Free Republic

Newspapers may be facing falling circulation and in some cases shutting down entirely but most people still rely on them for their daily news fix. From the Columbia Journalism Review For those of us of a certain small-but-growing subset— the blogging, commenting, techno-savvy, early-adopting, extreme-news consumers, it’s sometimes easy to forget that most people don’t live like we do. They don’t use RSS. They don’t Twitter. They don’t read twenty blogs a day. They (some 100 million or so) still actually pick up the newspaper and read it. Martin Langeveld published a fascinating analysis a few months ago on how...

The news business continues to be in a freefall thanks to a deep recession and changing reader and viewer habits but graduates from the Columbia School of Journaiism are relatively upbeat about their future. From the Village Voice In a down economy, the smart play is to go to school to learn new skills, network, and ride it out. At least, that's the case in a normal industry. But conventional wisdom has it that planning for a future in journalism makes as much sense as signing up for a career as a Pontiac dealer. That's not how members of the...

Just got word in that the Democrats seem to have overcome their so-called Blue Dog problem at least long enough to vote down any chance of stripping the “public option” from the Democrat sponsored Obamacare version of healthcare “reform” currently roiling the House of Reps. U.S. Rep. Doctor Mike Burgess (R, Texas) tried to introduce an amendment that would strip the House bill of the public option. Burgess worries about the regressive price controls and rationing as well as the pressure that the public option would put on the medical and insurance industries that would, in the end, force millions...

When it comes to their constituents' health care, the Blue Dogs are barking up the wrong tree. House Blue Dogs -- moderate Democrats who represent Republican-leaning districts -- joined ranks with liberal Democrats on Wednesday to impose a government insurance system on all Americans. The leader of the pack, Rep. Mike Ross, Arkansas Democrat, confusedly assured that government insurance "will not be mandated on anyone," but that "everyone in America will be required to have health insurance." He claimed that his negotiations cut the cost of the House health care bill by 9 percent and made it possible for more...

U.S. federal regulators have raised the number of struggling banks which they have essentially put on probation, forcing them to fix their problems to avoid potential failures, the Wall Street Journal said. Citing data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act requests, the paper said The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), along with the Federal Reserve, have issued more memorandums of understanding so far this year than in all of 2008. At the current rate of at least 285, the Fed, OCC and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp are in line to issue nearly 600 of these secret...

There was a picture of yours truly on the Politico site (blog by Thrush) that created quite a controversy. After some thought, I wrote the following in response; What is your liberty worth? Perhaps the better question is, “How far are you willing to go to preserve it?” This question was brought to mind as a consequence of the most recent protest I organized outside our local congressman’s office. Most protests, especially in our little backwater and with only twenty five people, don’t make much of an impact. In its organization, however, I sent out an e-mail stating that I...

<p>Please check out if your Senator or Representative is holding a public forum or Townhall in your area. So far I have found this list of upcoming Townhalls.</p>

LOS ANGELES (AP) - A group of retirees who refused to leave Sen. Dianne Feinstein's West Los Angeles office until she talked to them about health care reform has been arrested. Los Angeles police Sergeant Rich Brunson said Thursday that at least eight people were being taken into custody and would likely be booked for trespassing and released. Cate Engel, a spokeswoman for the group California Alliance for Retired Americans, says the activists - all between 55 and 87 years old - wanted to talk to Feinstein about strengthening Medicare and using the program as a model for health reform....

From Yahoo News: On the eve of the August recess, members are reporting meetings that have gone terribly awry, marked by angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior. In at least one case, a congressman has stopped holding town hall events because the situation has spiraled so far out of control. “I had felt they would be pointless,” Rep. Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.) told POLITICO, referring to his recent decision to suspend the events in his Long Island district. “There is no point in meeting with my constituents and [to] listen to them and have them listen to you if what is...

One young woman,a student at Wichita State University (WSU),who request to remain anonymous, said "Celebrities are idols.Gods and Goddesses. They're bigger than life. No one really believes that they can die prematurely. No one really believes that Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, or Kevin Costner can be killed in a car accident tomorrow. It is unfathomable to imagine that tomorrow's news headline could say something like, 'Brad Pitt, discovered dead after falling down his living room stairs and breaking neck.' So when it happens, people tend to get serious and say, 'If they could die prematurely, so can I.'" Michelle Singletary,...

