Free Republic

My great-aunt Carolyn was for all of my life a living link to Wisconsin's progressive heritage. That link, like those maintained in so many rural Wisconsin families, was an essential underpinning of my own understanding of the collective experience that has sustained this state's unique political character. Wisconsin progressivism is not an easy political construct to explain, let alone teach. It cannot be reduced to a sound bite or a political commercial. It cannot be "learned" by listening to a scholarly lecture or reading even so fine a book as Nancy Unger's biography of its progenitor, "Fighting Bob La Follette:...

VICTORY BASE COMPLEX, Iraq, March 4, 2009 – A flood of memories and emotion rushed through the mind of the executive officer for the 1st Cavalry Division’s Headquarters Service Company, Division Special Troops Battalion, as she reflected on the sacrifices it took to achieve her dream of becoming an American citizen. A smiling Army 2nd Lt. Memorina Edwin Barnes, center, chats with a fellow soldier just before a naturalization ceremony at al-Faw Palace on Victory Base Complex, Iraq, March 3, 2009. Along with 250 other servicemembers, Barnes became a U.S. citizen at the ceremony. U.S. Army photo by Staff...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: "Despite a sore throat, a medical advice to stay silent and his promise that his TV and radio program Aló, presidente! (Hello President) would be shorter than the previous ones, President Hugo Chávez spoke on Sunday for five hours, when restarting his weekly program that he had suspended on January 11th.  Venezuela's President ordered his governors and mayors to draw 'the map of the media war' to determine which media are 'owned by oligarchs.' After saying that 'there are not five million rich people in Venezuela,' with regard to the opposition vote in the referendum, Chávez...

NEW YORK – Playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote, who movingly portrayed the broken dreams of common people in "The Trip to Bountiful," "Tender Mercies" and his Oscar-winning screen adaptation of "To Kill a Mockingbird," died Wednesday in Connecticut, Paul Marte, a spokesman for Hartford Stage, said. He was 92. Foote died in his sleep in his apartment in Hartford where he was preparing work on "The Orphans' Home Cycle," a collection of nine plays, for next September at the nonprofit theater, Marte said. Foote left the cotton fields of his native Wharton, Texas, as a teenager, dreaming of becoming an...

An Iranian protester holds up a picture of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in front of the Palestinian flag during a rally in Tehran. Iran's leader said on Wednesday that President Barack Obama is pursuing the same "wrong path" as his predecessor George W. Bush in supporting Israel and described the Jewish state as a "cancerous tumor." The comments by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are likely to frustrate the new U.S. administration which has been seeking to engage Iran but has called on Tehran to "unclench its fist." "Even the new president of America, who has come to...

Arizona Game and Fish Biologists Begin Monitoring Collared Jaguar February 25th, 2009 Animal determined to be oldest known jaguar in the wild Macho B Jaguar Photo Gallery Early data received from the tracking device on the recently captured and collared jaguar in Arizona is already giving biologists a better understanding of the cat’s movement and foraging patterns. With nearly a week’s worth of data, the Arizona Game and Fish Department noted that the jaguar moved several miles after collaring to a very high and rugged area that the cat has been known to use in southern Arizona. The animal has...

SEAN HANNITY PLEADS GUILTY (ALL CHARGES LIKE RUSH) SIMULTANEOUSLY AS RUSH LIMBAUGH: FOLLOWS CODE OF THE BUSHIDO AND COMMITS HARI-KARI ON AIR (MAR 3, Tuesday, March 03, 2009 Sean Hannity pleads guilty, incontestable and does not challenge the charges against him any further; says “he had substantive charges” and also why the federal authorities will find his finances out of order “rich people always find a way to stash their fortune?” Or it could be a paper trail of corruption and influence or some criminal organization. Could also be Client 23 and various reasons why he knew Rush was in...

Buried in the $410 billion catch-all appropriations bill now before the U.S. Senate is a provision that would end a program that has allowed Mexican truck drivers to deliver goods to destinations inside the United States. A provision in the original North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 was supposed to allow U.S. and Mexican trucking companies to deliver goods in each other’s country. But opposition from the Teamsters union and old-fashioned prejudice against Mexicans has derailed implementation of the provision. Under current restrictions, goods coming into the United States from Mexico by truck must be unloaded inside the “commercial...

