Free Republic

Is Plame to Blame?-correction by: Bethany Stotts, August 23, 2007 The Valerie Plame Affair, which resulted in the conviction of White House aide Louis “Scooter” Libby, serves as rallying point for many opponents of the Bush Administration. However, some conservatives remain skeptical of Plame’s alleged victim status. While her job description was listed on the CIA rolls as an agent with “no official cover” (NOC), Plame had in reality had been performing administrative duties at Langley for at least five years. She remains willing to pose for the cameras as a starlet ex-agent, and continues participating in high-level lawsuits. Rowan...

The Michigan legislature on Thursday approved moving the state's presidential nomination contests to Jan. 15, just days after national Democrats vowed to punish states that vote too early. Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm is expected to sign the bill, but approval of the switch is far from certain. A disagreement among state Democratic leaders over whether to hold a primary or a caucus is complicating final action. If it moves up, Michigan Democrats risk losing all their national convention delegates, while Republicans risk losing half. Seeking to impose discipline on the states, the Democratic National Committee's rules committee voted on Aug....

Campus Dhimmis by: Bethany Stotts, August 24, 2007 New evidence has brought greater credibility to the old truism that multicultural tolerance excludes the campus’ greatest religious pariah, the Christian evangelical. While some students-rights advocates, such as the Foundation for International Rights in Education (FIRE), have long argued that evangelicals face religious persecution on campus, a new study released by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research (IJCR) reinforces these claims. IJCR found that 53% of college faculty reported neutral or negative feelings toward evangelicals, making evangelical fundamentalism the most stigmatized faith on campus. What is surprising about the May 2007...

Conflict of Interest by: Bethany Stotts, August 28, 2007 In 2003, the United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF) ranked the United States 18 out of 24 competing developed countries in educational effectiveness. In the face of such negative results, one would—mistakenly—expect to hear American teachers passionately call for systematic reform of our public schools. After all, education is about the students, right? Apparently not. Four years later, the National Education Association, the professional educator’s largest lobby in Congress, seemed more intent on pursuing partisan agendas en masse at the expense of student performance. The 2007 NEA Convention, held June 30...

CHICAGO (AP) - The son of deported immigration activist Elvira Arellano (el-VEER'-uh ahr-ay-AH'-noh) will travel to Mexico Friday to visit his mother and try to renew his U.S. passport. The Reverend Walter Coleman says 8-year-old Saul Arellano will visit his mother for at least the weekend. Coleman heads Adalberto United Methodist Church where Arellano had sought sanctuary for the past year to avoid deportation. Coleman's wife, Emma Lozano, heads an immigration rights group in Chicago and is Saul's legal guardian. But Coleman says Saul, a U.S. citizen, can't renew his U.S. passport without his mother's presence.

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan, Aug. 30, 2007 – Elements of the 1st Brigade, 205th Afghan National Army Corps, along with coalition forces, repelled a direct attack on Firebase Anaconda in Afghanistan’s Oruzgan province today, killing 11 of the attackers. Insurgents attacked the base from multiple directions with 72 mm rockets, small arms and heavy machine gun fire, officials said. Coalition close-air support conducted precision air strikes, successfully destroying the enemy fighters. This was the fourth attack on Firebase Anaconda this month. An estimated 74 insurgents were killed in the previous attacks on the base. The recent probing attacks have reinforced...

Aug. 29, 2007 Arrest Order Given for Gutseriev Agreeing to sell Russneft to Oleg Deripaska's Basic Element seems not to have helped Mikhail Gutseriev solve his problems with the Russian authorities. The Tverskaya Court in Moscow has sanctioned Gutseriev's arrest for violating his oath not to leave the area. According to unofficial information, Gutseriev is already in London, along with the $3 billion Deripaska paid him for Russneft. Representatives of the Investigative Committee informed the court as they petitioned to have Gutseriev arrested that he is accused of crimes of medium severity: tax evasion and “illegal entrepreneurship by a large...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 30, 2007 – President Bush will meet with defense leaders in the Pentagon tomorrow to continue the dialogue on operations in Iraq, a Joint Staff official said here today. Army Maj. Gen. Richard Sherlock, an operations specialist on the Joint Staff, said Bush would receive the “unvarnished” advice of the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during a session in “the Tank” – the room where the organization meets. The assessments lead up to the report the president will deliver to Congress by Sept. 15. The president’s meeting with the members of the Joint Chiefs of...

The last time Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke spoke at the annual bankers conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo., everyone hoped he'd keep his mouth shut about interest rates. This time, it's the only thing people want to hear him talk about. Bernanke speaks tomorrow at the annual gathering in what is arguably his most important speech since taking over for Alan Greenspan in February 2006. It will be the Fed chairman's first public comments since the credit and debt markets started to go haywire in late July. What's he going to say? The Fed never comments on the topic ahead...

MORGANTOWN, W.Va., Aug. 30 (UPI) -- West Virginia-based Augusta Systems Inc. has announced the successful swarming test of unmanned vehicles. The vehicles were equipped with the company's on-board sensor data processing capabilities. During recent Naval Air Systems Command field tests, the unmanned vehicles demonstrated a successful swarm with limited human intervention. "This is a significant advancement for unmanned systems," said Patrick Esposito, president and chief operating officer of Augusta Systems, in a statement. "Thanks to our on-board sensor data processing technologies, the vehicles can function as fully robotic systems, capable of making their own decisions." The demonstrations were held at...

