could land a sculpture of veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas. ~snipMcElhinney sculpted a clay version of a Thomas bust.

MYFOXNY.COM/ AP - The arrests by the FBI of five ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders in New York and New Jersey is making international headlines particualarly in Israel. All three of the country's major newspapers feature pictures of the men busted.

Nature, the biggest bank of all, could go bust, warns Prince Charles The Prince of Wales has said that "Nature, the biggest bank of all, could go bust" in an apocalyptic warning that the Earth is on the brink of environmental disaster. By Urmee Khan, Digital and Media Correspondent 08 Jul 2009 Nature, the biggest bank of all, could go bust, warns Prince Charles Delivering this year's Richard Dimbleby Lecture, the Prince said that the next generation will face a "living hell" unless governments urgently tackle climate change and stop plundering the Earth's natural resources. "In failing the Earth, we...

Santa Clara County Sheriff's deputies arrested one man and are searching for at least one other in connection with a secret pot garden bust that netted 6,100 marijuana plants with a street value of $18 million. Acting on a tip, deputies from the Special Operations Unit's Marijuana Eradication Team discovered the hidden grow Wednesday about 8 a.m. off Hicks Road in the foothills above San Jose, Sgt. Rick Sung said. As deputies approached two large gardens, they found a man tending to the plants. And they quickly arrested 24 year-old Jesus Ochoachacon, who has an unknown address and is now...

President Barack Obama acknowledged in a major economic speech Tuesday that "times are still tough" and warned that a culture of "instant gratification" had produced neglect of major national problems that wound up undermining the economy. "By no means are we out of the woods just yet," the president said in remarks at Georgetown University. "But from where we stand, for the very first time, we are beginning to see glimmers of hope. And beyond that, way off in the distance, we can see a vision of an America’s future that is far different than our troubled economic past. Obama...

Looking back three years ago, it is hard to fathom how much has changed from the frenzied pace of development then going forward. Land and housing prices were still rising, ever-larger development projects were being launched, and growth debates were raging across Southern California. That’s all gone now. As key real estate players suddenly find themselves without jobs, as more developers file bankruptcy, and more projects bite the dust, the depth of this “downturn” is sinking in. Many, of course, have “been through this before.” By that they mean, they’ve weathered the cyclical postwar busts that have intermittently interrupted the...

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican police have captured a leading drug baron from the border city of Ciudad Juarez, the country's most violent town in a turf war that killed 6,300 people last year. Vicente Carrillo Leyva, a leader of the Juarez cartel, was seized while exercising in a park in an upscale residential district of Mexico City, police said on Thursday. The Juarez cartel is locked in a bitter war with traffickers from the state of Sinaloa for control of smuggling routes into Texas. The fighting forced the government to send 5,000 extra troops into Ciudad Juarez last month.

Barack Obama has sent Sir Winston Churchill packing and pulse rates soaring among anxious British diplomats. A bust of the former prime minister once voted the greatest Briton in history, which was loaned to George W Bush from the Government's art collection after the September 11 attacks, has now been formally handed back. The bronze by Sir Jacob Epstein, worth hundreds of thousands of pounds if it were ever sold on the open market, enjoyed pride of place in the Oval Office during President Bush's tenure. But when British officials offered to let Mr Obama to hang onto the bust...

Barack Obama loves Lincoln. It seems not a day goes by that he isn't quoting the Civil War icon or comparing himself to that great man. But it looks like we are finding one great leader that Barack Obama doesn't like so much: Winston Churchill. It appears that President Obama is dissing the Brit's most famous and stalwart leader by quickly returning the most famous bust of the man loaned to this country by the United Kingdom in the aftermath of 9//11. The return of the bust of Churchill flustered the British government because they didn't ask for it to...

Sam Zell’s Empire, Underwater in a Big Way The Worldwide Plaza building in New York, left, was part of Macklowe Properties. Center and right, the Chicago Title and Trust building and the Chicago Mercantile building are part of Tishman Speyer. In 2007, Sam Zell, the billionaire Chicago investor, sold a portfolio of 573 properties he had assembled over three decades, Equity Office Properties Trust, to the Blackstone Group for $39 billion. It was the largest private equity deal in history, but Blackstone did not stop there: it immediately flipped hundreds of the buildings for $27 billion. Today, the wreckage of...

