Free Republic

When the shocking news of Justice Antonin Scalia's passing hit Saturday night, my mind raced back to a White House Correspondents Association dinner seven years ago, when we were seated together. We bantered about my hometown of Chicago, where he had taught law before ascending to the bench. He opined on wine and music and generally lived up to his reputation as a man who told and enjoyed a good story.

The state of Florida is putting thousands of children with heart defects at risk, a group of cardiac doctors say, because of a change in policy that came after Tenet Healthcare contributed $200,000 to Florida Republicans. In a widely publicized investigation in June, CNN revealed that a program at a Tenet hospital in Florida had failed to live up to state quality standards for children's heart surgery. Less than two months later, the state decided to get rid of those standards.

http://www.vice.com/vice-news/islamic-state-full-length

Regarding your editorial "Censors on Campus" (Jan. 18): Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich."

I tried asking a question on an old thread but received no answer, so I decided to post this here. I have always been a big fan of Larry Pratt and particularly enjoyed his skewering of Piers Morgan on CNN, but now I am not so sure about Pratt. Mr. Pratt is scheduled to appear at Freedompalooza over the July 4th holiday. The event is hosted by Paul Topete, from the band Poker Face. Mr. Topete is on the record as having stated that the Holocaust was a hoax. If this is the same Mr. Topete, and I am pretty...

The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill paid a visit to Jay Leno on Wednesday night — where he offered his take on both the current NSA controversies as well as the world of cable news. About the latter, he was a tad critical. And the jabs were aimed at both sides of the political spectrum. “We have a totally bankrupt media culture in this country,” Scahill charged. The Jodi Arias trial exemplified it, he said, noting how CNN’s prominent coverage coincided with the network closing it’s bureau in Baghdad. “On the other side of it, you know, you’ve got MSNBC — which...

Interesting cartoon from a very unlikely source

Since the early 2000s, industry leaders, observers, and policy makers have been declaring that there is an innovation crisis in pharmaceutical research. A 2002 front page investigation by the Wall Street Journal reported, “In laboratories around the world, scientists on the hunt for new drugs are coming up dry . . . The $400 billion a year drug industry is suddenly in serious trouble.”1 Four years later, a US Government Accounting Office assessment of new drug development reported that “over the past several years it has become widely recognized throughout the industry that the productivity of its research and development...

WASHINGTON, June 2 - Nabil al-Marabh was No. 27 on the F.B.I.'s list of terror suspects after Sept. 11. He trained in Afghanistan's militant camps, sent money to a roommate convicted in a foiled plot to bomb a hotel, and boasted to an informant about plans to blow up a fuel truck inside a New York tunnel, F.B.I. documents say. But after Mr. Marabh served an eight-month jail sentence, he was sent in January to his native Syria, which is regarded by the United States as a sponsor of terrorism, even though prosecutors had sought to bring criminal cases against...

Jews hid in cave and survived On a moonless October night in 1942, a desperate group of Jews fled the village of Korolowka, Poland, and literally went underground to escape the Nazis. While World War II raged above them, they hid from the Holocaust in two vast caves 50 feet beneath the rolling wheat fields of what is now western Ukraine. For about two years, dozens of them lived in almost total darkness, cooking by kerosene light. When the men ventured out for food and firewood, it was only at night. Like hibernating bears, they slept for 22-hour stretches. They...

HADLEY, Mass. (AP) -- Atlantic salmon and trout raised in federal hatcheries in the Northeast have high enough levels of dioxin and other pollutants that anglers should eat no more than half a serving a month, federal officials said Thursday. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service commissioned the tests to determine whether they were picking up PCBs and other contaminants from feed. A study published in January in the journal Science had suggested pollutants found in farm-raised salmon came from PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, in the fish oil and meal fed to the fish. Each year, the agency's northeast regional...

SEATTLE -- The photograph on the front page of Sunday's Seattle Times captured a moment rarely seen publicly since the start of the Iraq war. Coffins holding dead American soldiers, draped with U.S. flags and placed in rows, nearly filled a cargo plane for the journey home to the United States.

MIAMI (Reuters) - A Florida teen charged with hiring an undercover policeman to shoot and kill his mother instructed the purported hitman not to damage the family television during the attack, police said on Thursday. Police in the southwestern Florida city of Fort Myers arrested the boy, 17-year-old Carlos Chereza, on Tuesday on a charge of soliciting to commit first-degree murder. Tipped by an informant that Chereza had offered to pay to have his mother killed, an undercover detective posed as someone willing to do the job, Fort Myers police said. Chereza offered the detective $2,000 that he expected to...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A contractor for American Airlines has admitted to sharing personal passenger information with the US government and other companies, thrusting the world's largest carrier into a bitter controversy over rights to privacy in the post-September 11 world. The disclosure, certain to alarm civil libertarians, made American the third leading US airline caught disseminating private data behind the back of its customers in the name of fighting terrorism. Airline Automation, a Tucson, Arizona-based data processing company, acknowledged Saturday that it had released American Airlines passenger records in 2002 to four companies that had been testing aviation security systems...

The law requires everyone to follow the speed limit and other traffic regulations, but in Suffolk County, exceptions should be made for cops and their families, police union officials say. Police Benevolent Association president Jeff Frayler said Thursday it has been union policy to discourage Suffolk police officers from issuing tickets to fellow officers, regardless of where they work.

My new polling place stands inside the American Civil Liberties Union offices. It offers plenty of convenient parking. From my car, I walk a few short steps along a corridor covered with posters -- one attacking Mel Gibson's movie about Jesus, another saying the government should take better care of the elderly. Others proclaim the virtues of civil liberties and invite me to join the organization. The corridor ends in a large hall where I cast my ballot, unaffected by any of the propaganda I just read. Just kidding. My polling place has, in fact, moved, but not to any...

Staff Writer Major excerpts of telephone Interview on Monday, Feb. 16, 2004, 8 p.m. between Hutton Gibson, father of Mel Gibson, and Steve Feuerstein, executive producer and talk show host, "Speak Your Piece!" WSNR-620AM. The two-part feature on The Gibson Family: Offspring of Hate? will air on "Speak Your Piece!" on Monday, Feb. 23 and Wednesday, Feb. 25 from 10 p.m. to midnight on WSNR-620AM and live on the Internet at SpeakYourPiece.net.

NEW YORK -- Don't tell Jan Michelini that lightning doesn't strike twice. Michelini, an assistant director on Mel Gibson's "The Passion of Christ," was nicknamed "Lightning Boy after lightning struck his umbrella during filming on a hilltop in the town of Matera, Italy, reported VLife, a supplement to Variety publications, in its October issue. He suffered light burns on the tips of his fingers.

Rush Limbaugh was on his usual tear. "There's nothing good about drug use," he was saying. "We know it. It destroys individuals. It destroys families. Drug use destroys societies. Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. And the laws are good because we know what happens to people in societies and neighborhoods which become consumed by them. And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent...

For nearly two years, officials at the federal Environmental Protection Agency have denied that they failed to properly inform New Yorkers of the dangers of toxic releases from the collapse of the World Trade Center. But last week, an investigation released by the EPA's own inspector general made a stunning revelation: The trail of public health misinformation began inside the White House. The news that White House staff ordered the EPA to minimize potential health dangers near Ground Zero was bad enough. But the details in the 165-page report about how the EPA lied to the public - and even...