Free Republic

I got another one for all you brain pilots out there who think that Obama's background doesn't matter, and that we have bigger fish to fry. Here, hold my beer. Watch this. And for those of you at Hot Air who like to stay well within the approved lines, we're not going to provide any hard evidence here. We're just going to promote thinking. • Question with boldness • Hold to the truth • Speak without fear Jim McMahon did that with this piece. We're doing it by reprinting it. Who's Really Running the Show? I have been having a...

US B-1B Lancer drops 2000lb JDAM on Taliban position in Helmand, Afghanistan.....

A Modern Day "Modest Proposal" With each new Trillion dollar bailout and public give-away, lots of us taxpayers are getting uncomfortable. We used to see ourselves as productive citizens; now we wonder if we are being looked at as mere monetary food. Someone has to pay off this massive debt!This is what cannibalism is at its core: societal self-consumption. In this case, national self-consumption. Very soon, tax-suckers will outnumber tax payers. What's worse, those on the dole have a powerful entitlement mindset about your wallet. It's stealing with a muscular middleman. Imagine a FEMA pamphlet from the future that illustrates...

HARDINSBURG, Ky. (AP) -- A Kentucky woman says her 16-year-old son was baptized without her consent when he and fellow football players were taken to a Baptist revival by their coach.

4 U.S. troops killed in 'complex' Afghan attack Earlier, NATO officials confirm civilian deaths in airstrike on seized tankers KABUL, Afghanistan - Four American service members were killed Tuesday in eastern Afghanistan, the U.S. military said. U.S. forces spokeswoman Capt. Elizabeth Mathias said the troops were caught up in "a complex attack" Tuesday morning in Kunar province, which borders Pakistan. She did not provide further details. Afghan officials said they did not have information on the incident.

Obama's test: Quiet right, win left By: Carrie Budoff Brown September 8, 2009 04:28 AM EST After a summer of setbacks, President Barack Obama has a clear roadmap for salvaging health care reform: Convince skeptical Americans that a new system would actually help them, not limit their choices and care. Strike a compromise between liberals who demand a public option and cost-conscious centrists who call it a deal-breaker. Win over Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), an inscrutable moderate. And avoid Death Panels II, a rerun of the potent Republican attacks. But what’s got to make the White House nervous this week:...

Insulted in Restroom, Texas Judge Jails Court Attendee, 69, for Contempt Posted 1 hour, 15 minutes ago By Martha Neil Angry about a Texas judge's ruling in a custody matter involving his granddaughter, Don Bandelman followed the jurist into a public restroom at the Caldwell County courthouse. Then the 69-year-old called District Judge Jack Robison a fool, reports the American-Statesman. Bandelman says the judge told him to leave, and he did. But then Robison had his bailiffs arrest Bandelman on the courthouse outside the sidewalk and, without any hearing, sentenced him to a 30-day jail term for contempt, the article...

Matter now website

Teachers Spot Trouble In A Name Can teachers really predict behaviour from a name? Teachers think they can tell which pupils are likely to play up by looking at their names, a survey suggests. The poll of 3,000 teachers found more than one in three expected pupils with certain names to be more disruptive. Pupils called Callum, Connor, Jack, Chelsea, Courtney and Chardonnay were among some of the ones to watch. The online survey by parenting club Bounty.com found 49% of UK teachers made assumptions about a child when they first looked down the register. But it is not all...

This morning, Steny Hoyer signaled yet again that the public option will get dropped from ObamaCare, even in the House, where a threat from the House Progressive Caucus says that would lose 100 votes on the final product. Hoyer broached the possibility almost three weeks ago, and was roundly criticized by his colleagues for wavering. But does Hoyer represent the mainstream after the August recess? House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer indicated Tuesday that a public option might need to be dropped from the healthcare bill in order to get it passed. “In the final analysis, we have to see what...

The U.S. dollar tumbled against other major rivals Tuesday, including hitting a new yearly low against the euro, as investors continued to show a rising appetite for risk. The greenback's weakness came against a backdrop marked by a push higher in equities and improving economic data abroad -- as well as renewed questions about the role of the dollar as the world's premier reserve currency. The dollar index (DXY 77.21, -0.81, -1.04%) , a measure of the greenback against a trade-weighted basket of rivals, earlier fell to 77.093, the weakest since September 2008. It stood recently at 77.229, down 1.1%.

