Free Republic

Good evening fellow Freepers, I just want to send out this FYI as many of you have been amazingly kind in your thoughts and prayers after hearing the news about my father on Flight 93. For those of you who don't know the background of the "Walk With Joe" - here you go.... On 9/11 my father, Joe Driscoll – an avid walker/hiker, was on his way to Yosemite National Park to go on an annual hiking trip with some friends. The flight he was on, United #93, never made it to California . It was hijacked and crashed in...

South Africa's world 800m champion Caster Semenya said the gender debate that has erupted around her is "a joke", in an interview with a South African magazine that posed her in a fashion shoot. "I see it all as a joke, it doesn't upset me. God made me the way I am and I accept myself. I am who I am and I'm proud of myself," she told You magazine, South Africa's biggest-selling English-language magazine. Semenya appeared on the cover of the magazine's latest edition, but the masculine runner's makeover in stilettos and liquid skinny jeans only served to revive...

In yet another example of Barack Obama’s failure to properly vet administration officials, the president’s highly touted “Green Czar” has been ousted amid controversy over his radical, racist history and the White House hasn’t bothered to defend its fallen czar but rather jubilantly showed him the door. Van Jones, a self-described “rowdy black nationalist” turned communist was not vetted before Obama appointed him special advisor for green jobs and it blew up in the administration’s face over the weekend. The Yale Law School graduate and longtime civil rights lawyer became a communist after the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los...

Now the big bad MSNBC ogre, Keith Olbermann, is going after Glenn Beck and Fox News for daring to expose the 9/11 conspiracy nut Van Jones. This Obama administration czar resigned his post this past weekend, in large part because of Beck's courageous reporting. Instead of celebrating the work of a fellow journalist, the ogre wants to get him kicked off the air. Here is Olbermann's latest rant: Find everything you can about Glenn Beck, Stu Burguiere, and Roger Ailes. . . . Tuesday we will expand this to the television audience and have a dedicated email address to accept...

In expressing my exasperation at Naomi Klein' s baffling, circuitous and slippery attempt to defend her and her cohorts' protest against Israeli films at the Toronto International Film Festival — or, if you believe her, against the way these Israeli films have been “packaged” — I neglected to follow her argument, such as it was, through to its logical and damning implications. For those of you lucky enough not to have read her piece in The Globe and Mail, and foolish enough not to have read this morning's Full Pundit, I will summarize her reasoning: Israel did bad things in...

While White House spokesman Robert Gibbs today refrained from telling reporters whether President Obama in his speech Wednesday night will set a deadline for passing health care reform, sources tell ABC News that in his private meeting with Democratic congressional leaders this afternoon the key word was urgency. The president told House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., that it is important for them to pass health care reform bills soon, the sources said. Both leaders told the president that despite the difficult rough and tumble of the legislative process in the last few weeks,...

Ladder 15's Matt Dugan Undergoes 2 Surgeries To Alleviate Brain Swelling Police Believe 3-Year NYC Firefighter Was Defending His Girlfriend During Confrontation NEW YORK (CBS) - Police were looking for two men Tuesday who attacked and severely beat an off-duty firefighter in lower Manhattan on Labor Day. At New York Downtown Hospital, fire trucks stopped and crews have gone in offering their best wishes to the family of 34-year-old Matthew Dugan, who had surgery to relieve blood clots and pressure on the brain. When asked for his thoughts on Matthew, one firefighter remained silent. Dugan was attacked around 1:30 a.m....

Van jones has been appointed by barack obama to be his special adviser on green jobs. He will be obama’s green czar. What most people don’t know, however, is that van jones has a background as a street radical. After growing up in rural tennessee and getting a law degree from the white liberals at yale, van jones began his career of agitation in san francisco. He started a group called police watch, a group which has systematically harassed the police of the san francisco bay area. Using video cameras, protests, lawsuits, etc, van jones fought to prevent the police...

We just received an update on the next step in the battle against the U.S. Customs and their proposal to revoke earlier rulings that assisted opening knives are not switchblades. To recap, the proposal would not only outlaw assisted opening knives, but its overly broad new definition of a switchblade would also include all one-handed opening knives and most other pocket knives! If you have not been keeping up with the news surrounding the legislation, we invite you to read these posts, which will get up to speed. U.S. Representatives will be back in D.C. right after Labor Day and...

