Free Republic

We really have no reason to be winning this health care debate. The Democrats were swept into the Oval Office with a sweeping mandate, they have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a commanding majority in the House, and, at the beginning of the year, they were popular in the eyes of the public and had a plethora of political capital to spend. After spending some of it on the ill-conceived stimulus package, health care was next. One year ago at this time, I would have said: it’s done for. The public wants reform, they want a “public option,”...

I have a Dell flat screen monitor which is probably five years old. Within the last month, I've noticed the screen is slightly blurry. It's not readily obvious unless you sit and look at it. However, it's causing me eye strain and blurry vision which lasts for some time after looking at it. I can't look at the screen for more than a couple of minutes without eye strain. I never had this before. I'm prepared for the fact that I may need to buy a new monitor but I'd like to rule everything else out first. Changing the refresh...

James David Manning speaks about the government forcing health care on America . Aren't jobs more important ? Must watch !!!!

NEW YORK -- Prosecutors investigating Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton were prepared to seek indictments of them for their roles in the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky affairs, an explosive new book about the former president's scandals charges. In "The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr," due out in February, author Ken Gormley also says that Lewinsky believed Bill Clinton lied about their affair during grand jury testimony about his relationship with the White House intern. The Associated Press on Friday obtained a copy of the book by Gormley, a Duquesne University law professor, about the scandals that enveloped the...

Lower Merion fans at a high school basketball game, Tuesday, said some rather nasty things regarding host Upper Darby which brought a response from the Royals side which eventually escalated into some extraordinary ugly and anti-Semitic statements regarding LM, which has a large Jewish population. These ugly statements included things like "We'll write you letters when you're in Auschwitz". Now, this is not something that should be ignored but since Tuesday the dinosaur media has been tut-tutting over incident and the officials from both schools have been indulging in public hand-wringing and the Lower Merion parents have been calling for...

This is funny. Apparently this musician was on a United Airlines flight with his band and they man-handled his checked guitar and broke it. He went round and round with them for several months trying to get them to pay for the damage but they refused so he took matters into his own hands. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

On its Web site, GQ Magazine asks the burning question, "Has the Capital Gotten Cooler Under Obama?" The magazine says yes and no. But when it comes to Barack Obama and Co., you'll be relieved to know that the answer is a resounding YES!! In a slide show, we learn that Obama is "our best-dressed prez since JFK. When he goes tieless, Ahmadinejad should take notice." On Obama in jeans, "the loose fit seems presidential." Also lookin' good to GQ is Joe Biden: "The veep has terrific style. He deftly mixes colors and patterns with his shirts and ties, and...

For those that don't know about history ... here is a condensed version that will take about 2 minutes or less to read: Humans originally existed as members of small bands of nomadic hunters/gatherers.. They lived on deer in the mountains during the summer and would go to the coast and live on fish and lobster in the winter. The two most important events in all of history were the invention of beer and the invention of the wheel. The wheel was invented to get man to the beer. These were the foundations of modern civilization and together were the...

StopeTaxes.com wishes the Internet a very happy 40th birthday! What started in a lab in UCLA in 1969 has transformed human civilization. The internet has changed the way we work, learn, communicate, conduct commerce, and live. One of the most significant developments in human history, it has facilitated tremondous prosperity, innovation, and is bringing change to even the most closed, cruel, and opaque regimes in the world. StopeTaxes.com is committed to preserving liberty online. Indeed, the internet is the last best example of a truly free market. However, efforts are afoot that will hinder all that has made the internet...

Time is not on Tiger Woods' side - anymore. Swiss watchmaker Tag Heuer reversed course Friday and announced it is dumping Woods as pitchman in U.S. advertising campaigns for the foreseeable future. After initially standing by Woods and declaring his personal problems "not our business," the company's head honcho now says they will use actor Leonardo Di Caprio and other "brand ambassadors" instead of the disgraced golfer. "We recognize Tiger Woods as a great sportsman but we have to take account of the sensitivity of some consumers in relation to recent events," company CEO Jean-Christophe Babin told Swiss daily Le...

...is nothing more than a bunch of brainwashed, eco-Nazis attempting to lynch Western Civilization on a petard of tainted science.

U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell retorts: "Here's the most outrageous part: at the end of this rush (to get the bill passed), they (Dems) want us to vote on a bill that no one outside the Majority Leader's conference room has even seen."

