Free Republic

We’ve all seen the disappearance of the word “terrorism” since Obama came to power. Such is the case with the Uyghurs. Do you remember when Bush was President, and he went to China for the Olympics last year? The terrorist threat that the Chinese government was facing was that the terrorist Uyghurs were going to attack. The American media and the leftist intellectuals have been out to de-bunk the fact that many factions of the Uyghurs are terrorists. This is consistent with the recent appeasement that the Obama Administration has been doing such that they will not use the words...

Police confirmed Wednesday that ex-NFL star Steve McNair's 20-year-old girlfriend killed him before turning the gun on herself.They said they may never know what was going through Sahel Kazemi's mind when she shot McNair in his condominium early Saturday, but interviews with friends led detectives to conclude she was becoming increasingly distraught over events in her life, including financial problems. Police said she also suspected McNair was seeing another woman. Police earlier had labeled McNair's death a homicide, but awaited further tests and investigation before saying for sure what happened. At one point, Kazemi told an associate that her...

Six centuries ago, cartographers would scrawl in the blank space on their maps, "Here Be Dragons." Primitive navigation charts often featured sea monsters wriggling at the margins and ships plummeting into oblivion as known oceans met unknown ends of the Earth. Post-Sept. 11, the Pentagon snapped up Thomas Barnett's Information Age rendition of Known and Unknown Worlds. Barnett, in a seminal article in Esquire magazine's March 2003 issue, astutely labeled his Known World the "core" (connected and relatively stable places) and his Unknowns "gaps" (disconnected, isolated places potentially filled with 21st century dragons like terrorists and rogue states with nuclear...

Members of the state's congressional delegation said Tuesday that Boeing is laying down an ultimatum to its biggest union: Unless a long-term agreement barring strikes by the Machinists is reached by this fall, Boeing will build a second production line for the 787 someplace outside Washington. "The whole thing comes down to, can they get a long-term agreement with the union, with a no-strike clause," influential U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Bremerton, said in an interview Tuesday. "That's what ultimately has to happen here in the next two or three or four months — or they are going to go elsewhere....

U.S. health officials are stepping up testing of swine flu cases for Tamiflu resistance, now that an American has come down with a resistant strain. A California teenager was diagnosed with swine flu last month after arriving in Hong Kong on June 11, and has since recovered. The 16-year-old is a San Francisco resident and likely was infected in the United States, health officials said Tuesday. Her illness was mild, but noteworthy. She's just the third person in the world to be diagnosed with a strain resistant to Tamiflu, the primary pharmaceutical weapon against the new virus. The other two...

ROME – World leaders attending the Group of Eight summit opening Wednesday in Italy will each be presented with a gift from the past and one for the future. Handmade books portraying works by Neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova, as well as gold coins representing an imaginary future world currency will be given to the participants at the opening of the three-day summit. There are 10 copies of the book, commissioned by Italy's Premier Silvio Berlusconi from the Bologna-based art publishing house Fondazione Marilena Ferrari, each with a personalized dedication for the leader who receives it. ...snip... The coins, made by...

Flags flew at half-staff this week in California's state Capitol. No, not for Michael Jackson. For Private First Class Justin Casillas. Pfc. Casillas died in a suicide bombing attack on his Army base in eastern Afghanistan on the Fourth of July. While Americans enjoyed fireworks and Hollyweird mourned the "king of pop" with wretched excess, the family of Pfc. Casillas learned that the 19-year-old paratrooper with the U.S. Army's Alaska-based 509th Airborne had given his life for his country. His father told the Woodland (Calif.) Daily Democrat that Justin just "wanted to do his part." The family has a legacy...

George Fullerton, a longtime associate of Leo Fender who played a crucial role in the electric-guitar innovator's extraordinary success through his broad-based skills as a musician, artist and technician, has died. He was 86. Fullerton died Saturday of congestive heart failure at St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, said his son Geoff. While Fender tinkered away, coming up with improvements in guitar design that led to the creation of his revolutionary Telecaster and Stratocaster electric guitars, Fullerton was charged with making those innovations practical for mass production in their Orange County factory that opened in the late 1940s. Nearly 1,000...

Can this possibly be true? An anti-Obama website, The Obama File, posts a photograph purporting to show President Obama putting his hand over his heart during the playing of the Russian national anthem, during his visit to Moscow. How can it possibly be a genuine photograph, when we know that the President didn't put his hand over his heart during the playing of the American national anthem, as demonstrated in this now-infamous photograph taken during the campaign? Please, let the purported Moscow photograph be a fake. Or, even better, someone point me to the time when President Obama noted that...

