Free Republic

Paul's Reaganite cheerleader Doug Wead continues his early bird crusade to get "Dr. No" in front of the nation's voters one more time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeGMQBe7_OU

JOE BIDEN: HAIR WE CAN BELIEVE INAugust 27, 2008 Vice presidential candidate Joe Biden's speech at the Democratic National Convention was great. As I write, he hasn't given it yet, but these are my favorite parts: "General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all...

After the Des Moines Register Republican presidential debate ended here Wednesday afternoon, Susan Patterson Plank, the paper’s vice president of marketing, was a little defensive. Reporters wanted to know how Alan Keyes, the former ambassador running a nearly nonexistent campaign, qualified for the debate. Standing beside the established Republican candidates on the stage at the Iowa Public Television headquarters, Keyes used his considerable rhetorical skills to wander all over the lot, deliver sermons, avoid questions, grow increasingly irritable, and in general lead viewers to ask what in the h*** he was doing on stage.

VATICAN CITY — With his conservative pronouncements on issues of sexuality, liturgy and interfaith dialogue, Pope Benedict XVI has frustrated many Roman Catholics in the church’s progressive wing. Benedict’s views on economics, as expounded in an expected papal document, should be a lot more to liberals’ liking. Benedict’s encyclical — anticipated in the next several months, along with one on the theological virtues of “hope” — promises to be a provocative contribution to the debate on globalization and its social consequences. Though he adamantly rejects attempts to associate Catholic teaching with Marxism, the pope has signaled that he supports intervention...

WASHINGTON — A "dangerous cycle of debt" is trapping too many credit-card holders, making it increasingly difficult to protect their financial security, according to a report. About one-third of cardholders pay interest rates in excess of 20 percent, according to a report from New York-based think tank Demos. Also, borrowers with one slip-up can incur a "cascade" of penalties and end up in a "trap" of high-cost debt, the report said. "The excuse of risk-based pricing is used to justify everything. These prices go far beyond pricing for risk. Some of these interest rates and payment fees seem to not...

Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., said during a presidential campaign stop Sunday that he isn't against immigration. However, Tancredo is against illegal immigration - and its cost to taxpayers. "Amnesty is coming down the pike," Tancredo said a group of about 20 people at a home in Davenport. "But its a slap in the face to all the people who did it the right way, and to those who are patiently waiting in line to legally get in." Tancredo, who announced that he would seek the Republican presidential nomination on a Des Moines-area radio show in April, has gained prominence in...

Colorado Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo, an outspoken opponent of illegal immigration, will announce his bid for president on Monday.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Colorado Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo, an outspoken opponent of illegal immigration, will announce his bid for president on Monday. Tancredo will kick off campaign with an announcement in Iowa, where political caucuses start whose the presidential nominating season, an official close to the congressman said. Tancredo has flirted with a presidential bid for more than a year and began raising money for the effort in January. After taking in more than $1 million in two months, he has decided to make his run official, said the official, who asked not to be named ahead of Tancredo's official...

Tancredo, a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, said in a statement Tuesday that he doesn't believe that Gonzales' handling of the prosecutors' firings alone warrants his dismissal. But "his total mishandling of the affair is simply the latest latest in a series of leadership failures at the Justice Department," chiefly his handling of illegal immigration prosecutions, Tancredo said. "Gonzales' legacy at the DOJ has been one of misplaced priorities, political miscalculation, and a failure to enforce the laws which he's sworn to uphold." Tancredo faulted several Justice Department decisions dealing with border crimes, including the prosecution of two Border...

Tom Tancredo Set To Form Exploratory Committee. Just on Fox News

WASHINGTON - Rep. Tom Tancredo is headed back to Miami a month after sparking a tense exchange with Florida Gov. Jeb Bush by likening the city to a "Third World country." The Colorado Republican, who vocally opposes illegal immigration - and who has never shied away from a chance to talk about it - plans a speech next week to the Miami Rotary Club titled, "Renewing America: The Need for Assimilation." The speech will include more details about his thoughts on how to address "problems" in Miami, his spokesman Carlos Espinosa said. Alia Faraj, Bush's communications director, said Tancredo is...