Hello my Freeper friends, My 88-year-old mom has been in the hospital since just before Thanksgiving, and is now in ICU. Turns out she had E. coli poisoning, which led to kidney failure, dialysis, and they're still trying to knock out the infection in her blood. I'm praying that she pulls through this. She's been moved to ICU, where she's getting better care. Her blood pressure is still low, and she's on O2. Please, friends, I ask that you lift her up in prayer for her healing. Thank you.

Sorry for the vanity folks, but I stumbled across this video last night. It's a couple years old, before Al Franken was shaming the state of Minnesota as a Senator. An excerpt from a public forum featuring he and Ann Coulter, I think this so perfectly encapsulates Franken's weaselly methods in his attempts to smear conservatives as "liars," that it deserved addressing. Please take a few minutes to watch. Then, take a minute to read the ACTUAL ARTICLE by Thomas Friedman in question, and come back for my commentary. Now, did you notice what Franken did there? He started in...

When Fox News executives went looking to replace Brit Hume last year, they had to find someone to take over for their franchise newsman, the staid and steady Washington hand whose arrival in 1996 had conferred instant legitimacy on the upstart network. But the network turned not to another Hume, not a traditional anchor-desk presence or deep-voiced TV vet, but to Bret Baier — sunny, serious, self-deprecating and approachable. Eight years ago, he was holding down the network’s bureau in Atlanta. Today, he steps before the camera every weekday to anchor Fox News’s “Special Report” one-hour news program. Count Hume...

The soul of the city is coming off the practice field and headed toward the showers. They are a motley group, undrafted guys and late-round fliers, players cast off from other teams. Brees landed in town after an injury convinced the Chargers that his best days were behind him. "When we came here," he has said, "I was in the process of rebuilding, as well." Quarterback Drew Brees and the Saints' potent offense have produced a 13-0 record heading into their home game Saturday night against Dallas. Running back Mike Bell was out of football. So was cornerback Mike McKenzie,...

I keep thinking about our president’s hilarious Special Olympics remark on “The Tonight Show,” and I’m actually taking it personally. I’m not developmentally disadvantaged, exactly. Or mentally challenged. But I do kind of suck at bowling (not as bad as Obama). Plus, I’m lousy at tennis, embarrassing at basketball, can’t catch a pop fly to save my life, never played actual golf, etc. I have recently come to realize that I hate skiing. I used to be halfway decent at ping pong, but probably not anymore. Last week, when I filled out an NCAA bracket, I did so purely in...

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VideoA drunken Santa Claus prompts a mom to call 911 after he stumbles into her yard apparently looking for his reindeer and scaring her kids. Officers ticketed 55-year-old Thomas Arnold of Sparta for having an open beer in a car. The man driving that car, 47-year-old Kevin Arnold, was arrested for OWI. But, the kids say they knew right away this Santa was a hoax. "He smelled like alcohol. So I knew it wasn't the real Santa because Santa doesn't drink alcohol," says 9-year-old Katie Dockerty. Katie says the Santa that ended up in her lawn was loud and had...

Beauty is not so much in the eye of the beholder as in the measurements between the eyes, mouth and ears, US and Canadian researchers say. In four experiments aimed at finding "an ideal facial feature arrangement", US and Canadian researchers asked students to compare colour photographs of the same woman's face, in which the vertical distance between the eyes and mouth, and horizontal distance between the eyes, had been doctored using Photoshop. The features - eyes, mouth, nose, contour and hair - remained the same and a woman's face was only compared to her own, never to another's. Students...

Nearly 30 years ago, a Lockheed Constellation flew to its current location at a Helena college. If all goes as planned, the 1958 plane will do the same to its new home at an Oregon museum next year. After mechanics restore the plane, it will be flown to Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville, Ore., where it will be on display alongside the famed Spruce Goose, the wood-resin plane billionaire Howard Hughes developed for use in World War II but which never lifted off past its initial prototype. “What an awesome looking machine,” University of Montana-Helena College of Technology...

Diddy Obama? Sean Combs may be all grown up, but he wouldn’t mind having President Barack Obama as a surrogate father. “I ain’t gonna lie – if God said I could pick one person to be my father, I’d want to be Sean Combs Obama,” the Artist Popularly Known As Diddy told Playboy for their January/February double issue, on newsstands this month. “That’s how dope he is. I hope he reads this interview and adopts me. I wouldn’t even have to be in the will. I got my own money!” The rap music mogul, 40, also told the mag that...

