Free Republic

I've almost completed the 1st week of Insanity. I understand that it is designed to be a rough workout, but I have a hard time keeping up with Shaun T. I was wondering if other have completed this and if they were happy with the results. A guy I work with does P90X and repeats it - he's done it 6 times so far. I definitely feel better after a week.

“A Queens man was arrested Wednesday for allegedly firing a lifelike weapon and handing it over to his toddler-age son…. Jack Pawlowski was led out of his Queens home in handcuffs Wednesday, with his stunned wife and three young kids looking on. He said nothing as detectives put him into a squad car.

SUFFOLK, Va. — Two Suffolk second graders have been suspended for making shooting noises while pointing pencils at each other. Media outlets report the 7-year-old boys were suspended for two days for a violation of the Suffolk school system’s zero-tolerance policy on weapons. They were playing with one another in class Friday at Driver Elementary. “When I asked him about it, he said, ‘Well I was being a Marine and the other guy was being a bad guy,’” said Paul Marshall, one of the boys’ fathers. “It’s as simple as that.”

The Miami Dolphins’ quest for public funding for an overhaul of Sun Life Stadium will go down to the wire in the Florida Legislature. After hopes appeared to be fading early Friday, the Senate version of the bill was scheduled for a second reading on Monday. There are five days remaining in the session, and the House version of the bill remains bogged down in committee.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) -- The California Assembly passed a bill on Thursday that would make the state the first in the nation to allow non-citizens who are in the country legally to serve on jury duty. Assemblyman Bob Wieckowski, D-Fremont, said his bill, AB1401, would help California widen the pool of prospective jurors and help integrate immigrants into the community.

Homeless people in California would have the right to rest in public spaces, including sidewalks, without the threat of arrest, and local governments would have to provide access to bathrooms and showers, under a bill that passed its first major test Tuesday. The bill, called the Homeless Person's Bill of Rights and Fairness Act, could supersede local laws - including in San Francisco - that bar people from sitting or lying on sidewalks unless those localities meet certain requirements. It was introduced by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, and passed the Assembly Judiciary Committee on a 7-2 party-line vote, with...

The cookware giant has decided to temporarily stop selling pressure cookers at retail locations, including the Garden City store in Cranston. If you're in the market for a new pressure cooker to whip up some stew or pulled pork, don't head to the Cranston Williams-Sonoma for the time being. Williams-Sonoma, the specialty retailer of home furnishings and gourmet cookware with more than 250 stores in the United States, has pulled pressure cookers from their shelves following the Boston Marathon bombing. It was first reported that Williams-Sonoma pulled pressure cookers from shelves in stores in Massachusetts, but a call to the...

THE Supreme Court has frequently handed down judgments that have shaken America to its core. Now, it has turned its attention to the raisin. A group of farmers has brought a complaint about the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937, under which the government confiscates part of the annual national raisin crop. The Court is considering whether the arrangement is constitutional. But why is a country that generally celebrates red-blooded capitalism regulating the raisin trade in the first place?Since the 1940s a government agency called the Raisin Administrative Committee has confiscated a portion of the annual raisin crop: 47% in 2003 and...

IMAGINE if African-American men and boys were committing mass shootings month after month, year after year. Articles and interviews would flood the media, and we'd have political debates demanding that African-Americans be "held accountable." But when the criminals and leaders are white men, race and gender become the elephant in the room. Nearly all the mass shootings in this country in recent years have been committed by white men and boys. Unlike other groups, white men are not used to being singled out. So we expect that many of them will protest that it is unfair if we talk about...

Today I swung my front door wide open and placed my Stevens 320 right in the doorway. I gave it 5 shells, and noticing that it had no legs, even placed it in my wheelchair to help it get around. I then left it alone and went about my business. While I was gone, the mailman delivered my mail, the neighbor boy across the street mowed the yard, a girl walked her dog down the street, and quite a few cars stopped at the stop sign right in front of our house. After about an hour, I checked on...

<p>A state judge on Monday stopped Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration from banning the sale of large sugary drinks at New York City restaurants and other venues, a major defeat for a mayor who has made public-health initiatives a cornerstone of his tenure.</p>

An 18-year-old woman with a necrophilia fetish had three-way sex on the corpses of two men who she and her sexual partners strangled, it was claimed today. Joshua Miner, 24, piled the bodies of Eric Glover and Terrence Rankins, both 22, together and placed a beige sheet across them so he and his longtime girlfriend, Alisa Massaro, could lie together on top of them at Massaro's home in Joliet, Illinois, according to police reports. Adam Landerman, the 19-year-old son of a police sergeant, may have joined Massaro and Miner's sexual romp, as well, the report says. After killing the men,...

