Free Republic

Barack Obama’s foreign policy blundering is now verging on the surreal. When Manuel Zelaya, the socialist president of Honduras, was overthrown, Obama first declared himself “deeply concerned”, then denounced the coup as illegal; now, with the support of the Obama White House, the Organisation of American States has given Honduras a three-day deadline to reinstate Zelaya. This is madness. Zelaya was unseated by the army, but this was no ordinary military coup. The armed forces were carrying out a decision of the Honduran Supreme Court after it had declared unconstitutional a referendum Zelaya was attempting to hold to extend the...

FLINT, Michigan -- Like the ex-Flint police chief himself, the people who know Brad Barksdale are shooting straight about their former comrade. Barksdale is being praised by many for the single bullet in the chest that killed a robbery suspect who shot his way into the Palace Poker Room in Burton early Wednesday morning with a shotgun. "That guy picked the wrong place to rob," said Keith Speer, veteran cop and president of the Flint Police Officer's Assocation. "He's not going to miss a target he's intending to shoot. "He's not going to take a threat lying down ... he's...

Barack Obama yesterday accused Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, of "living in the past" and indulging in Cold War thinking on the eve of his first trip to Russia as US president. Mr Obama described the former president, who remains the country's dominant political force, as someone who still has "one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new". He said one reason he will meet Mr Putin, as well as Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, during his visit next week is that he wanted Mr Putin to know that "the old Cold...

Senate bill fines people refusing health coverageBy RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR – 58 minutes ago WASHINGTON (AP) — Americans who refuse to buy affordable medical coverage could be hit with fines of more than $1,000 under a health care overhaul bill unveiled Thursday by key Senate Democrats looking to fulfill President Barack Obama's top domestic priority. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the fines will raise around $36 billion over 10 years. Senate aides said the penalties would be modeled on the approach taken by Massachusetts, which now imposes a fine of about $1,000 a year on individuals who refuse to get coverage....

Pakistan's top Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, is buying children as young as 7 to serve as suicide bombers in the growing spate of attacks against Pakistani, Afghan and U.S. targets, U.S. Defense Department and Pakistani officials say. A Pakistani official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named because of the sensitive nature of the topic, said the going price for child bombers was $7,000 to $14,000 - huge sums in Pakistan, where per-capita income is about $2,600 a year. "[Mehsud] has turned suicide bombing into a production output, not unlike [the way] Toyota outputs cars," a U.S....

Who are your picks, baseball fans? Voting at mlb.com ends TONIGHT at 11:59 (Eastern). MLB has just added a 33rd slot to the roster, which should include 20 position players and 13 pitchers (at least three of which should be relievers). Every team has to be represented, of course. My personal criteria balances current performance, last year's performance, and career performance. Here are my choices (starters in bold): NATIONAL LEAGUEC: Y. Molina (STL), B. McCann (ATL)1b: A. Pujols (STL), P. Fielder (MIL), A. Gonzalez (SD)2b: C. Utley (PHI), F. Sanchez (PIT), O. Hudson (LAD)SS: H. Ramirez (FLA), M. Tejada (HOU)3b:...

Pat Toomey posted this link on his Fackbook site. http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=102823166700&h=X3VCP&u=2ikoj&ref=nf The direct YouTube link is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbbCTJxT7MA&feature=player_embedded

"As soon as I heard five [years], I could not hear much after, and I hurt because I felt I let you and everyone down." So wrote former sailor Steven Nary from his cell in Avenal State Prison in the middle-of-nowhere, California. Nary, now 32, had just endured a 3 ½ hour parole hearing, his first after more than thirteen years of incarceration. Despite a near perfect prison record, a long standing conversion to Catholicism, an excellent psychiatric report, almost enough college credits to graduate, numerous letters of support, several job and living offers—including one from my wife and me—and...

Liberals have noted with a fair degree of distress since January that the election results have yielded very few liberal policy implementations—the continuing wars abroad and on drugs, high defense spending, tax cuts, finance, environmental and national security stances, none of these are remotely liberal. Why not? An answer from the most excellent Mahablog is not an inability of the Executive to perform, but the inherent intended structure of Congress allowing a minority to obstruct. A better answer from the excellent O’Brien is not the current Republican ability to obstruct real progress, but that Congress itself is busted. For Californians...

President Obama on Thursday called the nation's latest unemployment figures sobering, but said the economic recession is slowing. In a Rose Garden appearance with chief executives of clean-energy companies, Obama noted the average number of job losses in the current fiscal quarter has been 400,000 a month, compared with a monthly average of 700,000 in the previous quarter. "It took years for us to get into this mess, and it'll take more than a few months to get out," Obama said. A government report Thursday showed a net loss of 467,000 jobs in June, compared with a revised loss of...