LADSON, S.C., Aug. 30 (UPI) -- South Carolina-based Force Protection Inc. has announced its production line of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles is ahead of schedule. Force Protection is a manufacturer of the U.S. military's Cougar and Buffalo MRAP vehicles. Fifty Category II Cougar 6x6 vehicles have already been manufactured to support the U.S. Department of Defense MRAP program, which puts the company’s August commitment ahead of schedule. "We have not yet closed August and are well ahead of our production objectives," said Force Protection Chief Operations Officer Raymond Pollard, in a statement. "This is indicative of the efficiencies of...

There are no new photos of the President or the First Lady today. Tony Snow held a Press Briefing Click here for transcript There was also a Press Briefing on the President's Trip to Australia and the APEC Summit by Senior Administration Officials Click here for transcript It was also announced that President Bush will welcome Portuguese Prime Minister José Sócrates to the White House on September 17, 2007, in his dual roles as Prime Minister and head of the European Union Presidency. Enjoy your visit to Sanity Island

ARMONK, N.Y., Aug. 30 (UPI) -- IBM announced two major scientific achievements Thursday, both in the field of nanotechnology. Researchers said the breakthroughs will enable scientists to further explore the building of structures and devices out of ultra-tiny components as small as a few atoms or molecules. In the first report, scientists at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., describe major progress in identifying a property called magnetic anisotropy, which determines an atom’s ability to store information. That research, said IBM, could lead to storage of as many as 30,000 movies in a device the size of an...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 30, 2007 – The provincial reconstruction team in Iraq’s Salah ad Din province is hard at work with local leaders to promote organization in governance, economic development, and rule of law, the team’s leader said yesterday. Steven Buckler, speaking with Internet journalists and “bloggers” in a conference call, said the Salah ad Din PRT has about 50 members. “A third of them are our security personnel, who escort us in the Humvees when we go into town,” he explained. The other two thirds, 35 or so, are a mix of civilian and military members. “We're in town five,...

I, for one, am relieved to hear that Idaho Senator Larry Craig is not gay. The disgraced lawmaker said so repeatedly during a ten-minute press conference on Tuesday, when he also informed us he would attempt to retract his guilty plea for trying to pick up an undercover cop in the Minneapolis airport in June. You know what, Larry? Being openly gay is the hallmark of someone with at least a little bit of courage and a little bit of integrity. An openly gay man lives his life more or less at ease with his sexuality. He does not contrive...

The Census Bureau ranks Brownsville as the most impoverished city in the nation, according to the bureau’s 2006 American Community Survey released on Tuesday. More than 40 percent of the city’s 171,000 residents live below the poverty line, the bureau’s figures show. The bureau’s poverty threshold for an individual is a $10,294 annual income. For a family of four it is $20,614. Despite the last-place standing, there are slight gains being made in this area. In 2005, the poverty level was 42.6 percent, compared to 40.6 percent in 2006. Median household income in Brownsville, the fourth lowest in the nation,...

Is Elvira Arellano — the recently deported Mexican illegal alien — the new Rosa Parks? Some of her supporters describe her this way. But Arellano's credentials as a "role model," to say the least, fall short. Indeed, even some "immigrant rights activists" find the comparison embarrassing. A check of the Web sites of the National Council of La Raza and the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund finds no statement one way or the other concerning Arellano. Rosa Parks, a black woman, was born in 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama — that is, Tuskegee, Alabama, United States of America. She thus...

SHEBOYGAN COUNTY - The suspect in a fatal hit and run crash has been captured. The Sheboygan County Sheriff’s Department says they were notified by the Immigration Customs Enforcement that Carbajal-Lile was in custody in Brown County, Ohio. Authorities say Carbajal-Lile was arrested in Ohio on unrelated charges after he was driving a car to help another guy accused of making harassing phone calls. He was arrested under the false name Ricardo Ibanez-Crisanto. When authorities fingerprinted him, they realized he was wanted for the fatal hit and run in Wisconsin and called Immigration Customs Enforcement officials. The Immigration Customs Enforcement...

QIAN'AN, China - Yang Zhongchen, a small-town businessman, wined and dined three government officials for permission to become a father. But the Peking duck and liquor weren't enough. One night, a couple of weeks before her date for giving birth, Yang's wife was dragged from her bed in a north China town and taken to a clinic, where, she says, her baby was killed by injection while still inside her. "Several people held me down, they ripped my clothes aside and the doctor pushed a large syringe into my stomach," says Jin Yani, a shy, petite woman with a long...

Well, the Marine Corps investigator has now dropped all charges against 3 of the 8 accused Marines in the case, and only one Marine still stands accused of crimes at the scene. The others are charged with various after-the-fact issues that arose from investigations of Haditha, not the events themselves. Murtha’s aim, of course, in accusing the Marines of murder “in cold blood” was to pin the blame on Bush. But in the process of blaming Bush, he slandered those Marines.