The Washington Post's Bob Woodward ripped into President Barack Obama on "Morning Joe" today, saying he's exhibiting a "kind of madness I haven't seen in a long time" for a decision not to deploy an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf because of budget concerns. "Can you imagine Ronald Reagan sitting there and saying, 'Oh, by the way, I can't do this because of some budget document?'" Woodward said.

A 5-year-old Pennsylvania girl who told another girl she was going to shoot her with a pink Hello Kitty toy gun that blows soapy bubbles has been suspended from kindergarten. Her family has hired an attorney to fight the punishment, which initially was 10 days for issuing a 'terroristic threat.' But her punishment was reduced to two days after her mother met with school officials and had the incident dropped to 'threatening to harm another student,' which apparently carries a lesser punishment.

PARIS -- Anyone who can't withstand a rational debate on the subject of gun control -- particularly in light of last week's Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Connecticut -- should be automatically prohibited from ever owning a firearm. In fact, this should be the number-one requirement of gun ownership: Can someone applying for ownership of a deadly weapon withstand an hour-long debate against someone in favor of gun control without resorting to physical or verbal assault? Is it too much to ask that every person wanting to possess a firearm be subject to a battery of tests -- everything...

It's been less than a year since we learned former NBA star Allen Iverson was broke, despite a $150 million career. Now we know why. TMZ has obtained court documents from Iverson's ongoing divorce proceedings that clearly show a man drowning in debt. Though he still earns $750,000 per year, Iverson is bleeding an estimated $360,000 each month. About a third of his debt is owed to creditors –– his bank account was seized last year when he couldn't come up with $860,000 he owed to a jeweler –– and another chunk goes to his mortgages. But there are a...

Jeb Bush in 2016? (CNN) -- For all of our post-2012 election talk about the changing culture, the changing demographics and, perhaps, a changing party, preliminary thoughts out of D.C. about the 2016 election have us headed toward not much change at all: Clinton vs Bush ... again. I am as intrigued by the prospects of these two juggernauts, Jeb and Hillary, locking ideological horns as I am repulsed by the thought of half of my life being dominated by two family names. One, Clinton, has risen from the ashes after the White House. The other name, Bush, is so...

GOP ready to forget Romney and embrace Rep. Ryan on MedicareBy Sam Baker and Elise Viebeck - 12/02/12 02:45 PM ET Mitt Romney’s Medicare budget might be fading away just as quickly as Romney himself. During the campaign, candidate Romney repeatedly hammered President Obama for cutting $716 billion from Medicare as part of his signature healthcare law. Romney pledged to repeal those cuts in a break from his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Ryan, the House Budget Committee Chairman, had preserved Obama’s Medicare cuts in two consecutive budget proposals that repealed the rest of the Affordable Care Act. Ryan...

The first family will be vacationing in Hawaii for the Christmas holidays at a cost of at least $4 million to taxpayers, according to a report from the Hawaii Reporter.The Hawaiian paper reports that residents living near the beachfront homes at Kailuana Place, where the President Obama and first family have visited annually since 2008, were notified Monday that there will be restrictions on their movements in place for 20 days, from Dec. 17 through Jan. 6.The Hawaii Reporter calculated the $4 million cost to taxpayers based in part on the price of a round trip flight to the island...

Long Beach voters took to the polls on Election Day and overwhelmingly cast their support for a living wage (or minimum wage, depending on choice of terminology) of $13 per hour for workers in the city’s largest hotels. The earliest the law would likely take effect is December 21. “In terms of what message voters sent . . . it affirms that the City of Long Beach was ready to really look at how quality of life issues matter, regardless of what level of employment or which sector you work in,” Councilmember Suja Lowenthal told the Business Journal. As of...

SEASIDE HEIGHTS, NEW JERSEY - The hurricane-ravaged east coast has been receiving north Alabama help, but crews from Huntsville Utilities learned they'll be doing work in Long Island, New York instead of in New Jersey. Crews from Huntsville, as well as Decatur Utilities and Joe Wheeler out of Trinity headed up there this week, but Derrick Moore, one of the Decatur workers, said they were told by crews in New Jersey that they can't do any work there since they're not union employees.

