Free Republic

Federal Communications Commissioner Robert McDowell is criticizing statements by FCC Chief Diversity Officer Mark Lloyd that he says are “troubling” indications of a penchant for regulating free speech. In his 2006 book “Prologue to a Farce: Communication and Democracy in America,” Lloyd wrote that public broadcasting outlets should be funded at a level “commensurate with or above those spending levels at which commercial operations are funded.” He said the funds should come from “license fees charged to commercial broadcasters” – the same “commercial broadcasters" that would have to compete with these public broadcasting outlets, CNSNews.com reported. “I find such ideas...

The "Homecoming Queen" at a traditionally black US university has sent a letter to President Barack Obama, complaining that her win had been questioned on campus because she is white. "It would be much easier to say that possibly some were not accepting of the news because I wasn't the most qualified contestant; however, the true reason for the disapproval was because of the color of my skin. I am not African American," the nursing student wrote to the president. She asked the president for help, suggesting that he visit Hampton University to convince students to "stop focusing so much...

DALLAS — Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Thursday that politics did not influence the decision to spend millions of dollars in stimulus money on little-used border checkpoints while passing over higher-priority projects. Members of Congress have asked for answers after The Associated Press showed that the Obama administration did not follow its internal priority list when handing out money to repair border stations nationwide.

Is any one really surprised? The soap opera begins.

Garth A. Wilson, “The Mulekites,” Ensign, Mar 1987, 60 This Jewish remnant plays a greater role in Book of Mormon history than many realize.A serious reader of the Book of Mormon will at some point likely ask himself how much is known about the Mulekites and about the role they played among Book of Mormon civilizations.The thirty verses which comprise the Book of Omni, although written by five lesser-known authors, provide answers to many questions.Just prior to his death, Amaleki completed the Book of Omni by briefly recording the account of King Mosiah’s discovery of the people of Zarahemla—the...

WASHINGTON – The White House says President Barack Obama has been "moved" by the television images of people in Iran taking to the street in protest.

Joshua C from Arizona asks about a pre-Fall role for the immune system, given that God created everything “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Medical doctor Carl Wieland responds...

Questions remain after fathers annihilate their entire families Perpetrator might kill family because he wants to save them from perceived doom CNN) -- ln April, a Maryland man wrote six suicide notes expressing his love and sorrow for his family, and then shot his wife and three children, before killing himself with a shotgun.. This month, a man killed his wife and two sons in their home near Tampa, Florida. Troy Bellar chased after his teenage son with a high-powered rifle, but the 13-year-old escaped. Bellar later shot himself.

Strata Data Axes Asteroid Dinosaur Demise by Brian Thomas, M.S.* In 1980, a theory was proposed that an asteroid or comet impact was primarily responsible for the mass dinosaur extinctions that were observed in the fossil record. But while the impact tale has become widely accepted in popular culture, critical questions remain unanswered. Further scientific investigations have revealed geological and fossil evidence that is inconsistent with a single-impact extermination.[1,2] And recently, geologists catalogued even more data that is incompatible with the asteroid story...

Planetary Quandaries Solved: Saturn Is Young by Brian Thomas, M.S.* NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has been on a mission to gather information on the structure and composition of Saturn, its rings, and its moons. Conventional cosmology holds that the planets of the solar system are billions of years old. But the more that scientists learn about Saturn’s systems, the more they uncover evidence of a young planet...

Re: Mark Traugher, "Peripheral Canal No Drought Lifeline, Contra Costa Water District Finds, Contra Costa Times, April 24, 2009 - Synopsis: A $10 billion plan to build a canal around the Sacramento Delta would not deliver significantly more water to cities and farms if it were in place this year, new data shows. It would divert water around the Delta for delivery to farms and cities. But numbers developed by a state-run planning group seeking to build the canal show it would not deliver more water in dry years, the Contra Costa Water District stated this week. Link: http://www.contracostatimes.com/search/ci_12221166?IADID=Search-www.contracostatimes.com-www.contracostatimes.com RESPONSE:...