The Secretary of State's office has given the green light to begin gathering signatures for a ballot initiative to lower the vote requirement for passing a state budget or increasing taxes from two-thirds to a three-fifths supermajority. The man behind the initiative, Berkeley-based attorney and editor Robert Denham, says he figures that a three-fifths majority would prevent gridlock over the budget but still be palatable to voters wary of dropping the requirement to a simple majority. "I thought voters are more likely to sign off on something that doesn't make it too easy," said Denham, a Democrat. "That sort of...

While the rest of the left wing media has gotten bored with the topic and has long since returned to its favorite subject – namely, the cult-like hero-worship directed toward Barack Obama – Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! still refuses to believe that in a small corner of Central America, an unpopular leader with Marxist tendencies has been soundly rejected and ousted from office. After weeks of airing story after story about Honduras, building up to a symphonic-like crescendo, Goodman treated us last night to an interview with Zelaya himself!

A startup snags funding to start early work on a low-budget test reactor.By Tyler Hamilton General Fusion, a startup in Vancouver, Canada, says it can build a prototype fusion power plant within the next decade and do it for less than a billion dollars. So far, it has raised $13.5 million from public and private investors to help kick-start its ambitious effort.Unlike the $14 billion ITER project under way in France, General Fusion's approach doesn't rely on expensive superconducting magnets--called tokamaks--to contain the superheated plasma necessary to achieve and sustain a fusion reaction. Nor does the company require powerful lasers,...

Customer Asset Protection Company, a little-known insurer whose members include Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs,, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, is becoming the focus of swirling questions as Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy filing puts it to the test. The concern is that Capco, created to protect big-money investors in the event of a catastrophic failure of a major brokerage firm, has no chance to coping with the Lehman bankruptcy, NYT's Zachery Kouwe writes. By some industry estimates reviewed by the insurance department, Capco could face nearly $11 billion in claims as a result of the Lehman bankruptcy but has only about $150...

On the afternoon of July 24, Hillary Clinton arrived back in Washington on a flight from Asia, got off the plane, and headed straight to the State Department, where reporters were assembled to join her in a teleconference with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who was in Ramallah. It was late Friday evening Ramallah time. The teleconference was called to commemorate the transfer of $200 million to the Palestinian Authority — the largest single transfer in the P.A.’s history, a part of the $900 million pledge the Obama administration has made for 2009 (more than 62 percent higher than the...

Two Democratic Party senators, Chris Doss and Kent Conrad have been "caught" receiving Sub-Prime "VIP" Loans from lender Countrywide Inc. The Loans were at favorable interest rates. Despite the fact that the lender has testified that both men knew that they were getting a sweetheart deal, Senator Dodd claims he didn't know he was getting favorable rates. This revelation came from Robert Feinberg, the official who handled their loans in testimony to congress. According to the Washington Post:Dodd got two Countrywide mortgages in 2003, refinancing his home in Connecticut and another residence in Washington. Conrad's two Countrywide mortgages in 2004...

How did we get to this point in America? What happened that allowed for the fabric of America to become so thin? Where did all the leaders go? We got here by allowing the media to begin to distort the truth in the 1960’s and allowing them to continue that distortion for the past four decades. We have allowed the media to glorify the 1960’s to this day. And, we have allowed the potential leaders of our nation to be swept away by the tide of progressivism in our schools and systems of higher education. The aging hippies and radicals...

President Obama’s new “green jobs” czar Van Jones, an avowed militant communist, had been on the board of the pressure group Apollo Alliance, which aspires to flatten the U.S. economy by having government fund “green jobs” scams, according to the “Glenn Beck Program” earlier this week. Even worse, the group, which has ties to ACORN, SEIU, and Center for American Progress president John Podesta, has significant pull in Congress and helped to write the stimulus bill.

The plan signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this week to balance the state's budget could leave California facing shortfalls in future years of more than $15 billion, according to an analysis released Thursday by a major Wall Street credit rating firm. Moody's also criticized California's plan to take more than $1 billion from counties' redevelopment agencies this year to help close its $24 billion deficit, saying that could jeopardize those agencies' credit ratings. Moody's is one of several firms, including Fitch Ratings, that downgraded the state's credit ratings this month after legislators failed to pass a budget by the June...

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) - West Virginia has tapped stimulus funds to clean, paint, resurface and replace a total of 87 bridges that it could not otherwise get to in the next six years. State highways officials say they also tried to distribute both the money and the square footage of new or improved spans evenly among West Virginia's three congressional districts. Officials say this approach explains why an analysis of stimulus spending by The Associated Press found that only around one-third of the West Virginia bridges selected are considered structurally deficient or obsolete.