Free Republic

Bethpage State Park and all of Long Island can officially begin planning for yet another major golf championship, the PGA Championship, and the Ryder Cup, which has become the most intense and passionate event in the sport. The PGA of America and New York State formally announced Tuesday that the 2019 PGA and 2024 Ryder Cup will be held at Bethpage Black.

Visiting Baton Rouge, La. for a meeting. I have felt very comfortable with the displays of Christmas. At the airport, the first thing I saw upon exiting the gate was a Christmas tree in the hallway of the terminal. As I walked to exit, I heard Christmas music overhead very clearly and it was a combination of traditional hymns I remember singing as a child and old classics from Bing Crosby, Andy Williams and others. There were more Christmas trees in the baggage claim area and continued playing of Christmas music. I arrived at the hotel later and got the...

"There doesn’t seem to be any point in my pretending not to be thrilled by the historic House vote that sent health care reform legislation to President 0bama. The victory is even more astounding when you consider that just a few short weeks ago health care reform was being pronounced dead upon the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, an event that denied Democrats the magic 60 votes they needed to get anything done in the dysfunctional Senate..... Credit for this amazing revivification must go to President 0bama for finally—finally!–making an all-out push to get his signature issue passed into...

"We all know that The New York Times and other papers have been thinking hard about finding ways to charge readers for the news on their web sites, and there’s evidence that the decision-making process is moving along. Bloomberg has reported that a survey of print subscribers included this sentence: The New York Times website, nytimes.com, is considering charging a monthly fee of $5.00 to access its content, including all its articles, blogs and multimedia. It also asked about a $2.50-a-month “discounted fee” for print subscribers....."

Due to a high degree of interest, Al Gore, Nobel Peace Prize winner and 45th Vice President of the United States, has opened his CTIA keynote to the press. Gore is scheduled to address attendees representing the global wireless industry on Friday, April 3 at 9:30 a.m. at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

CHANGE! This kind of Change we don't need. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's home district includes San Francisco. Star-Kist Tuna's headquarters are in San Francisco, Pelosi's home district. Star-Kist is owned by Del Monte Foods and is a major contributor to Pelosi. Star-Kist is the major employer in American Samoa employing 75% of the Samoan work force. Paul Pelosi, Nancy's husband, owns $17 million dollars of Star-Kist stock. In January, 2007 when the minimum wage was increased from $5.15 to $7.25, Pelosi had American Samoa exempted from the increase so Del Monte would not have to pay the higher...

Big Government: Barack Obama and Democrats blame the historic financial turmoil on the market. But if it's dysfunctional, Democrats during the Clinton years are a prime reason for it. Obama in a statement yesterday blamed the shocking new round of subprime-related bankruptcies on the free-market system, and specifically the "trickle-down" economics of the Bush administration, which he tried to gig opponent John McCain for wanting to extend. But it was the Clinton administration, obsessed with multiculturalism, that dictated where mortgage lenders could lend, and originally helped create the market for the high-risk subprime loans now infecting like a retrovirus the...

The debate over skyrocketing gas prices and what impact, if any, that should have on auto insurance rates, made me realize that both oil and insurance are industries plagued by a glaring lack of understanding on the part of the public about basic economic facts--ignorance shamefully exploited by politicians like John McCain to create scapegoats and win votes. The way Sen. McCain is pushing for more offshore oil drilling, you would think that all one has to do to "solve" the problem of rising fuel costs is to go to the beach, stick a straw in the sand and fill...

Rupert Murdoch was interviewed by popular WSJ tech writer Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the All Things Digital Conference today. Here are highlights of their discussion with Murdoch: "# Talk turns to politics. Where are we politically, asks Kara. What’s you assessment of the current situation. I think you have two candidates, says Murdoch, and they both have their problems. I think you have a unique situation today, where public opinion of the government and politics is at an all-time low. It’s abysmal, he says. And then here comes this candidate who positions himself as above it all. Murdoch...

As sniping over race and identity politics threatens to engulf the U.S. Democratic presidential contest, Senator Barack Obama's multi-ethnic roots and cosmopolitan kin - including his Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law - have become part of his campaign pitch to voters. Konrad Ng, a University of Victoria- and McGill-educated film professor now living in Hawaii, is married to Obama's sister Maya Soetoro-Ng, and is part of what the White House hopeful has described as a "mini-United Nations" of family members who help shape his global perspective. "If I am the face of American foreign policy and American power," Obama observed in a recent...

New York, March 8 (ANI): A new book on Bill Clinton's post-presidential life reportedly claims that he had an affair with New Yorker Denise Rich whose ex-husband, Marc, was famously pardoned by the former US President. 'The Clinton Crack-Up' authored by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., a prominent anti-Clintonite who founded the American Spectator also claims that Madame Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, knew about the whole affair. "Denise Rich's contact with Clinton began long before Hillary confided her allegations to Representative [now Speaker] Nancy Pelosi that Bill 'f-' Denise," the New York Daily News quoted Tyrrell as writing. The source for the...

Legislation was introduced in New Jersey Tuesday that would bar insurers from using drivers' education or profession in setting automobile-insurance-policy rates. Assembly Deputy Speaker Neil M. Cohen, D-Union, introduced the bill in response to published reports that Geico of Washington, D.C., used such information in setting prices. "I found out about this practice the same way everyone in New Jersey did -- by reading the newspaper," Cohen, chairman of the financial institutions and insurance committee, said. "And just like everyone else, I was outraged." Cohen's bill, A-2819, would prohibit insurers from assigning less-favorable rates to drivers based on their education...

Do you agree with Condoleezza Rice's assertion that the word of the United States is 'as good as gold'? FREEP THIS POLL!

Vanity. NOTE that MSN Encarta has completely ignored July 6 as President Bush's birthday.

LONDON (AP) U.S. allies Britain and Australia on Thursday rejected a claim by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan that the war in Iraq was ''illegal'' because Washington and its coalition partners never got Security Council backing for the invasion. Prime Minister Tony Blair's official spokesman reminded reporters that Britain's attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, had found before the war that Britain was acting legally, citing three U.N. resolutions he said justified the use of force against the Saddam Hussein regime. Britain was a leading supporter of the U.S.-led March 2003 invasion that ousted Saddam, which followed months of bitter debate in the...