Free Republic

SACRAMENTO (AP) - Legislative leaders returned to work Wednesday promising cooperation with each other and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger despite last year's special election battles and a general election just 11 months away. Saying they understand voters' growing discontent with Sacramento, lawmakers said they will set aside politics in favor of making progress on a number of issues. "The voters clearly said they want us to solve California's problems," said Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, D-Oakland. "They don't want bickering, and they certainly don't want to be given the responsibility of solving the problems they sent us to do." The...

SIERRA VISTA — Those who serve in today’s America’s armed forces will be treated with respect, veterans of a couple of other wars said Friday. Miguel Arvizo, a veteran of the Korean conflict often called the Forgotten War, and Chuck Bianco, who served in Vietnam, a conflict that raised the American people’s level of hate for the military, promised those serving in harm’s way today in Iraq and Afghanistan will neither be forgotten nor dismissed as killers. Both former soldiers, who were wounded during their time in combat, spoke about the need for the nation to appreciate those who are...

What are you driven by? The last time I was sick, it was a Saturday and I flipped on the TV for an extraordinary long time. The whole day was exercise equipment, how to become real-estate rich with no money down, and Suze Orman gave me her steps to financial security. /cut/ The average person on the street will tell you that the role of churches and other religious institutions is to provide moral instruction—practical suggestions for successful living for the spirit, just as Suze Orman and Jake are there to help us out with our banking and bodies. /cut/...

Mark Twain said it best when he commented: "There are lies, damn lies and ballot initiatives." --snip-- One of these deceptions involves Proposition 71, the measure that created California's $3 billion stem cell research agency in 2004. In marketing this initiative, proponents said the state would receive not only miracle cures and reduced medical costs, but also up to $1.1 billion in royalties from new stem cell innovations. Now we are learning that this promise, at best, was misleading. At worst, it was a cynical ruse. As was entirely predictable, biotech leaders and many university leaders - key supporters of...

In a report released Friday, the investigative arm of Congress found that fully electronic voting machines hold promise for U.S. elections but still have security and reliability problems. E-voting failures in elections have been a problem in California, and the state's experiences are mentioned several times in the latest report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Analysts for the GAO found that crucial vote-recording and tallying files could be altered, that voting software often had weak or nonexistent password protections and that manufacturers had installed unapproved software in several places, including California. Yet fixing those problems could be years away....

Trade: CAFTA is often seen as a battle of big manufacturing corporations. But in reality it will benefit businesses across the board. Just ask Central American immigrants around Los Angeles, who say it's critical. We've been intrigued by the imminent passage of CAFTA, which sadly has been given short shrift by the media. So we did something different. We talked with some of the people and businesses most affected by CAFTA — those in Los Angeles' thriving Central American immigrant community. We found their comments enlightening. Take, for instance, Transportes Guzman in Los Angeles' Pico-Union district. There, boxes pile nearly...

Budget: Last week, the Governor introduced his budget proposal for the fiscal year July 1, 2005 through June 30, 2006. Predictably, Democrats assailed it as being harsh and draconian and laden with too many cuts. But let’s look at the facts. The Governor’s proposed budget increases spending in the General Fund by 4.2%. That is a greater spending increase than was contained in any of the last 3 budgets, the last 2 of which were Gray Davis budgets. It also is an increase about in line with the inflation and population growth for the year. He has increased education spending...

VIENNA, Nov 17 - Iran obtained weapons-grade uranium and a nuclear bomb design from a Pakistani scientist who has admitted to selling nuclear secrets abroad, an exiled Iranian opposition group said on Wednesday. The group, which has given accurate information before, also said Iran is secretly enriching uranium at a military site previously unknown to the United Nations, despite promising France, Britain and Germany that it would halt all such work. "(Abdul Qadeer) Khan gave Iran a quantity of HEU (highly enriched uranium) in 2001, so they already have some," Farid Soleiman, a senior spokesman for the National Council of...

A third-party group started running advertisements on behalf of Tom Daschle Wednesday. The move by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee comes despite the fact that Daschle, the Senate minority leader, has for months said he wouldn't accept help from outsiders. Daschle has said that candidates have the ability to control many third-party ads. But, he said Tuesday, he is not going to stop the DSCC from running its spots. "Once again, Tom Daschle says one thing in South Dakota and does another thing back in Washington, D.C.," said Dick Wadhams, campaign manager for Republican challenger John Thune. For more on...