MOUNT VERNON, Wash., Dec. 17 (UPI) -- A string of lawn gnome disappearances in Washington state was solved when winds blew down a fence around the yard where they were being kept, authorities said. Lisa Soneda of Mount Vernon said her daughter told her this month that the fence separating her back yard from that of her next-door neighbor had blown down to reveal an unusual sight,

As a joke, my brother used to hang a pair of panty hose over his fireplace before Christmas. He said all he wanted was for Santa to fill them. What they say about Santa checking the list twice must be true because every Christmas morning, although Jay's kids' stockings were overflowed, his poor pantyhose hung sadly empty. One year I decided to make his dream come true. I put on sunglasses and went in search of an inflatable love doll. They don't sell those things at Walmart. I had to go to an adult bookstore downtown. If you've never been...

WASHINGTON — Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she was personally skeptical of manned space missions and warned that NASA's future funding could depend on whether it was likely to create jobs. Pelosi vowed "harsh scrutiny" of all spending requests and said she would be asking "what is the mission? How will the money effectively be spent, in what period of time, to create jobs, compared to what?"

A rocky and water-rich planet, not much heftier than our own, has been discovered so close to our solar system that astronomers one day may be able to study its atmosphere.

WASHINGTON — U.S. President Barack Obama reaffirmed his commitment to human spaceflight during a Dec. 16 meeting with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, but details of what path the president wants the space agency to take are not expected until the White House submits its 2011 budget request to Congress in February, according to government officials. Aerospace industry sources with close ties to the Obama administration said in advance of the Oval Office meeting that Bolden had prepared four options for the president to consider, all of which were said to include some variation of the so-called “Flexible Path” scenario a...

PARIS — European Space Agency (ESA) governments on Dec. 17 gave final approval to a two-part Mars exploration program to be conducted with NASA, confirming their commitment to spend 850 million euros ($1.23 billion) on missions in 2016 and 2018, ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain said.

Palin goes after the "governator" of Kalifforneeah !!! Palin shoots, she scores !!!!

James David Manning speaks about what Jesus meant by father forgive them, they know not what they do . Did McCain throw the election ? Palin was honest . Copenhagen conference ...etc...

Building a new stadium on the site of the Metrodome would cost $870 million, according to a report presented today to the Dome’s landlords. That compares to the most recent $954 million pricetag of a new stadium, primarily because of lower product and labor costs, according to Bill Lester, executive director of the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission (MSFC). According to Mortenson Construction, the cost decreased by nine percent since February of 2009 – a savings of $84 million. “What we’ve learned is that the time to do this is now,” commission chairman Roy Terwilliger said in a prepared statement. The...

A 42-year-old suburban mom is in a detox facility Wednesday night after registering a .40 when police stopped her Tuesday afternoon in Inver Grove Heights. A shopper at the Cub Foods grocery store in West St. Paul called police after she saw the woman and her young son in the frozen food aisle. "He was saying mommy, I want to go home. Let's go home mommy,'" said a woman who called 911. "I went up to her and asked if she was okay and she didn't answer me. She was like stumbling. So, I had my instincts kicked in." A...

Let us contemplate the badness of Joe Lieberman. Who would have thought that this holiday season we’d be obsessed with the senator from Connecticut? Really, I was hoping it would be more about shopping for mittens on the Internet. Lieberman’s apparently successful attempt to hijack health care reform and hold it hostage until it had been amended into something that liberals couldn’t stomach has mesmerized the nation’s political class. This was, after all, a guy who has been a liberal on domestic issues since he was a college student campaigning for John F. Kennedy. A guy who was in favor...

The Hornell NY Common Council approved a ban on smoking in city parks at Monday night’s meeting. Hornell Mayor Shawn Hogan said the city was prompted to ban smoking by the Southern Tier Tobacco Awareness Community Partnership, a non-profit that promotes smoking awareness. Hogan said the move makes sense, comparing it to a similar ban at Ralph Wilson Stadium, the home of the Buffalo Bills. “You’re seeing more and more of this,” he said, adding police will not enforce the ban, but it will be left up to peer enforcement. Representatives from STTAC at Monday’s meeting said the signs would...

Now, finally, we can all agree on something — the individual mandate should be killed. Check out Keith Olbermann's "special comment" about the individual mandate last night. It's (inadvertently, of course) laugh-out-loud funny at times, including his pledge to become an insurance criminal at the end: "Brand me a lawbreaker, if you choose. Fine me, if you will. Jail me, if you must."

