Free Republic

Former president Bill Clinton praised Saddam Hussein's lieutenants and their underlings on Tuesday, saying they were mostly "good" and "decent" people." "When [the U.S.] kicked out Saddam, they decided to dismantle the whole authority structure," Clinton told an audience at American University in Dubai. "Most of the people who were part of that structure were good, decent people who were making the best out of a very bad situation," he added. While Clinton didn't name, names, Saddam's authority structure was dominated by his two murderous sons, Uday and Qusay, as well as notorious characters like Ali Hassan al-Majid, [aka Chemical...

Texting on mobile devices while driving is a growing "global killer" and not enough attention is being paid to the dangers of distracted drivers, Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said on Friday. The U.N. General Assembly said on Friday it had asked the secretary general to consider establishing a voluntarily funded Road Safety Trust Fund to support efforts to reduce the number of deaths and injuries from traffic accidents. Road crashes kill more than 1.25 million people and injure as many as 50 million people a year globally, according to the world body. It has urged...

FULTON, N.Y. -- A Fulton nurse convicted of taking a photo of an unconscious patient's penis with her iPhone last year surrendered her license, according to the New York State Education Department. Kristen Johnson was forced to give up her license as part of a plea deal where she pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disseminating of unlawful surveillance photos. Her conviction came after a nine-month investigation by the Onondaga County District Attorney's Office into complaints from her Upstate University Hospital co-workers that she sent pictures of two patients via text message. She was originally charged with two counts of second-degree unlawful...

Neil Bush, brother of Jeb and George W. Bush, has joined the Ted Cruz national finance team, the senator’s campaign announced this afternoon. Whether Neil Bush is an outlier within the family, or the vanguard of a dynastic shift, remains to be seen. “This is certainly great news,” said Cruz communications director Alice Stewart. -snip- Neil Bush, a Houston businessman, was a director at Denver-based Silverado Savings and Loan in the 1980s. Its failure caused political headaches for his father, then the vice president.

Ultra-Left Dems are habituated to derangement about Conservs. Now it's Cruz--Trump' s God-Talk is just old timely Pol, even Chelsea spouts it. Before it was Cruz, it was Sarah Palin Derangement Syndrome, before her it was Dubya Derangement (W). That's just preaching to the Leftist Choir. But Citizens United, now demanding answers about Bubba in N. Korea, that's a SCOTUS Decision, that was the last Dem Senate Majority's focus for overthrowing the 1st Amendment. When leftists finally own up to owning guns, start openly stockpiling and get Bill Ayers to organize national street fighting training, you know Citizens United will...

Trump as Hitler is ridiculous, but pay attention to his media mastery, especially the lawsuits for content he doesn't like. Hitler & Stalin first of all, carefully groomed their domestic media images--Stalin is still popular in Russia. Charlie Chaplin's "Great Dictator" & Spike Jones' "Der Fuhrer's Face" give us a false idea of Hitler, he was a master propagandist, wielded almost psychic control over his audience. Free sci-to about Hitler as psychic, "The Leader" by Murray Leinster, select, right click, go to. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01A7FE4LI/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1

I disagree with those conservatives who say they will never, ever, ever, ever vote for Donald Trump should the GOP embrace his special brand of nonsense and nominate him, but I can't blame them. Hell, I'm about one more round of foolishness away from joining them. But not quite yet. Trump is the lesser of the candidates, lesser of the conservatives, but also the lesser of the two ancient socialist evils that the Democrats are eenie meenie miney moeing between. At least Trump pretends to embrace capitalism, of a sort. And at least he doesn't seem to hate America, just...

How long before I get pulled? I've seen an uptick in pulled threads lately, some from long time freepers. I'm a monthly donor and I'd like to see a sidebar of pulled threads.

An unexpected noise came out of a child's present this Christmas: an Islamic prayer. Instead of whooshing and roaring expected out of a toy F-16 fighter jet bought on Amazon, the toy plays a prayer in Arabic, KING-TV reported. The toy's manufacturer, WolVol, blamed its factory for the mistake, according to the report. "It sounds like an Arabic chanting, which is pretty unusual," Bjorn Thorpe, the boy's uncle, told KING-TV. "I think we're kind of confused on how this would happen." Nadeem Israr, president of the Islamic Society of Whatcom County, told King 5 the sound is a Muslim prayer...

The number of children who are caught trying to slip across the U.S.-Mexico border alone and illegally has quietly surged again more than a year after President Obama referred to the problem as an "urgent humanitarian situation." While the world has been focused on Europe's migrant crisis, apprehensions of unaccompanied minors along America's own border have exploded: More than 10,000 undocumented children have been stopped in just the last two months, according to U.S. Border and Customs Protection. The 10,588 apprehensions are a 106 percent increase over the same Oct. 1 through Nov. 30 period from last year, when 5,129...