Blame it on my misspent youth — “I remember Charlie’s Angels.” Farah Fawcett, Kate Jackson, Cheryl Tiegs, big hair, bad guys and a resonant voice emitting from a intercom system. In this modern era of “re-imaginings” and “remakes,” let me make a modest proposal… I present, for your entertainment pleasure, “Charlie’s Angles.”

If Malia and Sasha Obama write "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" essays as they head back to school this week, oh, the stories they can tell. The tweens have prowled the Kremlin in trench coats, roamed a Harry Potter movie set in London, and studied slave history in Africa as they racked up tens of thousands of miles crisscrossing the Atlantic Ocean, time zones and international borders with their parents this summer. Stateside, 11-year-old Malia and 8-year-old Sasha explored the American West on a family tour of Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Canyon. They went whitewater rafting in...

This just in from Gallup: the public is every bit as divided on health care today as they were a month ago. Meanwhile, yesterday President Obama spent part of his speech at the AFL-CIO picnic in Ohio making the case for health care - but in language that is virtually unchanged from the stuff that has failed miserably in his first seven months. In many ways health care is to Obama what Iraq was to Bush. President Bush kept reciting the same points over and over until the public simply tuned him out and - even worse for a president...

Unexpected Impact on Jupiter Credit: ALPO, Theo Ramakers Explanation: Two months ago, something unexpected hit Jupiter. First discovered by an amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley on 2009 July 19, the impact was quickly confirmed and even imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope the very next day. Many of the world's telescopes then zoomed in on our Solar System's largest planet to see the result. Some of these images have been complied into the above animation. Over the course of the last month and a half, the above time-lapse sequence shows the dark spot -- first created when Jupiter was struck...

Surgeon: Abortion Ups Breast Cancer Risk, Pregnancy Helps Lower It Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- A prominent breast cancer surgeon and professor has written a new article for a medical publication saying that abortion increases a woman's risk of contracting breast cancer. On the other hand, miscarriage has no effect while a full-term pregnancy lowers the breast cancer risk. http://www.LifeNews.com/nat5441.html

Barack Hussein Obama is president of the United States of America. As such, he is due the respect that the highest office of the land commands. For reasons that every black person knows and many white people are learning, this president is receiving 400 percent more death threats than then-President George W. Bush, according to the Secret Service. It's not all about Obama's desire to bring equity and compassion into the health care reform debate, although some people couch it that way. President Harry Truman tried to get health care reform several times, but he failed. President Lyndon Johnson signed...

One of the more discouraging data points for workers in Friday's report was the drop in temporary hiring. While the rate of decline in this data series has slowed when compared to trends from earlier this year, employers are still cutting temporary positions on a net basis. It will be important to watch this data series when it turns positive and to monitor how strongly it does so, because temporary hiring is a reliable leading indicator of nonfarm payrolls.

I recently met Helen Denton, the personal secretary who typed up General Eisenhower's orders for D-Day. What a fascinating and intelligent woman she is! Helen's grandfather moved with his 12 year old son (Helen's father, eventually) from New York to North Dakota and built a sod house on the prairie. He left the 12 year old there by himself and returned to New York to retrieve the rest of the family. The boy spent the long lonely nights playing his violin while the local Sioux population listened outside. In the dead of winter, the native Sioux would leave meat and...

In the Old Testament tabernacle, a copy of the temple in heaven, the sanctuary was covered with curtains. To the left of the sanctuary entrance was a piece of equipment used to illuminate it, the gold lampstand. According to the pattern God gave Moses on Mt. Sinai, the shaft, branches, bowls, ornamental knobs and flowers of this lampstand were hammered from one gold piece. The center shaft was flanked by three branches decorated with almond blossoms on either side, all seven branches topped by little bowl-lamps containing olive oil. Inside the holy place (the sanctuary) but outside the curtain veiling...