Free Republic

Maybe the PETA folks think any publicity is good publicity but taking on the quick-witted Blake Shelton in a war of words on Twitter isn’t the kind of publicity they want.Things started off nicely enough: “Hello @peta2…. Allow me to introduce myself… My name is Blake Shelton. This could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship!!!They certainly established a relationship, but not a beautiful one. In the dozens of tweets, PETA extremist position has made them look foolish, and Shelton looks foolish too — but doesn’t care. In fact, he tweeted: Y’all know of any other tree huggin, bunny...

While you may still have the delusion that Congress and Senators work for you because you elected them and pay their wages, and are there to serve you, Obama and his 44 (so far) UNELECTED, UNVETTED, AND responsible ONLY TO HIM and not even subject to Congressional oversight Czars are not your servants - they are your bosses, your rulers and there is nothing you can do about it. NOTHING, short of removing King Obama from office and thus his "princes" with him.

A documentary on US President Barack Obama’s late mother Stanley Ann Dunham will soon be made. The documentary titled Stanley Ann Dunham: A Most Generous Spirit, will look into her work in microfinance. It will focus on her decision to send her 10-year-old son from Indonesia to live in Hawaii with her parents out of fear that her politically sensitive work might endanger his life. Aloe Entertainment will produce the film, while the company topper Mary Aloe will exec produce. "According to Barack Obama himself, his mother was his single biggest influence in his life," Variety quoted Aloe as saying....

A military appeals court has ruled against CBS in a battle over unaired portions of a "60 Minutes" interview with a key figure in the 2005 slaying of 24 Iraqis in the city of Haditha. The U.S. Navy-Marine Corps Court of Appeals rejected the network's claim of reporter privilege in its battle with Marine Corps prosecutors who want access to the outtakes of Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich's interview. Wuterich is charged with nine counts of voluntary manslaughter and related offenses in the incident that was triggered by a roadside bombing that killed one Marine and injured two others. His case...

Two American journalists freed by North Korea after 4 1/2 months of captivity have admitted that they had crossed into the communist state. But they also say they were back across the border - "firmly back inside China," according to their joint statement - when North Korean border guards chased and apprehended them, then "violently dragged" them back into the North. The journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, posted their account late Tuesday on the Web site of their San Francisco organization, CurrentTV. It was their first explanation of how they were apprehended on March 17. Former President Bill Clinton...

Be afraid, be very afraid. The guy who posted this on LiveLeak wasn't making fun of it, but thought it would strike fear in the hearts of the infidels...

DENVER (AP) -- U.S. Roman Catholic bishops have taken a consistent line on a health care overhaul: It's vital, but they cannot support proposals that go too far in covering abortion and not far enough in protecting health workers who don't want to provide that procedure. Now, at least a half-dozen bishops have gone beyond that position, some of them using hard-hitting terms such as "socialization" and "monopolization" to launch a broader critique of big government. Their argument isn't that the federal government should necessarily stay out of health care coverage altogether, but that an oversized government health system could...

Forty-five years ago this November, political historian Richard Hofstadter published a provocative essay in Harper's Magazine entitled "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," in which he argued that our nation "has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds." Hofstadter, a widely celebrated professor at Columbia University who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for his book "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," was then confronting both the ghosts of McCarthyism and the more immediate significance of Barry Goldwater's candidacy for president of the United States. Hofstadter was particularly concerned about assessing "how much political leverage can be got...

Twenty years ago, the Solidarity movement in Poland played a key role in overthrowing the communist regime that was then ruling the country. My wife was living in Poland during that time and tells me that there are some interesting parallels between events then and the Tea Party movement in America today. For one thing, the Solidarity movement was not limited to the labor union shipyard workers in Gdansk, but was a large grassroots movement that went way beyond labor unions and shipyards to touch just about every corner of Polish society. Today in America, the Tea Party movement, although...

Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) has decided that Tuesday is the make-or-break day for bipartisan health care reform talks that have slowed the debate in the Senate to a crawl for most of the summer. The “gang of six” negotiators are expected to meet when Congress returns from the monthlong August recess Tuesday, and sources said Baucus will use that opportunity to push Republicans to sign onto the outlines of the bill that they have been discussing for months. If, as Democrats expect, ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) balk at agreeing to a bill,...

