Free Republic

The sickness spread at funerals. The Fore people, a once-isolated tribe in eastern Papua New Guinea, had a long-standing tradition of mortuary feasts — eating the dead from their own community at funerals. Men consumed the flesh of their deceased relatives, while women and children ate the brain. It was an expression of respect for the lost loved ones, but the practice wreaked havoc on the communities they left behind. That’s because a deadly molecule that lives in brains was spreading to the women who ate them, causing a horrible degenerative illness called “kuru” that at one point killed 2...

Rachel Maddow sat down with Seth Meyers last night and couldn’t stop laughing at how amazing Donald Trump‘s presidential campaign has been, not for the country as a whole but for her specifically. She said his campaign has been a “gift from God” and explained to an amazed Meyers how Trump is not just crushing his opponents in the polls, but doing so by a mile and keeping serious candidates out of the race. Meyers found the bright side: no one will be able to take him down with comments he made on a hot mic or something because the...

It began with anxiety and depression. A few months later, hallucinations appeared. Then the Texas man, in his 40s, couldn't feel or move the left side of his face. He thought the symptoms were because of a recent car accident. But the psychiatric problems got worse. And some doctors thought the man might have bipolar disorder. Cattle feeding practices have been changed in an effort to halt the spread of mad cow disease. THE SALT Mad Cow Disease: What You Need To Know Now Eventually, he couldn't walk or speak. He was hospitalized. And about 18 months after symptoms began,...

... ranked as the program's seventh lowest rated performance in its six-and-a-half year run...

**SNIP** At that point, the liberal host held little back in showing her disapproval for Democrats falling remarkably short at the state level: Complete Republican legislative control in 30 states and we've only got 50 states. Elections, consequences. Democrats, do you guys have a catch-up plan for the states here or what? Because the trend here is obliterating. Earlier, Maddow erroneously put the measly number of state legislatures run by Democrats at eight – “Oregon, California, Hawaii, Illinois, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware” when it’s really nine as Maryland’s legislatures remains controlled by Democrats (but will have a Republican Governor...

MOUNT VERNON, Wash. (AP) -- Police in Mount Vernon, Washington, killed an agitated Angus cow that rampaged through town, tossing a police officer into the air and tap-dancing on a patrol car. The Skagit Valley Herald reports (http://is.gd/dm29HB) that police spokeswoman Shannon Haigh says the cow apparently escaped from a farm outside the city limits. It was first reported in a Wal-Mart parking lot last Friday.

Laboratory tests have confirmed a diagnosis of variant CJD (a fatal brain disorder) in a patient who recently died in Texas. The confirmation was made when laboratory results from an autopsy of the patient’s brain tested positive for variant CJD. First described in 1996 in the United Kingdom, variant CJD is a rare, degenerative, fatal brain disorder in humans. It is believed to be caused by consumption of products from cows with the disease bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or "mad cow" disease). Worldwide, more than 220 variant CJD patients have been reported, with a majority of them in the United...

The European Commission has approved new rules aimed at limiting the spread of a virus that has killed millions of piglets in the United States, highlighting the risk of animal feed products as a potential transmission agent. Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus (PEDv) has wiped out more than 10% of the US pig population since it appeared a year ago, and has also struck in Canada, Mexico and Japan. The European Union has not been affected by this strain. In the United States, the world’s biggest pork exporter, losses from PEDv could cut pork production as much as 7% in 2014,...

An annoyed Rachel Maddow on Thursday lectured ABC News for daring to question Barack Obama's appearance earlier this week on an internet comedy show. After playing a clip of reporter Jim Avila quizzing Jay Carney on whether the chat program damaged the "the dignity of the office," Maddow labeled this contention "completely and totally wrong." [See video below. MP3 audio here.] She mocked "capital V, capital S, very serious pundit David Gergen" for this tweet: "Unimaginable that Truman, Ike, JFK, Reagan would appear on 'Between Two Ferns.' They carefully projected majesty of their office." According to Maddow, there is precedent...

“Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson Sues to Block Water Tower That Might Supply Fracking Operations,” cried the Huffington Post online news site. “Exxon Mobil CEO: No fracking near my backyard,” reported USA Today. [...]“This is not an anti-fracking lawsuit,” Whitten said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

..[B]y the time the Bush era was winding down, the whole administration, including the president, was stewed in terrible, Cheney-level disapproval ratings. And now, almost no one who played a significant role in that administration is anywhere to be found in electoral politics, beyond the tertiary orbits of Punch-and-Judy cable news and the remains of what used to be the conservative "think tank" circuit... Unlike the Reagan administration, the first Bush administration and the Clinton administration, the George W. Bush presidency elevated precisely no one to the ranks of national leadership who wasn't there before. The 2008 Republican presidential primaries...