Haven't seen so much media-generated hysteria since forever. But it's all bull. Smoke. All of it. Every. Single. Year. 30,000 Americans are killed by this exact same Flu. Type A. How many Americans have succumbed to this one? (that's a rhetorical question) I suspect, this is all an elaborate ruse. To cover up our "dear leader's" plummeting approval numbers. Someone, has been doing some polling. That's what I think.

President Obama marked Earth Day Wednesday by announcing a new initiative to lease federal waters for the purpose of generating electricity from wind and ocean currents. The president announced the initiative, to be administered by the Interior Department, while reiterating his pledge to push for a comprehensive energy plan that encourages the development of alternative fuel sources, cuts dependence on foreign oil, addresses climate change, and creates new jobs. Wind power can generate 20 percent of the country's electricity by 2030 and support 250,000 jobs, Obama said during a visit to a wind turbine tower manufacturing plant. It is part...

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose critical writings on the ambiguities of sexual identity in fiction helped create the discipline known as queer studies, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 58. The cause was breast cancer, her husband, Hal Sedgwick, said. Ms. Sedgwick broke new ground when, drawing on feminist scholarship and the work of the French poststructuralist Michel Foucault, she began teasing out the hidden socio-sexual subplots in writers like Charles Dickens and Henry James. In a 1983 essay on Dickens’s novel “Our Mutual Friend,” she drew attention to the homoerotic element in the obsessive relationship between Eugene Wrayburn and...

Rain is pelting down on Doña Porcela's treatment room in Puerto Cabezas, the main town on Nicaragua's Northern Caribbean coast. The room is barren except for a few plastic chairs, a wooden table and some old plastic bottles balanced precariously on timber beams. Doña Porcela is a respected traditional healer here and the bottles are filled with her secret medicinal potions. Her patient today is a teenage girl asleep on a piece of cardboard, serving as a mattress on the dirt floor. "Grisi Siknis turns people into witches and they go crazy," she said. Last year there were 65 cases...

'Did five, or even six, of the republican prisoners who were on hunger strike in the Maze prison in 1981 die to advance the political strategy of Sinn Fein? Did Gerry Adams and other members of the IRA kitchen cabinet snub a conciliatory offer from Margaret Thatcher, then the British prime minister, which met the substance of the prisoners’ demands, just to ensure that Sinn Fein would win a crucial by-election to Westminster? These are the explosive questions raised for Sinn Fein by papers released to The Sunday Times under the Freedom of Information Act.'

Not long ago Presbyterian congregations that promoted conserving resources were considered progressive. Now, in a time of soaring energy costs and a declining economy, such actions might be seen more as conservationist — as in conserving the environment and sometimes even protecting church budgets. From small congregations (of which there are many) to big-steeple churches, Presbyterians are becoming more interested in “going green.” It’s a term that some critics say is over-used, but whatever the motivation, more churches are doing it. “Presbyterians are getting involved, asking questions, asking for resources at a much higher rate,” says Rebecca Barnes-Davies, former coordinator...

Thank God winter is almost over. It has been another cold one. I hope Al Gore wore his hat and brought along his galoshes whenever he made an appearance against global warming....scientists have not been able to measure any increase in global warming since the end of 1998....Over the last two years temperatures have actually dropped by more than 0.5 degrees Celsius. Button up! I mention all this because (1) it is always amusing to kid Mr. Gore and (2) the price tag for Prophet Obama's climate plan has just jumped to $2 trillion. That is 3 times the White...

Immigrants Can Help Fix the Housing Bubble By RICHARD S. LEFRAK and A. GARY SHILLING The Obama administration should seriously consider granting resident status to foreigners who buy surplus houses in this country. This makes more sense than the president's $275 billion housing bailout plan, which Americans greeted with a Bronx cheer. The federal bailout forces taxpayers to subsidize overextended homeowners who bet on ever-rising house prices and used their abodes as ATMs, and it doesn't get to the basic problem -- the huge inventory of excess houses. We estimate that 2.4 million houses over and above normal working inventories...

The government has come under fire after banning a Dutch MP from entering the UK over anti-Islamic remarks. Former Conservative cabinet minister Michael Portillo said by turning away Geert Wilders, ministers had made a "populist twit and bigot" world famous. The Freedom Party MP had been invited to a House of Lords screening of his film, linking the Koran to terrorism.