My wife was listening to Glenn Beck’s radio program, this morning. She informs me that Glenn Beck says that the White House called his “red phone” yesterday at the end of his FOX News TV show. Evidently, the White House was upset that Glenn Beck interviewed Michael Goldfarb, author of the Offutt AFB closure threat report. In the interview, Goldfarb stood by his report. Glenn Beck, prefacing the story as a rumor, also stated that he confirmed this story with three sources. But, the White House vociferously denies the story.

Who am I?                                                                            Read the description, then click on the question mark at the right to see if you guessed right! I was born in one country, raised in another. My father was born in another country. I was not his only child. He fathered several children with numerous women. I became very close to my mother, as my father showed no interest in me. My mother died at an early age from cancer. Although my father deserted me and my mother raised me, I later wrote a book idolizing my father not my mother. Later in life,...

What is going on with Russia?

Flashing teen found guilty after being hit by car The Associated Press Posted: 12/16/2009 01:24:17 PM MST WELLINGTON, New Zealand—A New Zealand teen who was flashing her breasts at passing cars has been found guilty of disorderly behavior for the prank, which ended with her in a hospital after a distracted driver ran into her. Cherelle May Dudfield, 18, pleaded guilty to the charge when she appeared in Invercargill District Court, the Southland Times newspaper reported Wednesday. Dudfield, egged on by her friends, was flashing passing motorists from a traffic island in the middle of a four-lane road in the...

Lithium in the Water Supply: America has been adding fluoride to its public water supplies for decades to help prevent reduce tooth decay. Now researchers from Japan suggests expanding the list to lithium.

I ordered two autographed copies of Liberty and Tyranny for Christmas gifts, right from Levin's website. They just arrived today, and I just opened the box like 10 minutes ago, to have a look.

James David Manning asks why are the banks that receive bailouts doing so well. And more ...

Richard Branson's new commercial spacecraft, Enterprise, will transport the musicians to just outside the Earth's atmosphere where they can enjoy about 5 minutes of weightlessness and time to play one hit song.

Tiger Woods' wife Elin Nordegren is taking her two children and moving to Sweden after weeks of shocking revelations about her husband's infidelity, Fox411.com has learned exclusively. Tiger is not accompanying Nordegren and their kids, daughter Sam, 2, and son Charlie, 10 months, a source close to her family tells Fox411.com A second source confirms to Fox411.com that Nordegren will move out of the couple's Windemere, Florida mansion before Christmas. That is the same house where Woods crashed his SUV in the early morning hours following Thanksgiving. The revelations come as People magazine reports that Nordegren is meeting with divorce...

<p>Woods, meanwhile, is showing little commitment to the marriage, according to Us Weekly.</p>

Welcome to the world of the VIP host – also known as a concierge, marketing director, point person, or, depending on who you ask, celebrity pimp. It's 4 a.m. in Hollywood. One of the hottest night clubs in town is about to close, when the concierge gets a text message. A famous TV actor is on his way with his entourage. He wants the club to stay open. He also wants four bottles of exotic tequila, extra security, drugs, and a minimum of 10 curvy brunettes up for a "good time.” The concierge has 10 minutes to make it happen,...

We hear it so often around this time of year: "Happy Holiday!" "Season’s Greeting!" Everyone seems to be in the mood for some kind of festive celebration. Exactly what is the holiday that we are celebrating? Are we allowed to say it? Is it a forbidden word? Are we afraid to say it? Will people be offended if we actually tell them what the holiday is? What ever happened to Christmas? What ever happened to the Christ of Christmas? Long ago there was no room in the inn. Is there any room for Him in today’s celebration? Are little children...

Does anyone know of any inexpensive taxi services that would be able to take me to Detroit? I remember this on service that was 25$ during the week and forty during the weekend, but I can't find it.

DEFUNIAK SPRINGS – He was quiet. She wasn’t. He liked to hunt, while she loved her potted plants. She was 16 when they met in a skating rink. They eloped in a dump truck later that year. After 59 years of marriage, James and Lolie Brackin died Saturday morning only moments apart. “They say when you die, you’re immediately in the presence of Jesus,” said their youngest daughter, Dana Troublefield. “I think she got up there and said, ‘Where’s my husband?’ And Jesus said, ‘Just a minute. I’m working on that.’ “She didn’t like to go anywhere alone,” Troublefield added....

When thinking about the mass extermination camps of a holocaust think.. The key to freedom is to be able to have the ability to defend yourself &, if you dont have the tools to do that, then youre...