Or not. One of the enduring myths of this Summer of Health Care Reform Discontent is the Congressional Republicans are somehow stonewalling the process and running a massive disinformation campaign. Both of these claims ignore a couple of glaring facts: Republicans in Washington don't have the numbers to stonewall anything and they aren't even influential with their own constituents at the moment. Wait, I missed a third fact: the current group of Republicans in charge haven't been able to formulate a coherent message on any subject for several years now, it's highly unlikely that they finally turned into a well-oiled...

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) late Tuesday told reporters on his first day back in the Senate that the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) last month will affect him and the Senate deeply. The 2008 GOP presidential hopeful, who attended Kennedy's funeral in Boston on his Aug. 29 birthday, "I miss him every day," McCain said."We had a very, very congenial and enjoyable relationship. He had a great sense of humor. Obviously there's no one else like him."

This Action has been assigned to the calendar of Judge David O. Carter....

Consumer credit dropped like a rock in July on a mix of tight supply, weak demand, and charge-offs of bad debt. The U.S. Federal Reserve reported consumer credit fell by $21.6 billion, well below the $15.5 decrease recorded in June, marking a 10.4% annualized drop

The self-appointed leader of the lowly opposition, a person whose greatest single summer feat was to walk away from the job the people of Alaska elected her to do, a twitchy woman who challenged President Obama to an arm wrestling match earlier year, has now gathered her credentials to speak on the moral complexities of war, media, responsibility, and family grief. Sarah Palin called the Associated Press's decision to release a battlefield photo of a dying Marine over the family's objection "an evil thing to do." Lacking a podium, a network, or a job, she again relied on her Facebook...

Sage words, my friends. Left unmentioned: If you ignore his advice and crank up the crazy, you can always get a job as a czar in the Obama White House. They won’t even Google you. Or will they? According to several White House sources, Jones was hired for his “green jobs czar” positions over concerns raised by the White House Counsel’s Office, after Jones’s background materials came back with several of what were termed “inconsistencies” in the Standard Form 86 Questionnaire for National Security Positions. The counsel’s office places part of the blame on the Office for Intergovernmental Affairs and...

The Obama Czars “The Obama administration has created a two-tiered government—fronted by Cabinet secretaries able to withstand public scrutiny (some of them, just barely) and then managed behind the scenes by shadow secretaries with broad powers beyond congressional reach. Bureaucratic chaos serves as a useful smokescreen to obscure the true source of policy decision-making” (Michelle Malkin). Glenn Beck info on Czars: http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/29391/ “The goal from this White House is to have as much nonspecific language passed by Congress in policy areas like health care and the environment and then use [the Czar’s offices] to put in place the regulatory language...

Back in March, President Obama was so perturbed when a New York Times reporter asked him if he were a socialist that he felt the need to make a follow up call after the interview concluded. Now the Times needs to call him back.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Americans would be fined up to $3,800 for failing to buy health insurance under a plan that circulated in Congress on Tuesday as President Barack Obama met Democratic leaders to search for ways to salvage his health care overhaul.[snip] ......The fines pose a dilemma for Obama. As a candidate, the president campaigned hard against making health insurance a requirement, and fining people for not getting it. "Punishing families who can't afford health care to begin with just doesn't make sense," he said during his party's primaries. At the time, he proposed mandatory insurance only for children............"

A divided federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld a school district's refusal to let a band play a religious piece at a high school graduation, saying the superintendent had reasonably decided to avoid a constitutional controversy by ordering a secular program. The district's veto of an instrumental version of "Ave Maria" by the German composer Franz Biebl at the 2006 graduation ceremony in Everett, Wash., did not violate students' freedom of speech or religion, said the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The court said it wasn't necessarily forbidding religious music at graduation - unlike prayers, which...

The Wildcat was the fashionable offensive formation in the NFL in 2008. The Miami Dolphins introduced it in their upset of the New England Patriots on the third weekend. By season's end, it seems half the teams had incorporated the formation into the playbook. During my tour of training camps this summer, I sensed another trend emerging on offense – the two-tight end set. The Houston Texans have already made a sizable investment in that formation, carrying four tight ends on their 2009 roster. It's all common sense to Texans coach Gary Kubiak, who sees the multi-tight end sets beneficial...