Luther sensed deeply the stare of Christ the Judge standing over him, demanding of him an impossible level of inner purity. Luther's Upbringing Luther was the second son in a family of eight children. His father and mother were sturdy German Bauern (peasants): coarse, credulous, and devout. Often in the beliefs of these untutored folk, elements of old German paganism blended with the Christian story: woods, winds, and water were peopled by elves, gnomes, fairies, mermen and mermaids, sprites and witches; and witchcraft was taken for granted throughout Europe. Young Luther had ample opportunity to witness the mischief and grief...

GLENDALE, Calif. (KABC) -- Proposition 37 is a measure to require mandatory labeling of genetically engineered food. There are two sides to this contentious issue.

President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney began the three-week sprint to Election Day with a testy debate Oct. 16 over domestic issues raised by voters, including a question from an undecided Black voter who wondered how the president will help him. “Mr. President, I voted for you in 2008. What have you done or accomplished to earn my vote in 2012?” asked Michael Jones in the debate featuring questions from undecided voters at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. “I’m not an optimistic as I was …Most things I need for everyday living are very expensive.” Obama responded by ticking...

This month the Chicago Bar Association issued its judicial evaluations for the 50-plus judges running for retention, putting her and seven other judges under the “not recommended” category, as the association did in 2006 when she was up for re-election. ‘Not qualified’ The Chicago Council of Lawyers also recently found her “not qualified” — as the council did six years earlier. snip Court records obtained by the Sun-Times reveal she was examined by a court-appointed psychiatrist who believes she’s “presently mentally fit with medication” but opined she was “legally insane” at the time of the reported skirmish with the sheriff’s...

Was anyone really surprised at Biden's behavior last night? I saw exactly what I expected to see. It's pretty much been his M.O. for as long as I can remember: mock, condescend, act bored by the other guy's youth/incompetence/ideas, etc. In other words, just like Putzident Obamugabe wanted, Joe was being Joe. However, for me, the part of the debate that was truly appalling -- even for Biden and his clown act -- was his dismissal of the concern of a nuclear Iran. I honestly could not believe what I was hearing, as he essentially poo-poo'ed Ryan (and by extention,...

~~snip~~ “He’s trying to go through an extreme makeover,” Obama said. “After running for a year in which he called himself ‘severely conservative,’ Mitt Romney’s trying to convince you that he was severely kidding.” Obama went on, painting his opponent as a chameleon who began moderating his tone because he was losing the election. “What he was selling was not working. Because people understood his ideas wouldn’t help the middle class. So these days, Mitt Romney is for whatever you’re for. Suddenly he loves the middle class, can’t stop talking enough about it. He loves Medicare. Loves teachers. He even...

The US military and State Department aren't the only branches of the US government to "go gay." Since the Obama Administration took control, the FBI and CIA, the two main federal law enforcement and surveillance organizations, have fully embraced the homosexual and transgender movements, and appear to be poised to crack down on pro-family groups and citizens who are critical. ....the FBI is actively recruiting homosexual and "transgender" employees and agents. The FBI's "careers" website now boasts a page advising potential (and current) job applicants. (pictures and more at link)

Due to high taxes, burdensome regulations, lack of public sector reforms, and a lackluster job climate, more people have left California than come to the state since 2005, according to a comprehensive study by the Manhattan Institute released on Tuesday, suggesting California is no longer “perceived by most Americans as the land where dreams come true.” In the report, titled “The Great California Exodus: A Closer Look," Tom Gray and Robert Scardamalia found Californians have fled to states like Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Idaho, South Carolina, and Georgia because those states have a better economic climate with less taxes and...

How compromised are our politicians? This compromised. As I reported at Atlas last Saturday, on Friday night a Muslim was arrested in Chicago after plotting to blow up a car bomb outside a crowded bar. According to ABC News, the would-be jihad murderer, Adel Daoud, 18, attended the Islamic Foundation School in Villa Park. The very next day after the arrest, Illinois Congressional candidate Tammy Duckworth went to speak at the Islamic cultural center in Villa Park, the same place where jihad killer wannabe Adel Daoud went to school. Did she tell the Muslims there that they needed to cooperate...

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows President Obama attracting support from 47% of voters nationwide, while Mitt Romney earns 44% of the vote. Four percent (4%) prefer some other candidate, and five percent (5%) are undecided. A president’s job approval rating is one of the best indicators for assessing his chances of reelection. Typically, the president’s job approval rating on Election Day will be close to the share of the vote he receives. Currently, 50% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the president's job performance. Forty-nine percent (49%) at least somewhat disapprove of...

