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I have no idea what you did but the site is loading MUCH faster than it has for awhile. Clicking on Latest Posts or to an article is much faster than it has been for a long while. After seeing several posts over time mentioning the slow performance, I wanted to be sure to give you kudos for whatever tweaks you did. Cheers, knewshound

The wife and I are heading to Palm Springs for a long delayed and overdue vacation in the morning. Fellow FReepers, if you have spent some time there, we would love to hear what you would suggest doing. So far, I am going to be playing golf a couple of days at least, we may be going to a concert Thursday night, wifey will be pampered at a spa for a day and we will of course, be eating out quite a bit. I was hoping someone could suggest; Restaurants Activities Good values for a Spa Good values for Golf...

I know that a lot of fellow FReepers stream Netflix. What are your suggestions for movies that may not have received the attention or respect that they deserved? What are you those gems that are worth watching again? How about that obscure movie that you tell people they should watch? Bonus points for links, pics or video of the movie you are talking about. I'll start; Firefly - The complete series. Nothing like a good old fashioned cowboys in space series.  Excellent cast, tight writing and a fan demanded ending.  Highly recommended. Zombieland Guns, zombies and jokes.  What more can...

On Jan. 16, 1920, the United States went dry. On that day 90 years ago, the 18th Amendment went into effect, making the buying and selling of alcohol illegal. This period of Prohibition lasted for nearly 14 years in the United States. Then, in 1933, America's dry spell ended when the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th and the United States was able to once again legally pursue its love affair with alcohol -- including beer. As America marks the 90th anniversary of the start of Prohibition, its affection for beer is still strong. But while many drink the beverage, how...

Ground Zero Mosque Supporters UNITE ! I ask of you you who support the Ground Zero Mosque to please help my cause. I am the Founder and Pastor of the Church of Perpetual Condescension. You can call the Church of PC for short. I light of your belief that a Mosque founded by a hate spouting Imam supported by dubious financing 2 blocks from where planeloads of devout Muslim men murdered 3000 people is a great idea, I would like to ask you support for my own project in the same vein. As you are aware, the US dropped...

We are nearing the climax of "tax season." That's the problem right there, by the way: Summer should have a season, and baseball should have a season, but not tax. Happily, like candy canes and Christmas tree lights on Dec. 26, the TurboTax boxes will soon be disappearing from the display racks until the nights start drawing in, and the leaves fall from the trees and tax season begins anew in seven or eight months' time.

<p>In case you were feeling sorry for yourself.</p> <p>You could be me.</p> <p>I cam ehome from work last Friday and found my wife had demolished the guest batroom.</p> <p>We were planning on remodeling it for some time now, but I was still taken aback.</p>

How dazzling is President Obama? So dazzling that he didn't merely give a dazzling inaugural speech. Any old timeserving hack could do that. Instead, he had the sheer genius to give a flat dull speech full of the usual shopworn boilerplate. Brilliant! At a stroke, he not only gently lowered the expectations of those millions of Americans and billions around the world for whom his triumphant ascendancy is the only thing that gives their drab little lives any meaning, but he also emphasized continuity by placing his own unprecedented incandescent megastar cool squarely within the tradition of squaresville yawneroo white...

I was at the mall two days before Christmas, and it was strangely quiet. So quiet that, sadly, I was able to hear every word of Kelly Clarkson bellowing over the sound system "My Grown-Up Christmas List." Don't get me wrong – I love seasonal songs. "Winter Wonderland" – I dig it. "Rudolph" – man, he's cool, albeit not as literally as Frosty. But "Grown-Up Christmas List" is one of those overwrought ballads of melismatic bombast made for the "American Idol" crowd. It's all about how the singer now eschews asking Santa for materialist goodies – beribboned trinkets and gaudy...

The charge levelled against Maclean's by the Canadian Islamic Congress is that, in publishing an excerpt from my book, this magazine exposed Muslims to "hatred and contempt." Alas, at the first day of the Great Maclean's Show Trial at the British Columbia "Human Rights" Tribunal, the well of my book excerpt's "hatred and contempt" pretty well ran dry in the first hour. So Faisal Joseph, counsel for the plaintiff Mohamed Elmasry, was forced to bus in a huge pile of miscellaneous generic "hatred and contempt" from all kinds of other sources. And even then much of it seemed less like...