“The Iranians are suffering from the policies in the last four years, they have been humiliated all over the world and I really feel sorry for these people.” Mir-Hossein Mousavi The last four years (2005-2009) have been worse than ever for Iranian civilians due to the reign of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Historically, most presidents have acted as “counterweights” to the extreme ideologies of the Supreme Leader but unfortunately Ahmadinejad made those ideologies even more of a reality for the people of Iran by echoing them. Angry at the previous four years of Ahmadinejad’s presidency, the Iranian civilians, mainly the “student...

It's been a crazy week out here, and one casualty was my ability to track the comments thread on my last post. Given the way that comments thread turned out, I feel rather bad about that. I didn't expect the eruption that took place, and it looked like poor R. A. was just about tearing her hair out trying to deal with it. In retrospect, though, I think maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. Clearly, we struck a nerve—not just with the post, but with the reaction—and given Kweisi's bloody-mindedness, it wasn't struck lightly, either; and really, what else should...

<p>"The bombs the government drops in Iraq are the bombs that blew up in New York City," said Van Jones, director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, who also warned against forthcoming violence by the Bush Administration. "The US cannot bomb its way out of this one. Safety at home requires justice abroad."</p>

Thursday, Glenn Beck used two stories -- one of the Obama Administration’s misuse of the National Endowment for the Arts, the other of Obama’s planned speech to the nation’s elementary schools -- to show that subtle propaganda in American culture is nothing new. For his last Countdown segment of the week -- the supposed “Number One Story!” -- MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann purported to deconstruct Glenn Beck’s report on the fascist and communist roots of much of the art at Rockefeller Center, home of NBC News. Now, admittedly, Beck can get a bit emotional, but after this segment, MSNBC execs might...

During the past months an increasing number of economists have warned of the growing likelihood of an US economic recovery that fails to produce job growth. A bevy of economic reports in the past weeks have sent mixed signals as to economic strength, but overall most economists believe that the US economy has turned a corner. Yesterdays unemployment report, however, adds to the concern that the US is looking forward to a sustained period of high unemployment and lack of job creation.The Department of Labor reported a rise in the adjusted non-farm unemployment rate to a 30 year high of...

CNN News Tip Page Maybe we should alert CNN to the Van Jones story. They seem to have missed it.

It's not often you see a goat in a department store in Britain. Fortunately a new website is opening a window for Britons onto the bizarre, often alarming, always hilarious shoppers who patronise American budget store Wal-Mart. 'People of Wal-Mart' (www.peopleofwalmart.com), launched by three men in their 20s in August, has gone viral, becoming the latest star of the Internet. Hits increased by 700 per cent on August 27 alone. The site features the gloriously absurd attire of Wal-Mart customers in photographs sent in by bemused fellow shoppers around the country. And in addition to laughs, it's causing a legal...

BOSTON — Proponents of the Atkins low-carbohydrate/high saturated fat diet say that you can have your steak and eat it, too, and still lose weight. But the adverse metabolic consequences are too heavy a price to pay, Australian investigators reported at a symposium sponsored by the International Atherosclerosis Society. After 1 year, overweight and obese patients randomly assigned to the Atkins diet or to a low-saturated-fat, high-carbohydrate diet lost similar amounts of weight. But patients on the Atkins diet had a deterioration in flow-mediated arterial dilatation, a marker for cardiovascular disease, and higher levels of LDL cholesterol than at baseline,...

Explosive news coming out of the just released deposition of former FBI translator-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds. According to the released transcripts, Edmonds testified as follows: "[T]his Congresswoman's married with children, grown children, but she is bisexual. ... So they have sent Turkish female agents, and that Turkish female agents work for Turkish government, and have sexual relationship with this Congresswoman in her townhouse ... and the entire episodes of their sexual conduct was being filmed because the entire house, this Congressional woman's house was bugged...

          DISAPPOINTMENTS Disappointments come to all of us; and the more I see of life, the more convinced I am that one of the most important lessons anyone can learn is how to handle these disappointments. One of the great disappointments in my youth happened during my sophomore year in high school when I was running for class president. The class elected a cute brunette cheerleader. Another popular girl, another of the cheerleaders, came in second. And I trailed the field with only four votes. That was quite a blow to a cocky young boy...