As I read that Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan as a running mate, I heard "Puppet Man," by the 5th Dimension, echoing through my head. I wondered if this choice, worse than Palin could even pretend to be, would wake up the 50 percent who chant the "Star Spangled Banner" even though they are clueless as to what that song signifies. I’m sure the tune gets blurred between shouts of Hallelujah and Ave Maria. I have to laugh at this choice. Obviously, Mitt and his puppeteers aren’t concerned with the vote. The majority of independents are lost on Mitt’s choice....

...you can get arrested for expired tags on your car-  but not for being in the country illegally! You know you live in an upside-down country when... Your government believes the best way to eradicate trillions of dollars of debt is to spend trillions more of our money. A seven year old boy can be thrown out of school for calling his teacher "cute"- but hosting sexual exploration or diversity class in grade school is perfectly acceptable. The Supreme Court can rule that lower courts cannot display the 10 Commandments in their courtroom while sitting in front of a display of the...

Last year, Congress agreed to $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts, unless politicians find other things to cut. They didn't, of course. So now, with so-called sequestration looming in January, panic has set in. Even the new "fiscally responsible" Republicans vote against cutting Energy Department handouts to companies like Solyndra and subsidies to sugar producers. Many claim that any cut in military spending will weaken America and increase unemployment. It's another demonstration of the politicians' addiction to spending -- and how we are complicit. "One more infrastructure bill" or "this jobs plan" will jumpstart the economy, and then we'll kick...

Peter Orszag, former head of the Obama Office of Management and Budget, is desperate. With even Roll Call recognizing that President Obama is fighting an uphill battle for re-election, Orszag is floating a trial balloon: mandatory voting. His call for forced voting comes in an op/ed for Bloomberg News: The U.S. prides itself as the beacon of democracy, but it’s very likely no U.S. president has ever been elected by a majority of American adults. It’s our own fault -- because voter participation rates are running below 60 percent, a candidate would have to win 85 percent or more of...

The Rev. Al Sharpton, leader of the National Action Network, will be honored with a humanitarian award at the BET annual awards show at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles July 1, the network announced. BET said Sharpton will receive the 2012 Humanitarian Award for his commitment to political activism and social reform over the last five decades. “As the Founder and President of the National Action Network, Sharpton continues to raise awareness about civil rights and political issues, and actively takes a stand against prejudice and injustice for all people-no matter one's race, gender, sexual orientation or political affiliation,”...

After days of ridicule for launching a conspiracy theory-fueled investigation into Barack Obama’s birth certificate, Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett on Tuesday backed off his threat to keep the president off the ballot in November and apologized to his state. “If I embarrassed the state, I apologize, but that certainly wasn’t my intent,” Bennett said in an interview with Phoenix radio station KTAR. “He’ll be on the ballot as long as he fills out the same paperwork and does the same things that everybody else has.” Bennett said he still intends to keep asking Hawaii for verification that Obama’s...

Last week, news was made as today’s deadline approached for commercial and municipal swimming pool owners to install means, by which disabled swimmers could enter the nation’s swimming pools. It is the kind of regulation that would make a great punch line for the conservative version of the Daily Show, if conservatives were that funny. The Obama Administration has recently construed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Standards for Accessible Design to apply to the act of swimming. Today, this regulation was supposed to go into effect, opening up the owners to $100,000 fines as well as trial lawyer...

Samantha Brick, the journalist who decried women for being jealous of her "lovely looks", has taken a swipe at French women including the new first lady of France, Valerie Trierweiler.Miss Brick, who was publicly ridiculed for her article in April entitled Why women hate me for being beautiful, claimed to have an "insight into the sinister machinations" of the minds of French women. According to Miss Brick, the ladies of France, who are often celebrated as sophisticated and fashionable, are actually adulterous misogynists. The columnist for the Daily Mail is married to French native Pascal, and has lived in the...

Police continue to downplay the Trayvon Martin connection to the beating. But a neighbor confirms what his sister told News 5. The neighbor, too scared to go on camera, told News 5's Lauren Vargas that they heard one of the suspects say "This is justice for Trayvon" as she drove away. Tonight, an angry mother who lives on the street told News 5's Blake Brown that the kids who live on Delmar Drive are the real victims. Before Lauren Vargas' live shot on News 5 at 5:00, a black woman who lives on the street started yelling at Lauren saying...

