Free Republic

When someone takes out a scalpel, it's usually going to hurt — a lot.Yet Peter Orszag, President Obama's budget director, claims the U.S. could slash $700 billion in annual medical costs without affecting quality. That would make it much easier to pay for sweeping health care reform, which is struggling on Capitol Hill over cost concerns. But divining and adopting best practices is trickier than Orszag may realize, some researchers say. The head of the Office of Management and Budget draws heavily on the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. The atlas has found that Medicare spending varies greatly across the...

Time: July 4, 2009 from 10am to 2pm Location: Fort Lauderdale Federal Courthouse Organized By: Karen Moore/Lauren O'Brien Event Description: Tea Party to Protest spending and taxes. Join us on Broward Blvd. and Third to make your stand against wasteful spending and taxation without representation. We will be there from 10 am until 2 pm. Bring the kids and bring signs to show your support for this effort. Should you wish to contribbute or help out with time or spreading the word, please feel free to contact me. See you all there!

It’s slowly starting to make the news, now. To be sure, the “mainstream” media is doing as little as possible to cover this heinous crime, but the new media is starting to make it know despite their efforts to promote their “objective bias.” I’m talking about Frank Lombard, Associate director of Duke University’s Center for Health Policy, and his despicable molestation of a 5-year old boy he adopted. Lombard was recently arrested by the FBI and charged with offering up his adopted 5-year-old African American son for sex to an undercover cop. Lombard admitted to molesting his own adopted son...

U.S. nonfarm payroll employment has declined by 6.5 million jobs since the recession started in December 2007. One exception is Wal-Mart, which has expanded its domestic work force by 40,000 (2.9%) and announced June 3 that it will add 22,000 jobs in its U.S. stores in 2009.Wal-Mart's everyday job creation is a countercyclical trend visible in all six recessions since the firm's IPO in October 1970 during the December 1969-to-November 1970 recession. Corporations with entrepreneurial roots (think Wal-Mart's founder, Sam Walton) are providing the everyday job creation the U.S. economy needs to escape the worst economic contraction since the Great...

First it was going to put the coal plants out of business. Killing jobs. Then it was going to stunt house sales. Now it seems the grand promise of all those "green jobs" from the cap and trade legislation just won't happen either.

> The Desert Eagle pistol can "blow a hole the size of a Mack truck through a person," said Leigh Winchester, regional chief of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. >

Feminists irate over game show ISTANBUL - A new game show claims there is entertainment value in asking men to guess which pair of women has managed to answer a simple trivia question. WomenÂ’s rights activists react after just two episodes, claiming the show is evidence of the discrimination against women in Turkish society. Â’Its format is an attack on women,Â’ the activists say Feminists irate over game show WomenÂ’s activists are up in arms over a new television show they argue depicts all women as unintelligent. The showÂ’s producer, however, says the show unveils the failure of the Turkish...

As we rush headlong toward the Socialist Utopia, it appears Democrats will not only be rewriting history but trying to remove any reference to it. 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.

Mission Accomplished: The withdrawal of U.S. troops from 15 Iraqi cities makes this a time to remember the sacrifices that made success possible — and the president who refused to lose.The concerns that former Vice President Dick Cheney recently expressed regarding our forces in Iraq are not to be taken lightly. Reacting to the announcement last week that U.S. soldiers would leave Iraq's cities in a 24-hour span, Cheney reflected to the Washington Times that "one might speculate that insurgents are waiting as soon as they get an opportunity to launch more attacks." The former defense secretary for the first...

Air France Flight 447 slammed into the Atlantic Ocean, intact and belly first, at such a high speed that the 228 people aboard probably had no time to even inflate their life jackets, French investigators said Thursday in their first report into the June 1 accident. ... Problematic speed sensors on the Airbus A330-200 jet that have been the focus of intense speculation since the crash may have misled the plane's pilots but were not a direct cause, Bouillard said... ;... The plane was flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris when it went down in a remote area of...