We're getting close to Election Day 2004 and the Kerry campaign is feeling the stress. Even with 90% of the media acting like an arm of the Kerry campaign, Kerry is still losing. Of course, Kerry's neighbor (at one of his mansions), a fellow named George Soros, got himself into the act by contributing about $18-million to the socialist committees of darkness in the background. The dark side thought they could use the money to defeat Bush this year by being extremely negative. Silly Soros, all he did was make a few political pikers rich. Oh, and it went far...

BERLIN: A handwritten document in Arabic recovered by the FBI assures the September 11 suicide hijackers about a dozen times that they would go to paradise as Islamic martyrs, according to a German academic. The four-page document, found by the FBI after the attacks, urged them to view the people they were about to kill as "sacrificial victims", said Tilman Seidensticker, a professor of Middle East studies at the University of Jena. Professor Seidensticker said he examined the document in detail and published the results in a new book because he felt it received too little attention in investigations of...

John Cornepone Edwards: "We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and other debilitating diseases. When John Kerry is president." -Or me and my Lawyer buds will sue the PANTS of the Doctors that fail to cure these diseases.

from the Kerry Ammo Armory...email-able, copyright-ready graphic you can use in emails, on blogs, in flyers, on posters... anything that's noncommercial. 

But, sure enough, a year and a half later, there's this young sergeant in shorts and an Army windbreaker, running on his prosthetic leg. And running beside him? The President of the United States.

WASHINGTON - A new deep-sea research vessel will be able to carry people to 99 percent of the ocean floor, diving deeper than the famed Alvin that pioneered the study of seafloor vents, plate tectonics and deep ocean creatures over the past 40 years. The new American submersible will provide the tools to reach "not for the stars but for the depths," Robert Gagosian, president of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said Friday at a briefing at the National Science Foundation (news - web sites). France, Russia and Japan also operate deep sea research vessels and China is building one,...

Saudis promise to root out all the al-Qa'eda 'deviants' By Robin Gedye, Foreign Affairs Writer (Filed: 01/06/2004) Five of the the six terrorist cells known to be active in Saudi Arabia have been dismantled in the past year, a senior Saudi official claimed yesterday as his country vowed to hunt down al-Qa'eda "deviants". In an attempt to reassure the outside world that the security situation was under control, Prince Turki al Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to London, said there appeared to be no new recruits to the core of al-Qa'eda members identified last year by the Saudi intelligence services. Prince...

PORTLAND, Ore. - Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry (news - web sites) on Tuesday accused President Bush (news - web sites) of breaking a campaign promise to pressure oil-producing nations to increase production in an effort to help control soaring gasoline prices. "Where is the president?" Kerry asked in Portland, where gasoline is selling for as much as $2.31 a gallon. "We need a president who is fighting for the American worker, the American family at the fuel pump." Kerry said rising prices for daily necessities have hammered working families, yet Bush has provided little help. "It's time we had...

Herman Cain's Pledge to Protect the Unborn Our Nation's founders stated that we have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We can pursue happiness as long as we do not infringe on another's liberty. We can have liberty as long as we do not take another's life. And life begins at conception. The Supreme Court's decision that the most innocent of human life - the life of an unborn child - can be ended for the sake of convenience, began the moral decline of our society. No great nation can prosper when life is not...

I have a confession to make: I'm in love with the Land of Israel. After nearly 18 years living here, through two intifadas, two Gulf Wars, the ups and downs (mostly downs) of Israel's turbulent economy, and a two-and-a-half-year wave of terror which fills me with dread and heartbreak, my ardor for Israel has not abated. Why do I love Israel? Because I have been to half the world's holy sites. I have meditated in Varanasi, immersed in the sacred headwaters of the Ganges, visited the Vatican, circumambulated the Buddhist stupa in Sarnath, bathed in the waters of Lourdes,...

<p>Is Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger looking to crawl out of the not-so-little political box he put himself in - the campaign promise that the state's budget gap can be closed without any new taxes? "That does not mean that later on someday you cannot go there," Schwarzenegger recently told The Sacramento Bee. In other recent interviews with other newspapers, the governor has similarly gone from a fast-and-firm no to a fudging maybe.</p>