Rachel Maddow blasted Republicans for shutting down the government, claiming they’ve been trying to do this since they took control of the House of Representatives. MSNBC host Maddow said Monday that Republicans took control of the House and were sworn in January 2011. By April they were threatening to shut down the government. Maddow criticized the GOP Congress for being the least productive Congress in U.S. history. She said there has been “no significant legislation since John Boehner got the speakership.” The GOP has been “otherwise occupied” with threatening to shut down the government. “By July [2011] Republicans had forced...

NEW YORK (BHN) - Industry experts anticipate MSNBC will make major changes, after the latest ratings show the network in a virtual free-fall. "Look, we're getting beaten regularly by infomercials for that crinkly garden hose..." said one MSNBC executive. "I guess when you look at the turds we've got in front of the camera, it's no surprise we're in the crapper." The Rachel Maddow Show delivered its lowest-rated month since it debuted in September 2008 (717 total viewers). "We've got to get either a real man or real woman in that time slot, because whatever the hell we've got now...

Among the most hilarious things uttered by Rachel Maddow came when she appeared on "Real Time with Bill Maher" last June. Maddow was a guest along with Reason.com editor Nick Gillespie, publisher Mort Zuckerman and actor Mark Ruffalo. When Gillespie and Maher tried to pin Maddow down on whether she supported the health care law signed by then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in 2006, the template for Obamacare four years later, Maddow got testy. (video, audio clips after page break)Maddow plays dumb on sex-selective abortion ban in North Dakota "Leave me alone about Romneycare, all of you!" Maddow whined. "Listen, my...

A poster on Twitter, upon seeing what he thought were very similar posts referencing MSNBC host Rachel Maddow's show, did some searching and found out that Maddow has been using phony twitter accounts to boost her "mentions" on the popular website. As can be seen by screenshots collected by a tweeter named @LeftyBollocks, Maddow has massive amount of accounts posting the exact same claim that "Confession: I yell at my TV while watching Rachel #Maddow talk about filibuster reform in the same way most people do during football." With so many supposedly unique accounts mentioning her name, the term #Maddow...

or someone seemingly so bright, Rachel Maddow sure has a short memory. There she was on June 19, talking about a proposed debate between GOP Sen. Scott Brown and Democrat challenger Elizabeth Warren and mocking Brown with her trademark brand of arm-waving, arrested adolescent sarcasm (video after page break) -- Maddow Drops Bogus Claim about MSNBC Not Hosting Proposed Brown-Warren DebateMADDOW: This week, though, Scott Brown said he would agree to a televised debate with Elizabeth Warren, but he had conditions. And he said if his conditions weren't met, he wouldn't do it. His conditions are, first, that the widow...

HOUSTON -- The brain damage that characterizes Alzheimer's disease may originate in a form similar to that of infectious prion diseases such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob, according to newly published research by The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). "Our findings open the possibility that some of the sporadic Alzheimer's cases may arise from an infectious process, which occurs with other neurological diseases such as mad cow and its human form, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease," said Claudio Soto, Ph.D., professor of neurology at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston, part of UTHealth. "The...

Older fathers made headlines several years ago when researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine reported that a man over 40 is almost six times as likely as a man under 30 to father an autistic child. Since then, research has shown that a man's chances of fathering offspring with schizophrenia double when he hits 40 and triple at age 50. The incidence of bipolarity, epilepsy, prostate cancer and breast cancer also increases in children born to men approaching 40. Both dwarfism and Marfan syndrome (a disorder of the connective tissue) have been linked to older fathers, and according...

It has taken hold with conviction: the idea that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker ginned up a phony budget crisis to justify his bold bid to strip state employees of most bargaining rights and cut their benefits. A volley of e-mails, blog posts and inquiries to reporters followed a  Madison Capital Times editorial on Feb. 16, 2011, that said no state budget deficit exists for 2010-’11 -- or if it does, it’s the fault of Walker and the Republicans in the Legislature. Liberal MSNBC talk show host Rachel Maddow joined in Feb. 17, accusing Walker of manipulating the situation for political...

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and her show's producers were ejected from Senate nominee Christine O'Donnell's headquarters today with an "angry guy" insisting they were not welcome back. This afternoon Maddow told TPM in a statement that she spoke with O'Donnell's staffers "multiple times about us being here today and wanting to speak with someone -- anyone, even a volunteer -- from the campaign."