Free Republic

Obama’s First Military Order by Paul L. Williams, Ph.D. thelastcrusade.org Don’t shoot back! Don’t pick the poppies! And don’t bother the women and men in burqas! These are the new rules of engagement for leathernecks in Afghanistan. Sound incredible? They’re true. Welcome to the modern Marine Corps under Commander-in-Chief Barack Hussein Obama Taliban for ObamaOn July 1, the U.S. military initiated Operation Khanjar or “Strike of the Sword,” an invasion of the Helmand Province by 4,000 Marines and 650 Afghan soldiers. “Strike of the Sword” represents the first military operation to be ordered by President Obama. The purpose of the...

Suing Al Gore for Global Warming. I love it.

Arguing that having sex is essential to a reasonable quality of life, a Swedish court has ordered local authorities to subsidize a 30-year-man’s prescription for the potency drug Viagra. The case involves a man from Gothenburg in western Sweden who recently emerged from a 15-year addiction during which he was treated with a medicine that left him impotent, the Göteborgs-Posten (GP) newspaper reports. The issue of whether or not he was entitled to assistance originally came about because he did not have specific medical advice recommending that he needed to take the potency medication. The local support unit in the...

MEMPHIS, TN – Two people have been shot during an attempted robbery of a jewelry vender in East Memphis. It happened around 3:00 p.m., Wednesday, July 8, 2009, in the 5300 block of Poplar Avenue, outside of the Hopson Building. myEyewitnessNews.com was first on the scene, just seconds after the call went out to Memphis Police. Police say a jewelry vender was doing business inside the building just before the shooting happened. The man told police that he had been followed by four men, but didn’t know how long they were watching him. Investigators say when the man left the...

The state’s zoos may be shuttered and lions, giraffes, apes and other exotic animals could land on a furry death row if devastating funding cuts proposed by Gov. Deval Patrick go through, alarmed officials warned. The governor’s proposed $4 million whack would shut down Dorchester’s Franklin Park Zoo and Stone Zoo in Stoneham, Zoo New England boss John Linehan told the Legislature in a no-nonsense letter this week. Worse yet, he warned, officials could have to unleash a tragic string of mercy killings because it would be impossible to find new homes for all 1,000 of the zoos’ fuzzy friends.

Vice President Joe Biden told us this week that the Obama administration “misread how bad the economy was” in the immediate aftermath of the inauguration. Puh-leeze. Mr. Biden and President Obama won the election because the economy was cratering so badly there were fears we might be entering another depression. No one understood that better than the two of them. Mr. Obama tried to clean up the vice president’s remarks by saying his team hadn’t misread what was happening, but rather “we had incomplete information.” That doesn’t hold water, either. The president has got the second coming of the best...

AURORA — The owner of a check-cashing and cigarette store shot and killed an armed robber in his store early Monday afternoon, according to eyewitnesses and a vague police account. Aurora police said they received a 911 call shortly after 1 p.m. about a gunman who attempted to rob the check-cashing store on the northwest corner of Clinton Street and East Colfax Avenue. After investigating, police said a "possible suspect" had been shot by a person in the store. The wounded person was driven by an unknown person to a Denver-area hospital where he died of a single gunshot wound,...

A conservative, anti-union bastion whose people don't have much education. A magnet for destructive hurricanes. A region whose unskilled workers are incapable of building an airplane that can fly. Does that sound like Charleston? Now that the Lowcountry has emerged as a top competitor for a second production line of Boeing's new 787 jetliner, the area is getting increased attention from people living in Seattle and particularly in Everett, Wash., where Boeing builds its jets

Trained for 2 Years, Retriever Helps Mr. Montalvan Get Back on His Feet NEW YORK -- Like any other golden retriever seeking a treat, Tuesday nudged his owner's hand with his snout one recent morning and waited expectantly. Luis Carlos Montalvan got up from a chair in his small Brooklyn apartment and walked to the kitchen. Tuesday followed close behind, eyes fixed on a white cabinet. The retriever sat alertly as Mr. Montalvan, an Iraq war veteran with severe post-traumatic stress disorder, reached for a vial of pills, lined a half-dozen on the table and took them one by one....

MADRID -- A Spanish court is expected to deliver its verdict this month in the insider-trading trial of Telefónica Chairman César Alierta -- a long-awaited decision that could have profound consequences on Europe's biggest telecom firm and Spain's close-knit business community.