Official: Zimmerman is in custody and will be charged with 2nd-degree murder

Richard Viguerie, a veteran conservative activist and top Santorum supporter, tells National Review Online that Santorum is “reengineering” his presidential campaign. “You can’t repeat the same behavior and expect different results,” he says. “We’ve got to do things different. We’ve got to reengineer the campaign. We’ve got to add things, take things out, and make changes. Everyone recognizes that, from the candidate on down.” Earlier today, Viguerie, along with a group of movement leaders, met with Santorum at an office in northern Virginia. For over an hour, they discussed ways to revive his bid. “We came up with a number...

During remarks in Portland, Maine, on Friday, President Obama said, “We won’t win the race for new jobs and new businesses and middle-class security if we cling to this same old, worn-out, tired ‘you’re on your own’ economics that the other side is peddling. It was tried in the decades before the Great Depression. It didn’t work then. It was tried in the last decade. It didn’t work. You know, the idea you would keep on doing the same thing over and over again, even though it’s been proven not to work. That’s a sign of madness.”

Making houses and cars smokefree is the only way to protect children from second-hand smoke, according to a new government campaign in England. The TV and radio adverts show how pervasive invisible second-hand smoke can be. Breathing it in can damage lungs and cause cancers, research has shown. Snip The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health said it wanted to see smoking in cars made illegal, when children are present. "I have no doubt an outright ban on smoking in cars would have the same positive results [as banning drink-driving]” - Prof Terence Stephenson Royal College of Paediatrics &...

Its popularity has declined sharply, many of its details have yet to emerge, and independent authorities have questioned its financial and operational viability, but California's bullet train project is very likely to get the green light from the Legislature soon. That's the consensus of those who have been counting votes among the Legislature's dominant Democrats, who can give the California High-Speed Rail Authority authorization to sell bonds and begin construction of an initial segment in the San Joaquin Valley. And that's true even though lawmakers still don't know, in any detail, what linking the northern and southern halves of the...

The threat of global climate change has prompted us to redesign many of our technologies to be more energy-efficient. From lightweight hybrid cars to long-lasting LED's, engineers have made well-known products smaller and less wasteful. But tinkering with our tools will only get us so far, because however smart our technologies become, the human body has its own ecological footprint, and there are more of them than ever before. So, some scholars are asking, what if we could engineer human beings to be more energy efficient? A new paper to be published in Ethics, Policy & Environment proposes a series...

KITCHENER — A Kitchener father is upset that police arrested him at his children’s’ school Wednesday, hauled him down to the station and strip-searched him, all because his four-year-old daughter drew a picture of a gun at school. “I’m picking up my kids and then, next thing you know, I’m locked up,” Jessie Sansone, 26, said Thursday. “I was in shock. This is completely insane. My daughter drew a gun on a piece of paper at school.” The school principal, police and child welfare officials, however, all stand by their actions. They said they had to investigate to determine whether...

Religious materials -- including Qurans that were burned at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, sparking Afghan protests -- were removed from the library of a detainee center "because of extremist inscriptions" on them, a military official said Tuesday. There was "an appearance that these documents were being used to facilitate extremist communications," a military official said. "Additionally, some of the documents were extremist in and of themselves, apparently originating from outside of Afghanistan," the official said. The official said the material was burned, but authorities are attempting to determine how much. The uproar prompted Gen. John Allen, commander of NATO's International...

HOLLYWOOD star Liam Neeson is considering giving up his Catholic belief and becoming a Muslim. The actor, 59, admitted Islamic prayer "got into his spirit" while filming in Turkish city Istanbul. He said: "The Call to Prayer happens five times a day and for the first week it drives you crazy, and then it just gets into your spirit and it's the most beautiful, beautiful thing. "There are 4,000 mosques in the city. Some are just stunning and it really makes me think about becoming a Muslim." Liam was raised in Northern Ireland as a devout Catholic and altar boy...

President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico is an act of national insanity. It isn’t often that a president makes a decision that has no redeeming virtues and — beyond the symbolism — won’t even advance the goals of the groups that demanded it. All it tells us is that Obama is so obsessed with his reelection that, through some sort of political calculus, he believes that placating his environmental supporters will improve his chances. Aside from the political and public relations victory, environmentalists won’t get much. Stopping the pipeline won’t halt...