Last week for several days I saw a Turkish flag flying above the Connecticut State Capitol. Does anyone know why? And why is it in the center while the U.S. flag is off to the side and lower?

A court reportedly requires proof that the 'Crocodile Hunter', who was killed by a stingray barb in 2006, will give up his right to the 17-year-old's earnings... Bindi Irwin will reportedly be prevented from claiming her Dancing with the Stars pay by a judge who is demanding proof that her 'Crocodile Hunter' father Steve Irwin is dead. Australian Bindi is 17 and so signed a minor's contract with the ABC show, which requires her parents to agree to give up their rights to her earnings, which at present stand at $230k. Mother Terri has done so - but a judge...

Even after Rosenfeld had already twice answered a similar question and recalled that most Israelis have served in the military and have undergone years of firearms training, Blitzer absurdly pressed the issue a third time in his final question: Aren't you concerned, though, it's one thing for police and military to walk around with weapons, but it's another thing for civilians simply to be walking around with weapons. Some of them may be trained, some of them no so well-trained, Aren't you concerned that they might simply shoot before they really know for sure there's a danger?

Soylent, which produces liquid food for techies who hate chewing, has stopped shipping its gloop after some of it was contaminated with mold. The firm started flogging version 2.0 of its formula in August, and has produced 400,000 bottles of the strange substance. It has since learned that 11 of the bottles had mold inside or on the outside by the time they reached customers. That's a tiny proportion, however on Friday the biz confirmed it's halting operations. "During our record review process we did discover that the conveyor guardrail settings were not optimized, causing some bottles to move erratically...

John Gibson was a pastor and seminary professor. When he wasn’t teaching at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, one of his favorite pastimes was fixing cars. He was married with two children. His daughter, Callie, was teaching in front of 250 college students when she got the call. Her father had killed himself. It was August 24, six days after hackers exposed the names of millions of people who had signed up for Ashley Madison, the notorious site for those seeking affairs. Gibson’s name was on the list. His wife, Christi, discovered her husband’s body. “It was a moment that...

Newly-minted parents at Venezuela’s Dr. Luis Razetti Hospital in Anzoátegui are denouncing its maternity ward for killing 17 babies in a week, the victims of sanitation so poor the ward is overtly inhabited by a swarm of opossums. One relative of a dead newborn told El Tiempo that, upon challenging hospital officials regarding the opossums, she was told “the appearance of possums is something normal in the hospital..." ... the reason opossums are so common, says one employee at the hospital, is that sanitation employees have run out of cleaning liquids and necessary maintenance items, leaving them impotent in the...

Today, comedian Rosie O’Donnell said “women’s rights“ are under attack in America and that politicians are undoing all the advances abortion activists have made. The Hill reports that O’Donnell told Jenny Hutt on SiriusXM’s radio program that she believes there is a war on women. She said, “Bigger than any specific people, there is a war on women that is happening in this country. Women fought for equality in this country, and right now, politically, it’s being taken away from us.”Then, unbelievably, O’Donnell said she would like to do this to pro-lifers: “I’d like to take my period blood I...

Let me see if I’ve got his straight:There’s a man who is a pure product of the City of New York, one of the great urban cesspools of our time, a borderline third-world metropolis run as a combination nanny state and dictatorship.He is the epitome of all that is hated about that city: he is brash,loud,boastful,vulgar,insincere,and only as honest as he has to be. Furthermore,he has few of the city’s virtues.Where the typical New Yorker is hot-blooded,he is cold, where generous,he is close-handed,where magnanimous,he is vicious. You could look long and hard for a more impressive illustration as to why...

Washington Post reporter Jessica Contrera has only been out of college a year. So is that the level of experience you choose for someone to try and pry some information out of the Clinton Machine about daughter Chelsea? Instead, we get the usual worshipful sentences, like this one: “Polished, practiced and private, Chelsea Clinton is the closest thing America has to a princess.” The headline on the front of Wednesday’s Style section is “A very private public figure: Chelsea Clinton always avoided the spotlight. But now she welcomes it – on her own terms.” In other words, “Chelsea Clinton dictates...

Jonathan Greenblatt, a White House aide, has been selected to replace Abe Foxman as national director of the ADL. The Anti-Defamation League has announced that Jonathan Greenblatt, a special assistant to President Obama, will succeed Abraham Foxman who is stepping down as the ADL’s national director this coming July. “The unanimous choice of the 16-member succession committee is Jonathan A. Greenblatt, a social entrepreneur, government official and corporate executive with extensive experience in building socially conscious businesses and creating innovative public-private partnerships,” noted the ADL’s press release, issued on Thursday, Nov. 6. Greenblatt, 43, has been the director of the...