According to a 2005 Pew Research Center poll, 70 percent of evangelical Christians believe that living beings have always existed in their present form, compared with 32 percent of Protestants and 31 percent of Catholics. Politically, 60 percent of Republicans are creationists, whereas only 11 percent accept evolution, compared with 29 percent of Democrats who are creationists and 44 percent who accept evolution. A 2005 Harris Poll found that 63 percent of liberals but only 37 percent of conservatives believe that humans and apes have a common ancestry. What these figures confirm for us is that there are religious and...

You are invited to An Evening with Best-Selling Authors Stephen King John Grisham Jim Webb To support Democratic Candidate for U.S. Senate Jim Webb Sunday, September 24, 2006 at 7 pm The Paramount Theatre, The Downtown Mall Charlottesville, Virginia Please respond by the attached card Inquiries to Bert Colley at 434-245-5900 bertcolley@yahoo.com $2100 Includes wine and cheese reception with the authors and priority seating $500 Includes preferred seating $ 100 General admission ticket

Mobile Genes Found to Pressure Species Formation. Biologists at the University of Rochester have discovered that an old and relatively unpopular theory about how a single species can split in two turns out to be accurate after all, and acting in nature.The finding, reported in today's issue of Science, reveals that scientists must reassess the processes involved in the origin of species. The beginnings of speciation, suggests the paper, can be triggered by genes that change their locations in a genome. "In the 1930s there was speculation that parts of chromosomes that switch from one location to another might cause...

Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna said he thought Darwin's theories on evolution deserve to be studied in schools, along with the scientific question marks that remain. It is right to teach "the science of Darwin, not ideological Darwinism," Cardinal Schonborn said Aug. 23. He spoke at a meeting in Rimini sponsored by the Catholic lay movement Communion and Liberation, and his remarks were reported by Italian newspapers. In 2005, Cardinal Schonborn helped fuel the debate over evolution and intelligent design when he wrote in The New York Times that science offers "overwhelming evidence for design in biology." He later...

Former Seattle police Chief Norm Stamper doesn't have dreadlocks, a Zig-Zag T-shirt or a single Phish album. He just sounds like it. "It's laughable when people say we are winning the drug war," said Stamper, who had just finished a main-stage speech to the crowd gathered Sunday at the Seattle Hempfest in Myrtle Edwards Park. "The people who are prosecuting the drug war are invested psychically and financially. It's a holy war for them. "We should legalize all drugs." While the comments might be unusual for most law enforcement careerists, they are nothing new for Stamper, who was Seattle's top...

• Q2 jumps by 67 percent year over year • Buyers done in by ‘creative mortgages’ according to figures released Monday by Foreclosures.com, a Central Valley-based real estate investment advisory firm and publisher of foreclosure property information. "Year over year at the end of the second quarter of 2006, foreclosure activity in California has increased more than 67 percent," says Alexis McGee, president of Fair Oaks-based ForeclosureS.com. The once hot housing markets in Las Vegas and Phoenix are cooling off rapidly and defaults there are on the rise as well, she says. "Both Las Vegas and Phoenix were impacted by...

God and Charles Darwin were not on the primary ballot in Kansas on Tuesday, but once again a contentious schools election has religion and science at odds in a state that has restaged a three- quarter-century-old battle over the teaching of evolution. Less than a year after a conservative Republican majority on the State Board of Education adopted the most far- reaching standards in the United States defining science education in ways that challenge Darwin's theory of evolution, moderate Republicans and Democrats are mounting a fierce counterattack to retake power and switch the standards back to what they call conventional...

Darwin won. Moderate Kansas State Board of Education candidates pulled off a victory Tuesday, gathering enough might to topple the board’s 6-4 conservative majority. A victory by incumbent Janet Waugh, a Democrat whose district includes parts of Lawrence, and wins by Republican moderates in two districts previously represented by conservatives left the tables turned heading into the Nov. 7 general election. “If we change the board around, we’ll be able to make decisions that we think are right for our students,” Lawrence school board member Craig Grant said. Grant had worked to defeat the conservatives who attracted international attention and...

Ten years ago, an international team of scientists reported evidence, in a controversial cover story in the journal Nature, that life on Earth began more than 3.8 billion years ago—400 million years earlier than previously thought. A UCLA professor who was not part of that team and two of the original authors will report in late July that the evidence is stronger than ever. Craig E. Manning, lead author of the new study and a professor of geology and geochemistry in the UCLA Department of Earth and Space Sciences, painstakingly mapped an area on Akilia Island in West Greenland where...