Free Republic

ROGERSVILLE — The pending budget problem for the Hawkins County school system got quite a bit worse Thursday as administrators realized that nearly $1.4 million in federal stimulus money awarded to the county has been included as part of the state funding allocation. Prior to Thursday, Director of Schools Charlotte Britton and her staff had been under the impression that the federal stimulus money was above and beyond what is projected to be the state BEP (Basic Education Program) allocation to Hawkins County Schools for 2009-2010. Although the budget has not yet been finalized, the Board of Education was expecting...

Obama’s health Czar, Nancy-Ann DeParle, has spent the last eight years making a fortune working for medical companies that have been under federal investigation for violating Medicare laws. Once again, Obama has managed to place a fox in the federal chicken coop with minimum criticism from the mainstream media. The Investigative Reporting Workshop has the story: Nancy-Ann DeParle … served as a director of corporations that faced scores of federal investigations, whistleblower lawsuits and other regulatory actions, according to government records reviewed by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University. Several of the companies were investigated for alleged kickbacks or...

Marching around with signs makes you "feel" good, but is not going to get it done. I've been there; done that. It is time for civil disobedience. It's worked for the liberals for decades, why can't or won't we do it? Being hauled off from a peaceful "sit-in" is a misdemeanor. Are Constitutionalists that afraid? Think what the Founding Fathers put on the line? Need I enumerate those who lost their lives, properties, wives/children, et al to be free men? NO ONE is listening to you nor even acknowledging the TEA Parties. I may be wrong about today, the 4th...

DAD, WHAT's UNABHANGIKEITSTAG? "Is that when the thirteen colonies broke away from England?" My ten year inquired out of nowhere at 6 AM German time this morning. "Yeah, why do you want to know, eat your breakfast," I mumbled, too sleepy to be very curious. "Because I am afraid my teacher will ask me, since I am wearing this T-shirt and I'm the only American in the class." With an effort, I adjusted my gaze upward to his white T-shirt. It was brand new. Prominent on his breast was an image of the flag and below that: OLD NAVY FREEDOM...

Katharine Weymouth, the relatively new publisher of The Washington Post, is a lawyer who worked for the company for 12 years and was educated at the Harvard School of Business, so she is hardly a naïf in running a business. But she has never worked in a newsroom, a gap in her résumé that may have contributed to her current problems. As first reported in Politico, The Washington Post had sent out a brochure offering sponsorships — a fee of $25,000 for one, or $250,000 for an entire series — for an exclusive “Washington Post salon” at Ms. Weymouth’s home...

The UN's top health official has opened a forum in Mexico on combating swine flu by saying that the spread of the virus worldwide is now unstoppable. World Health Organization head Margaret Chan added that the holding of the meeting in Cancun showed confidence in Mexico, which has been hard hit. The WHO says most H1N1 cases are mild, with many people recovering unaided. As the summit opened, the UK alone was projecting more than 100,000 new cases of H1N1 a day by the end of the summer. As the peak of the flu season approaches in South America, some...

Millions of American women are busy with July 4th preparations. They are dusting off picnic blankets, preparing potato salad, and making arrangements with friends and family for firework displays. Few have time to thinking about the meaning of our country's founding and how events today may change our country in important ways. As any school child could tell you, our founders rebelled because they wanted to escape a too-intrusive government. Since then, we have allowed government to expand in ways the founders never contemplated. Presently, our government is expanding once again. American women should consider what that means for their...

May I suggest reading the Declaration of Independence again..today.

Colin Powell, one of President Obama's most prominent Republican supporters, expressed concern publicly for the first time Friday that the president's ambitious blitz of costly initiatives may be enlarging the size of government and the federal debt too much. "I'm concerned at the number of programs that are being presented, the bills associated with these programs and the additional government that will be needed to execute them," Mr. Powell said in an interview with CNN's John King. It was released by the network Friday. Mr. Powell, a retired U.S. Army general who rose to political prominence after a long and...

THERE'S an old joke about a fantastic three- legged pig and a farmer. It comes in many versions. In some tellings, the pig saves the farmer's life. In another, it can talk. The punch line always comes after a visitor asks, "So how come he only has three legs?" "Because," the farmer explains, "you don't want to eat a pig like that all at once." More and more, it seems the Obama administration has just that attitude toward the economic crisis: doling out pork for as long as possible. Recall the White House mantra of "never let a crisis go...