The soon to be former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, is like one of those souffles my mother sometimes made. The recipe warned against premature removal from the oven because the dish would collapse. That is the saga of Gov. Palin. Prematurely plucked from relative obscurity by John McCain and touted as a rising star by many Republican conservatives, Palin collapsed. Though she was treated unfairly and in ways that no liberal woman would have been -- not even Hillary Clinton -- she clearly was not prepared to discuss the issues, the command of which -- or least familiarity of...

...they were upset that their 14-month-old brother Trig, who has Down Syndrome, was "mocked and ridiculed by some pretty mean spirited adults." I'd like to know the names of those mean-spirited adults who mocked and ridiculed her special needs child. I don't believe it for a second. I think what she is talking about is that she was criticized for the way she dealt with her pregnancy with Trig and her caregiving of him after his birth. Remember, Sarah Palin is a right-wing, evangelical Christian for whom "family values" and the role of the mother are paramount. Many right-wing Christians...

<p>“Harry Potter” star Jamie Waylett has been charged with growing ten cannabis plants.</p> <p>The 19-year-old actor will have to appear in court later this month for the charges stemming from an April arrest.</p> <p>Waylett, who plays Potter bully Vincent Crabbe, was busted when cops pulled over his vehicle in London and allegedly found eight bags of marijuana. He was taken to a nearby police station before a team of officers raided his mother’s home in Camden, the Daily Telegraph reports.</p>

Two pieces of prime coastal real estate will be maintained as open space if they are purchased by the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, a public agency with the goal of preventing development on scenic lands rich in wildlife and farming history. The district is likely to approve the purchase of two rural properties in the San Mateo County foothills at a meeting Wednesday in Half Moon Bay. The lands — the sprawling Bluebrush Canyon property and the smaller Roberts property — make up nearly 300 acres of forest, creeks and wild grassland. They currently are owned by the Peninsula...

DIBBLE — A 26-year-old man died Sunday from injuries he suffered when he was holding a lit firework a day earlier. Richard Hines apparently had been drinking Saturday night when he lit the fuse of an artillery shell aerial firework and held the reloadable fiberglass launching tube above his head, McClain County Sheriff Don Hewett said. Instead of launching into the air, the shell exploded and shot out the bottom of the fiberglass tube. "From what I heard, it exploded on his head, and he lost three fingers and a thumb," Hewett said. "There were several people standing fairly close...

Ethics complaints against Gov. Sarah Palin and top members of her administration have cost the state personnel board nearly $300,000 over the past year, almost two-thirds of which appear to be from the Troopergate investigation of the governor. That's according to new figures released by the personnel board, which described them as "independent counsel expenditures." The board hires private lawyers to investigate the complaints. The expenditures were released after the personnel board expressed frustration at the costs of the complaints. Palin has said the state is wasting money trying to resolve "frivolous" complaints against her. The bulk of the expenses...

The gap toothed Alfred E Newman looking bastard apparently feels that since he still has a job and no sponsors left his show that it is safe to start hitting up on Governor Palin again. Top Ten List From Last Night: Top Ten Messages On Sarah Palin's Answering Machine Top Ten 10-"Hi, It's George W. Bush. Why didn't anyone tell me resigning was an option?" 9-"It's John McCain -- why did I call?" 8-"Mark Sanford here. Ever been to Argentina?" 7-"I'm calling from Geico to see if you want to renew your dogsled insurance" 6-"It's Letterman -- we still cool?"...

Asif Zardari told a meeting of former senior civil servants in Islamabad, it was time to be honest about their deployment. "Let us be truthful to ourselves and make a candid admission of the realities," he said. "The terrorists of today were the heroes of yesteryears until 9/11 occurred and they began to haunt us as well." These groups were not thrown up because of government weakness, but as a matter of policy. He said they were deliberately "created and nurtured" as a policy to achieve some short-term tactical objectives. His comments amount to an admission that Pakistan trained Islamic...

"Cybersecurity Plan to Involve NSA, Telecoms DHS Officials Debating The Privacy Implications" SNIPPET: "The Obama administration will proceed with a Bush-era plan to use National Security Agency assistance in screening government computer traffic on private-sector networks, with AT&T as the likely test site, according to three current and former government officials. President Obama said in May that government efforts to protect computer systems from attack would not involve "monitoring private-sector networks or Internet traffic," and Department of Homeland Security officials say the new program will scrutinize only data going to or from government systems."

Regardless of what Palin does next, Malek will be watching. "She has that Ronald Reagan quality," he said of the Alaska governor. "She has that magic."

--------- Snip White House officials confirmed that Obama agreed to language supporting a goal of keeping the world's average temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). --------- Snip