Free Republic

Now, I guess, we know what a community organizer does, because today we learned, an ACORN Brothel Grows in Brooklyn. When we last saw our fake pimp and hooker, they were in our nation's capitol trying to find out how ACORN would deal with people looking for a home mortgage so they can open open up a brothel using under-aged girls. Now scandal surrounding Jerrold Nadler's favorite activist organization ACORN has spread to New York, with employees at its Brooklyn office were caught on video helping supposed ladies of the night get loans for their dream houses of ill repute....

I’m sitting in a coffee shop on the ground floor of the Empire State building. It’s about 10 a.m. on September 11th. I’m reading the Sermon on the Mount. The man at the table next to me is reading the Koran. My phone rings and I answer. It’s a professor who teaches courses in clinical psychology. He called to tell me he was coming forward. His course had been taken away from him – the one in which he teaches aspiring psychologists how to treat depression. They weren’t offended when he said that women are more prone to depression. That’s...

How do you marginalize a significant protest against a politician or policy you sup port? Lowball the numbers, then dismiss participants as deranged and possibly dangerous kooks. In the case of Saturday's massive 9/12 protest in Washington, done and done. "Small protest," popular lefty blogger Josh Marshall reported from his armchair, as an overflow crowd (at least 100,000, by my rough, unscientific estimate) filled the 1.5 miles between the south White House and the US Capitol, spilling out all over the National Mall and even down the street to Union Station. The Center for American Progress, whose president headed up...

Size and major risk have been confirmed for those with the eyes to see and the ears to hear. It is exactly what I have been teaching.Translation:Unless financial contracts have standards there is no way to clear them. Unless financial instruments have accurate means of daily valuation, there is no way to clear them. OTC derivatives outstanding from 1991 to 2008 have no standards. OTC derivatives outstanding from 1991 to 2008 have no sound means of true valuation in any time frame, certainly not from day to day.With this being the incontrovertible set of facts:The Bank for International Settlements is...

President Obama is speaking tonight, apparently to assure us all that his administration has the financial crisis resolved. Don’t bet on it. To see why, let me take you back a couple of years. In the fall of 2007, facing billions in losses on Merrill Lynch’s holdings of toxic assets, then-CEO Stan O’Neal approached his board at least twice to sell Merrill or merge it with a major bank — and at least twice got rejected. Merrill was bleeding, he warned, and might not survive the huge losses on its balance sheet. The board’s response: No way. The firm would...

Americans of all political persuasions agree that the nation has problems. Big problems. And here's where we all part company. The political left, who now control our government, thinks we need more government -- a lot more. Those on the right see our problems as the result of excess government and want to move things in the opposite direction. The fact that Democrats, with their man in the White House, and control of both houses of Congress, are having difficulty getting their big government programs passed says something about the strength of the grass roots push back now taking place....

One Canadian soldier killed and four injured in an explosive device strike CEFCOM NR–09.024 - September 14, 2009 OTTAWA – One Canadian soldier was killed and four injured when an improvised explosive device detonated near their armoured vehicle on a road in Panwjai District. The incident occurred approximately 10 kilometres South-West of Kandahar City at around 1:00 p.m., Kandahar time, on 13th September, 2009. Killed in action was Private Patrick Lormand from the 2nd Battalion, Royal 22e Régiment based in Valcartier, Quebec. Private Lormand was serving as a member of the 2nd Battalion, Royal 22e Régiment Battle Group, Quebec. Four...

Remember a little thing called the space-time continuum? Well what if the time part of the equation was literally running out? New evidence is suggesting that time is slowly disappearing from our universe, and will one day vanish completely. This radical new theory may explain a cosmological mystery that has baffled scientists for years. Scientists previously have measured the light from distant exploding stars to show that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. They assumed that these supernovae are spreading apart faster as the universe ages. Physicists also assumed that a kind of anti-gravitational force must be driving...

In the final days of a nearly three-year battle with lymphoma, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug was asked by his daughter if he needed anything. The 95-year-old responded: "Africa. Africa. I have not finished my mission in Africa," his daughter, Jeanie Borlaug Laube, said Sunday from Dallas. Norman Borlaug, an Iowa farmboy who graduated from the University of Minnesota, believed food was a moral right. He traveled the world as a scientist and humanitarian, becoming the Green Revolution's "Apostle of Wheat" for the high-yield grain he perfected. Borlaug, who most recently had been a distinguished professor at Texas A&M...