Four score and seven years ago … No, wait, my mistake. Two score and seven or eight days ago, Barack Obama gave the greatest speech since the Gettysburg Address, or FDR's First Inaugural, or JFK's religion speech, or (if, like Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books, you find those comparisons drearily obvious) Lincoln's Cooper Union speech of 1860. And, of course, the senator's speech does share one quality with Cooper Union, Gettysburg, the FDR Inaugural, Henry V at Agincourt, Socrates' Apology, etc.: It's history. He said, apropos the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, that "I could no more disown...

Last week, Time magazine featured on its cover the iconic photograph of U.S. Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima. But with one difference: The flag has been replaced by a tree. The managing editor of Time, Rick Stengel, was very pleased with the lads in graphics for cooking up this cute image and was all over the TV sofas, talking up this ingenious visual shorthand for what he regards as the greatest challenge facing mankind: "How To Win The War On Global Warming." Where to begin? For the past 10 years, we all have, in fact, been not warming...

About this business of Hillary coming under intense sniping, I have some sympathy. The Clintons got away with this sort of thing for so long that you can't blame them for wondering how they missed the memo advising that henceforth the old rules no longer apply. Bill, being warier, was usually canny enough to set his fantasies just far enough back in time that live cable footage was unlikely to be available – his vivid memories of entirely mythical black church burnings in his childhood, etc. But Hillary liked to live a little more dangerously. The defining fiction arose back...

Like John O'Sullivan, I'm currently traveling in Europe and spent [Wednesday, Feb. 28]being asked wherever I went about Bill Buckley. He is an heroic figure to many because he was right about the great question of the second half of the 20th century at a time when far too many in the West thought it boorish and vulgar to be: As a character in one of his last novels tells a self-regarding liberal, "The kind of people who have offended you since you were at college are the people who won the Cold War." Bill was not a shrill man...

On the day that Margaret Thatcher was toppled by her own party, I ran into an old friend, a hard-core leftist playwright, Marxist to the core, who wasn't as happy as he should have been. He jabbed me in the chest. "You bastards on the right!" he fumed. "You wouldn't even let us be the ones to drive the stake through her heart." I'm sure in America's Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy there are similar mixed feelings. The Clintons have met their Waterloo but it's not some doughty conservative warrior who gets to play Duke of Wellington, only some freshman pap peddler...

Well here we go. It is the Friday before Super Tuesday.  This is the last chance Hillary! will have to skewer Obama. As a columnist and political observer for 30 years, I have watched with endless fascination, the  Political operation of the Clintons.  The campaigns and the candidates come and go but the Clintons always fall back to the tried and true methods that have worked for them in the past. If they follow their previous scripts, sometime late today or early tomorrow, some sort of scandal or accusation will come out against Obama.  Unlike the poor example used against Congressman Foley that...

HAVE YOU HUGGED AN ISLAMO-FACIST TODAY? October 24, 2007 College liberals are in a fit of pique because various speakers are coming to their campuses this week as part of David Horowitz's Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week -- not to be confused with Islamo-Fascism Appreciation Week, which I believe is in April. Apparently liberals support Islamo-fascism. The Democratic leadership might want to have a powwow with their base because I believe their public position is to pretend to (BEGIN ITALS)oppose(END ITALS) Islamic fascism. Elected Democrats at least make empty rhetorical gestures about opposing Islamic fascism. Of course, amidst their nonspecific condemnations of...

Take five swinging city boys Add one ex dictator getting ready for his big date And you get - First, Kyan has a heart to heart with SaddamSaddam, buddy, I know you have been busy lately, denouncing the infidels and so on, buy honey, you have let yourself GO. Lets take a look at your grooming and dental habits and see what we have to work with here Well the good news is; you don’t have a big bald spot to worry about. When we were in Russia, Putin was trying to tell me he wanted a comb over. Vlad,...

ST. LOUIS — A St. Louis man was shot to death by his wife after giving her a can of warm beer, police said. The shooting happened Sunday. Names have not been released. The woman was taken into custody. The wife allegedly admitted shooting her husband, who was about 70 years old, in the kitchen of their home. The man was shot four or five times in the chest after giving his wife a can of warm Stag beer. The house was among thousands in the St. Louis area that lost power after a winter storm hit the region Thursday.

Good evening, I'm Lou Dobbs and this is Moneyline. In a recent incident involving Muslim Imams being expelled for what has been called "Disruptive behavior", CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations has called for a boycott by Muslims of US Airways. We are joined tonight by the Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer for US Airways, Mr. Doug Parker.  Thank you for joining us tonight on Moneyline Mr. Parker   Well thanks for having me on to speak about this very important subject Lou; it’s my pleasure to be here. Here also to present the other side is Council...