Freddie Mac Gets Another $6.1B from Gov't BY STEPHEN BERNARD | AP Business Writer You have entered an invalid email address From (email):* Required NEW YORK (AP) - Battered mortgage giant Freddie Mac received $6.1 billion in new funds from the Treasury Department to help offset its mounting liabilities, according to a regulatory filing submitted Wednesday. The company could also be close to naming a new, permanent CEO, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The Federal Housing Finance Agency, which has been operating Freddie Mac since last fall, requested the funds for Freddie Mac after the mortgage...

Scientists have performed the first DNA-based reconstruction of the giant extinct moa bird, using prehistoric feathers recovered from caves and rock shelters in New Zealand.Researchers from the University of Adelaide and Landcare Research in New Zealand have identified four different moa species after retrieving ancient DNA from moa feathers believed to be at least 2500 years old. The giant birds – measuring up to 2.5 metres and weighing 250 kilograms – were the dominant animals in New Zealand’s pre-human environment but were quickly exterminated after the arrival of the Maori around 1280 AD.

Financial lobby gears up effort against Obama planBy Silla Brush Posted: 07/02/09 12:35 PM [ET] A coalition of financial services interests is in the process of organizing a major lobbying campaign against the Obama administration's plan for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. The plans are not yet final, but among the groups and firms in the discussion are the American Financial Services Association, Financial Services Roundtable, Mortgage Bankers Association and Community Bankers Association, according to two industry sources familiar with the plans. The budget could be as high as several millions of dollars to organize grassroots opposition to the plan,...

WASHINGTON -- Spending by lawmakers on taxpayer-financed trips abroad has risen sharply in recent years, a Wall Street Journal analysis of travel records shows, involving everything from war-zone visits to trips to exotic spots such as the Galápagos Islands. The spending on overseas travel is up almost tenfold since 1995, and has nearly tripled since 2001, according to the Journal analysis of 60,000 travel records. Hundreds of lawmakers traveled overseas in 2008 at a cost of about $13 million. That's a 50% jump since Democrats took control of Congress two years ago. The cost of so-called congressional delegations, known among...

The Ruzh Hallat Primary Health Care Center will provide medical services for 30,000 residents of the Humer Kwer quarter of Sulaymaniyah province. USACE photo by Mike Scheck. SULAYMANIYAH — For the 30,000 residents of the Humer Kwer quarter of this province, access to healthcare just got a lot easier with the completion of the Ruzh Hallat Primary Healthcare Center. The $540,000 construction project was managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) in Iraq. The U.S. Economic Support Fund provided funding for the project, and the USACE’s Sulaymaniyah Resident Office was the on-site construction manager.Dr. Ousman Younes, the Kurdistan...

A group of teenagers misunderstood a woman's screams during sex and, thinking they were stopping an assault, beat a 25-year-old man in her bedroom, police said. A 16-year-old girl who lives in the same Torrington home as the 34-year-old woman overheard her and the man on June 6 and rounded up four friends to stop what they thought was an attack, police Lt. Bruce Whiteley said Thursday. One of the five teens beat the man with a bat and others punched him, police said. The man was treated at a hospital for injuries that were not life-threatening, and was released...

At Wednesday’s Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Board meeting, chairman H.R. Crawford – a former District Council member and Marion Barry confidante – told fellow Board members that he has heard talk on Capitol Hill about yanking former President Ronald Reagan’s name off the local airport and returning it to its previous generic moniker: National Airport. “It was just a discussion. We’re not aware of anything specific,” MWAA spokeswoman Tara Hamilton later told The Examiner. It’s clear that the current crop of congressional leaders want no part of Reagan’s grand conservative vision for America, but erasing all trace of his memory...

]-->Army Capt. Jason Smith listens to an infant's breathing at the last "Bring on the Docs" cooperative medical engagement at the Jassan Health Clinic in Iraq's Wasit province, June 23. Photo by Sgt. 1st Class Joe Thompson, Multi-National Division - South. FOB DELTA — Soldiers serving with a medical task force here completed nearly a year's worth of missions last week, satisfied that they've helped to improve health care in Iraq's Wasit province. Soldiers from Task Force Gunner Med wrapped up Operation "Bring on the Docs" with a recent visit to the Jassan Health Clinic for a cooperative medical engagement."It...

Iran Human Rights, July 1: Six people were hanged in Tehran’s Evin prison early this morning July 1. reported the state run Iranian news agency ISNA. None of those who were executed today were identified by name, age or details around what they were convicted of. The state run news site "young journalist’s club" also reported that one man identified as Alireza (28) was hanged in Tehran’s Evin prison convicted of murdering his friend. Jerusalem Post , quoting a source in Iran, reported that six poeple were hanged in Tehran in relation with the recent pro-democracy demonstrations in Iran. Iran...