A grandfather today spoke for the first time of how doctors helped him see again with a pioneering 'bionic' eye implant. Ron, 73, is one of only three people in the UK who have undergone the revolutionary surgery at London's Moorfield Eye Hospital. The pensioner, whose full name was not revealed, spoke of his joy at being able to carry out everyday tasks like sorting the washing since losing his sight in his 40s. The implant has been designed by an American company called Second Sight. Eighteen patients worldwide have been fitted with the device as part of an international...

Especially liked the part where Obama's talking about "selfishness being a virtue" and the next clip is Reagan's "Somewhere a perversion's taken place..."

I really need to learn to relax. I read this interview with Jane Alexander, former chair of the National Endowment of the Arts, about an hour ago, and I'm just now starting to get my blood pressure to a safe level. I don't really know why it made me more hot than I usually get about these things, but it did. Did Ms. Alexander really defend the appropriation of $50 million for the NEA as a sound economic policy? She argues that there are 2 million professional artists in the country, and without the NEA and the funding it provides...

Driving snow froze the hopes of organizers of "the biggest global warming protest in history" Monday in Washington. With the government on a two-hour snow delay and the speaker of the House unable to attend because her flight was grounded by inclement weather, shivering protestors gathered on the west front of the Capitol, the latest victims of a climatological phenomenon known by the scientific community as the Gore Effect.

A “time traveller’s phrasebook” that could allow basic communication between modern English speakers and Stone Age cavemen is being compiled by scientists studying the evolution of language. Research has identified a handful of modern words that have changed so little in tens of thousands of years that ancient hunter-gatherers would probably have been able to understand them. Anybody who was catapulted back in time to Ice Age Europe would stand a good chance of being intelligible to the locals by using words such as “I”, “who” and “thou” and the numbers “two”, “three” and “five”, the work suggests. More nuanced...

Recently the Republican-owned New York Post ran a scurrilous racist cartoon comparing Obama to the Connecticut chimpanzee that was shot dead by the police. The headline read, “Who’s going to write the stimulus package now?”, a more than a sub-textual suggestion that assassinating President Obama is an option to those who disagree with him. I think that is against the law. This week the newly elected first Black chairman of the Republican National Committee Michael Steele, proclaimed, what should have been obvious, that he, not radio provocateur Rush Limbaugh, was the head of the GOP. Steele called Limbaugh an “entertainer”...

A video of Rep. Nicely commenting on his decision to join the call for Obama to show his birth certificate.

Gordon Brown sparked fury today by awarding an honorary knighthood to U.S. senator Edward Kennedy, who has been accused in the past of being an IRA sympathiser. Conservative MPs and Peers condemned as 'inappropriate' the decision to make a man closely linked to the Irish nationalist movement a 'Sir'. Senior British politicians also expressed unease at honouring the Democrat who was embroiled in controversy when he was involved in an infamous car accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 in which a young woman was killed.

Iran can develop a nuclear weapon within a year and has ready access to enough fissile material to produce up to 50 nuclear weapons, according to a panel of current and former U.S. officials advising the Obama administration. William Schneider, Jr., chairman of the Defense Science Board and a former under secretary of state in the Reagan administration, offered those estimates Wednesday during a news conference announcing the release of a new "Presidential Task Force" report on Iran by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The report, entitled "Preventing a Cascade of Instability: U.S. Engagement to Check Iranian Nuclear...

BALTIMORE, March 4, 2009 – The commander of U.S. Northern Command said he got one question repeatedly during recent rounds at the U.S. Capitol. Air Force Gen. Victor E. Renuart, commander of U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, tells attendees at the National Guard's 2009 Domestic Operations Workshop in Baltimore on March 4, 2009, that Northcom and the National Guard are working together to protect and assist Americans. Air Force Maj. Gen. William H. Etter, director of domestic operations for the National Guard Bureau, is at left. U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Jim Greenhill  (Click photo...

Obama gums up federal projects by undoing Bush environmental regulation(video) President Obama issued a presidential memorandum to restore mandatory review of projects to determine if they harmed endangered species. This change may slow down many of the planned infrastructure projects in the stimulus bill. This is another example of how catering to the political base is more important to Obama than ending the recession.

WASHINGTON, March 4, 2009 – The Coast Guard is used to being in high demand, overworked and underequipped, but the pursuit to modernize in the midst of fiscal ambiguity is the real challenge, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad W. Allen said yesterday. “The fact that demand for Coast Guard services exceeds our capacity has always been the case,” Allen said during his State of the Coast Guard address at the National Press Center here. “But as the nation faces fiscal uncertainty, we'll have to make difficult financial choices and manage resources to buy down risk in the most critical areas.”...