WASHINGTON (AllPolitics, May 15) -- Sen. Robert Dole (R-Kan.) electrified Washington today, resigning from the Senate to campaign full time for the White House (256K WAV sound). "I announce that I will forego the privileges not only of the office of the majority leader but of the United States Senate itself, from which I resign effective on or before June 11th," a choked-up Dole told a Capitol Hill news conference, flanked by Republican lawmakers and a few Democrats. "And I will then stand before you without office or authority, a private citizen, a Kansan, an American, just a man." ......

More unemployment means a smaller carbon footprint, as California greenies succeed in convincing a judge to shut down a needed modernization of California's oldest refinery, the massive 104 year old Chevron Richmond refinery. David R. Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle reports: A judge has ordered Chevron Corp. to stop work on its controversial oil refinery expansion in Richmond, handing environmentalists their biggest victory in a long fight over the project. Contra Costa County Superior Court Judge Barbara Zuniga gave Chevron 60 days to wind up work on the project, which would have given the 107-year-old refinery greater flexibility to...

At this point there is much speculation about why Sarah Palin abruptly announced her impending resignation from Alaska's governorship. Her critics are already calling her "erratic" but she is consistent in one respect: she cares little for the established ways of doing things when she thinks she has a better course of action. The conventional wisdom holds that you bury news when it is announced at 4 PM on Friday of a holiday weekend. But the comparative news vacuum seems to be only amplifying the echoes reverberating through the political world. Does anyone think that Sarah Palin minds the fact...

Los Angeles will end use of coal-fired powerThu Jul 2, 2009 4:33pm EDT By Bernie Woodall LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Los Angeles will eliminate the use of electricity made from coal by 2020, replacing it with power from cleaner renewable energy sources, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said. Consumers of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the largest city-owned utility in the United States with 1.45 million electricity customers, will see higher power bills in the fight against climate change, he added in his inaugural speech for his second four-year term as mayor on Wednesday. California does not have any...

Just as we conservatives get ready to celebrate our patriotism on the Fourth of July, a liberal from a prominent family has been accused of spying for Cuba. Write Mary Beth Sheridan and Del Quentin Wilber in The Washington Post about a retired State Department employee: What Walter Kendall Myers kept hidden, according to documents unsealed in court Friday, was a deep and long-standing anger toward his country, an anger that allegedly made him willing to spy for Cuba for three decades. Ho hum. It's not as if this is the first time. Yet these days it is good old...

WASHINGTON -- It took the Obama administration eight days to figure out whether Iranians being gunned down for protesting a fraudulent election and demanding basic civil liberties deserved to be acknowledged by the president of the United States. It took the O-Team less than eight hours to side with Cuba's Fidel Castro, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega over the ouster of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras. As we now have come to expect, Mr. Obama got it wrong again, but this time, nobody noticed. The U.S. news media, preoccupied with the sudden demise of Michael Jackson, ignored the event...

There is a missing element in all the media attention to the Mark Sanford scandal: How did the South Carolina governor fulfill his public duties? When he told his staff he might take a hike on the Appalachian Trail, it seems he willfully misled them. He was, in fact, not only out of the state, but out of the country. And he did not leave his Lt. Governor in charge. To see how serious this dereliction of duty was, we have only to ask ourselves: What if the tragic collision on Washington’s Metro had taken place on Amtrak in South...

With Americans busy celebrating the 233rd birthday of the USA this week, freedom of speech comes to mind. We Americans are big on speaking freely, but the words we use are quite another matter. In fact, we are becoming a nation of braying sheep, using the same words and phrases over and over again. Benjamin Franklin, a wordsmith if there ever was one, would have some issues with that. "Issues." That is a drastically overused word that is being used to avoid the proper word: "problems." He has "issues" sounds a lot better than "the guy is dramatically screwed up."...

N. Korea test-launches seventh missile off east coast: S. Korea By Sam Kim SEOUL, July 4 (Yonhap) -- North Korea test-fired its seventh missile of the day off its east coast on Saturday, the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said. "North Korea fired its seventh missile at 5:40 p.m.," a JCS official said, speaking on customary condition of anonymity. "We believe it was from the same missile base on the east coast."