The Hemisphere: A Honduran official has warned that deposed President Mel Zelaya was in league with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez to ship drugs to the U.S. If true, can this really be the man the U.S. wants back in power?Foreign Minister Enrique Ortez dropped a bombshell last week when he said Zelaya, the president who was thrown out by a constitutional process June 28 after defying the law, had a little side business with the Caracas caudillo allowing cocaine to roll into Honduras from Venezuela before heading to the U.S. "Every night, three or four Venezuelan-registered planes land without the permission...

In a letter to his wife Abigail, John Adams told her of the actions of the Continental Congress on July 2, 1776. "The second day of July, 1776 [the actual day the Declaration was signed], will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations,...

LONDON (Reuters) – A housewife from Sleaford in Lincolnshire will be the first of thousands of people to stand for one hour on top of a plinth in London's Trafalgar Square as part of a 100-day "live sculpture" exercise. "One & Other" is a work devised by sculptor Antony Gormley for the square's empty plinth, now a platform for temporary works of art. The first of 2,400 people to feature in Gormley's work is Rachel Wardell, a 35-year-old housewife and mother-of-two. Participants are chosen at random, and 14,500 people have applied so far. Applications are still open and can be...

Tegucigalpa, Honduras - Sometimes, the whole world prefers a lie to the truth. The White House, the United Nations, the Organization of American States, and much of the media have condemned the ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya this past weekend as a coup d'état. That is nonsense. In fact, what happened here is nothing short of the triumph of the rule of law. To understand recent events, you have to know a bit about Honduras's constitutional history. In 1982, my country adopted a new Constitution that enabled our orderly return to democracy after years of military rule. After more...

I got to the pond just as the marsh birds started coming in to drink and bathe. When the tide is high they can't feed efficiently, so they take a break. Roseate Spoonbills and a Great Egret. I got a lot of shots, it will take time to process them all.

An autopsy on actor David Carradine has ruled out suicide as a cause of death. Michael Baden, an American forensics expert who carried out the autopsy in the US, concluded the singer died of asphyxiation. Auto-erotic asphyxiation is among the theories circulated about the cause of Carradine's sudden and shocking death while working on location in Thailand last month. Carradine was discovered in a hotel closet with his neck and hands bound. *** "The cause of death was asphyxiation, an inability to breathe. Now why that happened is still what we’re working on... He didn’t die of natural causes, and...

Fr. Rob Clements was just 10 years old when he discovered the beauty of the Catholic faith. He had been riding his bike in Sacramento when he stumbled upon a large Catholic church. Leaving his bike parked outside, he entered to find a priest in the midst of the concluding rites for a funeral. “It was just spectacular,” Fr. Clements said. “I saw the casket with the black cover on it and the crosses. The priest incensed the body and I was just blown away with this.” When he headed back outside the church, he discovered his bike was gone....

Politics: The former Stuart Smalley becomes the 60th Democrat in the U.S. Senate, thanks to the community organizers at Acorn and the little-known Secretary of State Project. Is the system being rigged?Politics: The former Stuart Smalley becomes the 60th Democrat in the U.S. Senate, thanks to the community organizers at Acorn and the little-known Secretary of State Project. Is the system being rigged? Incumbent Republican Norm Coleman conceded defeat in the mother of all recounts in Minnesota's U.S. Senate race after the state's Supreme Court unanimously rejected his lawsuit. Arguably, his seat may have been lost the day in 2006...

America is with you, Chavista douchebag ! Deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya said he’s plotting his return to the Central American nation and called for “strong” action from the U.S. to help restore him to power. “Their words are strong,” Zelaya said today during an interview in the lobby of the Sheraton hotel in Panama. “We’re going to see now if their actions are strong.”… The U.S. has suspended some aid to Honduras while it evaluates whether the removal of Zelaya meets the definition of a military coup under American law. “We’ve taken some actions to hit the pause button...

Who won the Cold War? That’s a no-brainer. The United States prevailed while the Soviet Union collapsed, and the People’s Republic of China dumped Marxism; capitalism (free markets and private property) triumphed over socialism (centrally planned markets and state-owned property); an ethos of individual rights proved to be more resilient and healthy than collectivist ideology; relatively small, democratic government clearly was demonstrated to help a society prosper far more effectively than elitist Big Government. How ironic, then, that voices in Russia and China are mocking our current Big Government policies. Those whose countries took the tragic, impoverishing detour through Big...