HOUSTON -- As Barack Obama considers the pantheon of larger-than-life presidents who came before him, David Adickes pauses to consider Barack Obama. The Houston sculptor carefully examines the president-elect’s profile: his slightly furrowed brow, the firm mouth pursed somewhere between smile and frown, the expressive eyes. Adickes squints. Something is not quite right. “Looking at him, I see that his ears have to go back about a quarter of an inch,” Adickes says, then reaches to gently tweak the features on a life-size model of the president-elect’s head. The bust is the first step in plans for a replica of...

In 1847, a Dr Hyde Clark wrote a paper entitled Physical Economy - a Preliminary Inquiry into the Physical Laws Governing the Periods of Famines and Panics. His paper was published in the Railway Register. It opens with the comment: “We have just gone through a time of busy industry and are come upon sorrow and ill-fortune; but the same things have befallen us often within the knowledge of those now living...a period of bustle, or of gambling, cut short in a trice and turned into a period of suffering and loss, is a phenomenon so often recorded, that what...

Cedric Benson's time with the Chicago Bears is up.The troubled running back, whose relationship with the team soured further because of his second arrest in little more than a month Saturday, was waived by the team on Monday, sources told ESPN.com's John Clayton. Before his release, Benson made one last ditch effort to repair the situation, issuing an apology on Monday afternoon."I apologize for making the poor decision to drink and drive during the early morning of Saturday, June 7th," he said in a statement. "Given the incident last month, it was a particularly bad decision. I have no excuse...

PARIS - Divers trained in archaeology discovered a marble bust of an aging Caesar in the Rhone River that France's Culture Ministry said Tuesday could be the oldest known. The life-sized bust showing the Roman ruler with wrinkles and hollows in his face is tentatively dated to 46 B.C. Divers uncovered the Caesar bust and a collection of other finds in the Rhone near the town of Arles — founded by Caesar. Among other items in the treasure trove of ancient objects is a 5.9 foot marble statue of Neptune, dated to the first decade of the third century after...

Almost everyone's breasts look good in Hollywood. From Anne Hathaway and Victoria Beckham to Catherine Zeta-Jones, it doesn't matter if you're 20 or 50; when you get on that red carpet in your designer dress, you've got to get it right. C02 TREATMENTSSaid to be the biggest breakthrough since Botox, carboxy therapy can eradicate wrinkles and stretch marks on your de colletage and take years off your skin. It has recently been made available in Britain by Parisian doctor Jules-Jacques Nabet, who says: "Nothing else works like it for loose skin and stretch marks. It means there is no need...

This week opponents of the war were given a treat. They were told-in a single article-based on a single anonymous source-that a report which hadn’t been released said there was never any ties between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the al-Qaida network of terrorist groups. Millions of the war’s opponents were instantly elated with glee at the idea that the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with the war against the al-Qaida terrorist network; that the invasion was completely disconnected from any threat to the United States. Disregarding the misplaced glee for a moment, let’s face some facts. The report...

Buffett's Insurance Bust Ruthie Ackerman, 02.29.08, 9:30 PM ET All good things must come to an end -- even billionaire investor Warren Buffett's success in the insurance business. On Friday in Buffett's eagerly awaited annual letter to shareholders, he acknowledged 2007 was a good year, thanks to Berkshire Hathaway's stable insurance operations in a disaster-free 12 months, but he's not expecting a repeat. "That party is over,” he wrote. “It is a certainty that insurance-industry profit margins, including ours, will fall significantly in 2008. Prices are down, and exposures inexorably rise.” He predicted that even with another catastrophe-free year, the...

Japain Feb 21st 2008 From The Economist print edition The world's second-biggest economy is still in a funk—and politics is the problem THE ghost of Japan's “lost decade” haunts the United States. As the consequences of America's burst housing bubble are felt through financial markets, it has become popular to ask whether Japan's awful experience of boom-and-bust has lessons for other rich countries facing, at best, sharp slowdowns. Japan's property-and-stockmarket bubble burst in 1990, creating bad loans equivalent in the end to about one-fifth of GDP. The economy began growing properly again only 12 years later, and only in 2005...

Banking Bust: More To Come Liz Moyer, 01.16.08, 4:30 PM ET Banks have written down more than $100 billion since the summer. Yikes. Now the bad news: There are still billions worth of potentially toxic securities sitting on the books. The additional $1.3 billion write-down disclosed by JPMorgan on Wednesday was just the latest loss big banks have reported in the fourth quarter. Merrill Lynch is expected to report a sizeable write-down when it reveals fourth-quarter numbers on Thursday, by some estimates in the neighborhood of $15 billion. Bank of America, Wachovia and other big lenders report next week and...