Free Republic

Popular speech and political dissent have proved troublesome to President Barack Obama since the very beginning of his term in office. The Obama Administration began waging war on the minority of media outlets that did not worship at his altar immediately after he was sworn in. Just three days into his presidency Obama warned Congressional Republicans against listening to radio host Rush Limbaugh.

Democratic senators ripped their Republican counterparts for forcing cancellations of hearings throughout the Senate on Wednesday, claiming that the GOP is needlessly blocking essential national security business. Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Sen. Claire McCaskill both complained that Republicans kept them from holding their hearings on budget requests for the military's Pacific and strategic and police training contracts in Afghanistan. Either party in the Senate is allowed to object to holding hearings, as Senate rules require a unanimous consent request for hearings to be held after 2 p.m. Most of these unanimous consent requests aren’t even noticed on...

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Enhancing specific chemical signaling in the brain could help treat the disorder. By Emily Singer Drugs that boost the chemical messenger norepinephrine in the brain have been shown to alleviate cognitive problems in mice engineered to mirror Down syndrome. The findings, published today in the journal Science Translational Medicine, suggest a new approach to treating the disorder. Several existing drugs can boost the chemical or mimic its effects, though none have yet been tested in patients with Down syndrome. The research also reflects a growing understanding of the brain systems that underlie the cognitive problems in people with Down syndrome,...

(IsraelNN.com) An Arab driver who killed a little Jewish girl riding her bicycle near the synagogue in Kfar Tavor on Yom Kippur Eve in 2007 was sentenced to nine years in prison on Tuesday. His accomplice was sentenced to just two years in jail, longer than the time that has already passed since the event. On Yom Kippur eve, when the Kol Nidrei service began and the streets were empty, the two Arabs entered Kfar Tavor at high speed on the all-terrain vehicle (ATV) and headed directly for a group of children milling about near the synagogue on their bicycles....

(IsraelNN.com) Weapons are flowing freely into Shechem and other Palestinian Authority-controlled towns in Samaria thanks to the recent removal of IDF checkpoints. So reports a senior IDF source who spoke to the Hebrew-language Arutz Sheva this week on condition of anonymity. The weapons come to Shechem from the south, the source explained. Weapons are smuggled from the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt to Israel's Negev desert. From there, they are smuggled to the Hevron region, where the Judea and Samaria security barrier remains incomplete.

So far this September has been a lesson in conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom number one says that generally Septembers are bad for equities. Conventional wisdom number two says that they are especially bad when markets had good months coming into September. So, given a good near 40% increase heading into September, we would expect a bloody September. Instead, we've seen gains of about 7%.

After three straight days of being up, the market indices took a slight breather yesterday. Markets were down just slightly. The dow for instance was down less then 10 points. Futures are pointing up this morning. The Dow is currently up near 30 points and all three indices look to gain their yesterday losses and then some at the open.

There is breaking economic data news. The June trade numbers came out and the trade gap widened. The U.S. trade deficit widened in June to $27.0 billion, as goods imports increased for the first time in 11 months on the back of higher oil prices, a Commerce Department report said on Wednesday.

You see it repeated all over the web, but nobody on the left ever bothered to check its validity. Where in her quote did Gov. Palin say: "could kill my Down Syndrome baby?" Media Treatment Of Sarah Palin: Where In Her Quote Did She Say “Could Kill My Down Syndrome Baby?”84rules August 12, 2009

Anyone else able to get on? Are their servers down? Did they not pay to re-up their domain? Are the libs doing a denial of service attacks on them?

The Obama adminstration has imposed financial sanctions on a company accused of involvement in North Korea's missile proliferation network.

Cash injection has failed to have impact, study shows The government's national cancer plan, backed by a massive injection of cash for cancer services in England, has failed to boost survival rates substantially, a major study shows today.The findings will dismay government ministers, who have secured a tripling of spending on cancer over the last decade with the ambition of bringing the UK from among the worst countries up to the standard of the best in Europe. But the authoritative study, from a team led by Professor Michel Coleman at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, shows that...

Ahead of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's trip to Washington this week, the US has been urging Israel to "tone down" its rhetoric on Iran and to stop threatening a military strike on its nuclear installations, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

February loaded oceangoing cargoes at the side-by-side ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach fell 36.6 percent from the previous February, the two ports showed in separate reports. The slowdown for February is much more pronounced than it was in January, when the year-on-year decrease in cargo traffic at the two Southern California ports was 18.7 percent. The ports are the two busiest in the United States, handling more than 40 percent of imported consumer goods. The two ports showed inbound cargoes down 38.8 percent and outbound cargoes down 32.2 percent in February 2009 from February 2008. The traffic fell...

Dow Jones Industrial Average(DJI: ^DJI) Index Value: 6,873.37 Trade Time: 4:00pm ET Change: 147.35 (2.19%) Prev Close: 6,898.63 Open: 6,726.50 Day's Range: 6,726.42 - 6,979.22 52wk Range: 6,661.74 - 13,191.50 Quotes delayed, except where indicated otherwise. For consolidated real-time quotes (incl. pre/post market data), sign up for a free trial of Real-time Quotes.

Feb. 12 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. stocks extended a global slide, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average to a three-month low, as jobless claims climbed to a record and investors speculated government measures will fail to boost the economy.

Is gmail down? I have been having problems since late afternoon .. it just never synchs... anyone else having problems?

Russian markets closed until Friday Russia ordered its main stock exchanges closed for another day Thursday as President Dmitry Medvedev called for pouring 500 billion rubles ($20 billion) into financial markets in an effort to stabilize them. The government is struggling to stem a dizzying plummet in share prices and restore confidence in the economy _ a plummet that has revived memories of the 1998 financial collapse. "We have sufficient reserves and a strong economy, which guarantees the avoidance of any shocks," Medvedev said in televised comments.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 18, 2008 – From Mosul in the north to Basra in the south, insurgent-committed violence in Iraq continues to decrease as stability visibly increases, a senior U.S. military officer posted in Iraq said today. Video “For 10 of the last 11 weeks, we’ve sustained less than 200 attacks per week nationwide,” Army Lt. Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, commander of Multinational Corps Iraq, told Pentagon reporters during a satellite-carried news conference from his Baghdad headquarters. Attacks in Iraq had once reached more than 1,500 a week a few years ago during the zenith of insurgent-committed violence. “It...