Free Republic

Obama will be visiting the Jersey Shore at Belmar today. Rt. 71 and all roads east of 71 will be closed to traffic after 11 AM. No actual time, route or destination has been announced.

Interested in knowing about conservative alternates to AARP.

How can I safely create a Facebook account without risk of the following: Facebook’s use of software that enables it to track users’ online activity after they log off of the social-networking site came under scrutiny in Washington this week, with lawmakers and consumer advocacy groups demanding a federal investigation. In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission, Reps. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Tex.) wrote that Facebook’s use of “cookie” software should be investigated under the “unfair and deceptive acts” clause of the agency’s mandate. “When people log out of Facebook, they are under the expectation that...

Governor Christie is holding a townhall in Brick, NJ today at 3 PM. I signed up to go, and got a confirming call from the Governor's office yesterday.

]The 2012 outlook is improving modestly from a disappointing 2011. Economic growth picked up in the fourth quarter of 2011 to 2.8 percent and is expected to come in at 2.3 percent for 2012, up from 1.6 percent growth for all of last year, according to Fannie Mae’s (FNMA/OTC) Economic & Strategic Research Group. However, the year-end growth rate was due largely to a positive swing in business inventory growth, which is not indicative of underlying consumer demand or the overall health of the economy. Nevertheless, consumer spending improved modestly and manufacturing and services activity expanded at a strong pace....

Attack on Arizona Congresswoman Giffords The attempted murder of Congresswoman Giffords and the tragic killing of six others in Arizona has again exposed the political left. Before the assailant’s weapon had cooled off, leftists from all corners were scrambling to try to connect the madman’s act to Conservatism, talk radio, the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, the Tea Party and Sarah Palin. They have since been exposed as misinformed at the best, liars at the worst; the gunman has been shown to be one of their own. Yet their assault on the First and Second Amendments continues unimpeded by...

I bought two Freedom Concert tickets several months ago for myself and Mrs. JimRed. I forgot to remind her that the concert is this weekend, and she accepted an invite to visit her best friend a few states south of us. I hear that they sold out quite a while ago, so I hate to see it go to waste. No scalping here; face value is $75 and I'll eat the sales tax.

Got this e-mail this morning. The Board of directors of CHINA INDUSTRIAL MACHINES COMPANY LIMITED (CIMCL) ,uses this medium to solicit for your services as our payment receiving agent in your country.Please Contact us for more information. Yours faithfully, Mr Cheng Lee President.

All the links to the articles on Townhall.com are non-working this morning...

Isn't April 9th supposed to be some sort of important day according to the Islamonazis?

I am a landlord. Laws are proposed in many jurisdictions requiring that landlords not rent to illegals. It just dawned on me that I have never seen a "green card", so I wouldn't know if it was valid or not. I did a search under INS Green Card but got dozens of law offices offering to assist in getting and renewing them, nothing showing what one looks like.

Iran is accelerating its uranium enrichment efforts and Israel could have only six months to destroy Tehran’s nuclear capabilities or risk an Iranian nuclear attack, according to influential Israeli columnist Caroline Glick. “Just as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has dropped nearly all pretenses about his intentions to achieve nuclear weapons, so too he makes it clear daily that he intends to use such weapons to annihilate Israel,” Glick writes in the Jerusalem Post. “With Iran speeding up its program, Israel may have as little as six months to launch a strike on its nuclear facilities before they can start churning...

I have somehow managed to flip my screen display over on its left side. I haven't a clue how I did it.

When the felonious Duke — that is, Duke Cunningham, former U.S. Rep from California's 50th District — left office last December, we had every reason to hope for something better, someone at least a little less criminal. We even had hopes for honesty! And things looked up. A candidate entered the running promising to cut back on pork. Candidate Brian Bilbray had been to Congress before, and he looked back on that time fondly, claiming to have been on the right side in 1995. "There's still more to do," he clarified in his recent campaign. He went so far as...

For the past six months, I've been staring at a 30-pound box filled with court documents and what's left of a young man's life following one college night and a 5- to 15-second disputed sex act. That is, 5 to 15 seconds into the act of sexual intercourse, she said, "Stop." He stopped immediately. She claimed rape. Thus, before his 23rd birthday, Rich Gorman of Orlando, Fla., was locked behind bars in the Liberty Correctional Institute near Tallahassee, serving a five-year sentence for sexual battery. One minute a junior at Florida State University majoring in business/computer systems, the next a...

I was aghast to read Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle's response to a question from The New York Times columnist John Tierney, "How long will blacks vote for a party that opposes the voucher programs they strongly favor?" Doyle's response: "I don't think this is an issue that moves voters." The discussion took place in context of the Democrat governor's opposition to moves to expand the number of vouchers available in the immensely popular and successful school choice program in Wisconsin. In a recently released Zogby poll, only 3 percent of respondents, with barely any difference between Democrats and Republicans, listed...

We had a neighbor when I lived in DC who was part of the secret service presidential detail for many years. His stories of Kennedy and Johnson were the same as those I heard from the guys who flew the presidents' plane. Yes, Kennedy did have Marilyn Monroe flown in for secret "dates," and LBJ was a typical Texas "good ole boy" womanizer. Nixon, Bush 41, and Carter never cheated on their wives. Clinton cheated, but couldn't match Kennedy or LBJ in style or variety. The information below is accurate: The elder Bush and current president Bush make it a...

Mike Wallace could be barred by his own network from covering gun-related stories on CBS News. The "60 Minutes" showboat correspondent appeared at a birthday party for columnist Art Buchwald -- a party that was also a fundraiser for the Brady Center, a prominent advocate of gun control laws. At the event Wallace showed a 47-second video of a past "60 Minutes" segment that, by Wallace's own admission, cast former NRA President Charlton Heston in a less-than-favorable light. In introducing the video, Wallace called Heston the "self-righteous enemy of the Sarah and Jim Brady bunch," according to a CBS News...

A letter was sent by Congressman Walter B. Jones, (R-NC), to President George W. Bush earlier this week with 69 signatures of Members of the United States House of Representatives explaining that Christian military chaplains are being told to use general terms when they pray publicly, and to not mention the name of Jesus. The Members of the House of Representatives signing the letter to the president said: "We are disappointed and gravely concerned to learn that the Christian military chaplains are under direct attack and that their right to pray according to their faith is in jeopardy. As you...

British Prime Minister Tony Blair is pressuring the rich nations of the world to give more foreign aid to Africa -- to the tune of $25 billion a year by 2010. The U.S. already gave $3.2 billion last year. In the wake of this pressure, we might ask ourselves whether it's foreign aid that Africa needs most for economic development. A standard myth is there's a "vicious cycle of poverty" that makes economic development virtually impossible for the world's poor nations. This myth holds that poor countries are poor because income is so low that savings cannot be generated to...