America’s global primacy in the air power is currently teetering on a knife-edge. Soon, the US Senate will vote on whether to continue funding future production of the F-22A Raptor. If the Senate endorses the continuation of F-22 production, as sought by the full House of Representatives, the House Armed Services Committee, the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the Senate Appropriations Committee, the United States Air Force has some prospect of maintaining its strategic position in the longer term. If the Senate votes against the F-22, the United States Air Force will enter a terminal death spiral from which it...

It was just a few months ago when insurance giant AIG sparked outrage after company executives walked away with millions of taxpayer-funded bonuses. Now, the Social Security Administration is treating its 700 managers to three days at the Arizona Biltmore Resort. But the Agency's Pete Spencer says his group is no AIG. "We get a regular appropriation, which includes money for training, and that's what we're using," says Spencer. The conference is being paid for by taxpayer dollars. Critics say the training session is too lavish and should be scaled down. But Spencer says the Arizona Biltmore was actually the...

Twenty-five Egyptians and one Palestinian suspects detained in Egypt have confessed to planning attacks on Suez Canal shipping and oil pipelines on behalf of al Qaeda. Tuesday, July 7, DEBKAfile's counter-terror sources disclosed that a large group of 15-20 al Qaeda terrorists, trained in Pakistan and Algeria to hijack and blow up airliners, deployed secretly in Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Turkey and Egypt for multiple attacks in the week of the G8 summit in l'Aqila or thereabouts. For this article, click HERE. Our military sources report that this week an Israeli nuclear-capable Dolphin submarine escorted by a missile vessel transited...

Palin Juggles Two Parties You took a fine time to leave us, Sarah. Can't you imagine Kenny Rogers singing about it? We've had some bad times/ Lived through some sad times/ But this time your hurtin' won't heal. Sarah Palin's detractors, and there are lots of them, pile on the lower-class comparisons, ridiculing her as more country than cool: Barbie with a gun, whose got the moose on the run. They're right. That's why she has fans for being just that, among both men and women. She's authentic when a lot of pols rely on manufactured authenticity.Stereotypes cut several ways....

VIDEO HERE.

The second quarter didn't bring any improvement in the fortunes of consumer magazines, which saw ad pages plunge 29.4% compared to the same period last year, from 60,721 to 42,841, according to the Publisher's Information Bureau. While not completely unexpected, this bad news dims the prospects for recovery later this year. At this rate, 2009 is shaping up to be the worst year for consumer magazines since 1932, when total revenues dropped 30%. Of course it's possible the steep declines in the first half of the year will be offset by smaller losses in the second half, but this becomes...

Spurgeon's Morning & Evening - July 11 -------------------------------- Morning Devotional "After that ye have suffered awhile, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you." - 1 Peter 5:10 You have seen the arch of heaven as it spans the plain: glorious are its colours, and rare its hues. It is beautiful, but, alas, it passes away, and lo, it is not. The fair colours give way to the fleecy clouds, and the sky is no longer brilliant with the tints of heaven. It is not established. How can it be? A glorious show made up of transitory sun-beams and passing rain-drops,...

What if in 2025 a husband and wife decide they want to use old-fashioned incandescent bulbs in the sanctuary of their home? Will the light-bulb left defend their right to privacy and freedom of choice? Don't count on it. Many Americans may not know it yet, but the federal government has already effectively banned the type of light bulb most of us use today. In 2007, President Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act, mandating that household light bulbs use incrementally less electricity starting in 2012 and culminating in 2020, when they must use less than 70 percent of...

....Obama on Saturday dismissed the idea the nation might need a second stimulus to jolt the economy out of recession and urged Americans to be patient with his economic recovery plan.....Obama used his weekly radio and Internet address to remind voters that reversing job losses takes time.

Oh, my. It makes my arms tired. With all the trouble on this planet - some made by us, most by others - you would think that our leaders on Capitol Hill would be working on those difficult and potentially deadly problems or, at a minimum, acting like adults. Nah. Sen. Roland Burris (D-Ill) announced he won't be running for re-election having remembered that maybe he and his people perhaps had sort of offered to raise money for former Governor Rod Blagojevich. Not that he did anything wrong, mind you, but according to the Washington Post Burris has raised a...