Mr. Obama: As you flew quickly toward your counter-demonstration (avoiding the increasing crowds of the American people) stacked with only your supporters, in order to further push your anti-American and anti-human ObamaCare agenda, we were gathering in the streets of our now commandeered-by-you White House. As we 1.2-2 Millions strong Americans lined the streets of Washington D.C. and many hundreds of thousands more of us in state capitols on Saturday, you spoke to a hand-picked crowd of between 10-15,000 in Minnesota. Where you continue to tell us that your planned and now attempted implementation of the death and destruction of...

A friend of 42 years his taken a different ideological path that I. Both of us being political wonks, we quite often exchange e-mails about the daily developments in the, all to real, metaphorical chess game between our founding fathers liberty and Social Fascism. Probing into the mind of a socialist who has returned time and again to the Kool-Aid fountain can turn up some interesting tidbits. Today I received this. Diary Entry of A Conservative... This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by socialist electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US Department...

The scandal surrounding the left-wing activist organization ACORN has spread to New York, with employees at its Brooklyn office caught on video helping supposed ladies of the night get loans for their dream houses of ill repute. Rather than reminding the women that prostitution is dangerous and illegal and advising them to change their careers, counselors at the social-services group shockingly offer suggestions on how they can launder their earnings.

KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan -- Governor General Michaelle Jean was moved to tears Wednesday as she toured the multinational NATO hospital here and heard stories of children who have lost limbs to improvised explosive devices. Amina, nine, was heading to the bazaar with her sister to buy something for the religious holiday of Eid when a blast tore away her leg. Malik, seven, was walking through a field when an explosion took his leg. Ms. Jean, with her extraordinary ability to connect with children everywhere, was able to coax a smile from Malik, who was shy with her at first. "You...

The Pentagon has begun putting into place a new program under which hundreds of prisoners being held by the military in Afghanistan will be given the right to challenge their detentions, a defense official said Sunday. Prisoners at Bagram military base are all to be given a U.S. military official to serve as their personal representative and a chance to go before new Detainee Review Boards, to have their cases considered, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to be able to discuss a program that has not been formally announced. The initiative amounts to the first time...

The time has come for me to publicly thank Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Obama for doing something in America that hasn't been done since the Revolutionary War. These three amigos have fired up the American people – so much so that they are finally getting involved with their country and government. Continues...============================================================= Massive crowd pull down B. Hussein's statue in Washington In contrast to fake Astroturf, rent-a-mob liberal protesters, Americans attending the Tea Party march on D.C. paid their own way, were fully clothed, have actual jobs and actually pay taxes. Liberals protest...

Just before The Four Hundred went on hiatus, I told you that IBM would be making a presentation about the forthcoming Power7 processors at the Hot Chips 21 conference hosted by the IEEE at Stanford University. And indeed, the top techies working on the eight-core Power7 processors did raise the curtains a little bit about the future brains of the Power Systems lineup, which are due in 2010. IBM confirmed to me a little more than a year ago that the Power7 chips would have at least eight cores and would be made using a 45 nanometer process in Big...

America spoke September 12th in Washington, DC. Real America. Not black America, not white America, not Hispanic or Asian America, not even conservative or liberal America. Real America. There were mothers, sons, fathers, daughters, newborn children and kids on the way up; there were many, many elderly and a lot of disabled folks, young and old, in wheelchairs. Many of these people had never been to a protest before in their lives. People were pleasant, polite and considerate. There was not a drunken eye in the house. The most unlikely bunch of domestic terrorists one could ever imagine. Contrast that...

Politicians will tell you they’d rather have you hate them than distrust them because hate is an emotion that can be tweaked, while trust is an investment in character – a bond that, once broken, can never fully be repaired. The problem for President Barack Obama and Democrats is that, in poll after poll, Main Street does not trust them. Republicans are not exempt, either; while Dems keep sliding in the polls, the GOP is recording no parallel gain. On the eve of Obama’s health-care pitch to Congress and the country last week, an Associated Press-GfK poll highlighted his fall...

Editor's note: Michael Ackley's columns may include satire and parody based on current events, and thus mix fact with fiction. He assumes informed readers will be able to tell which is which.Let's hear it for Joes. First we had Joe the Plumber, who had the fortitude to grill then-candidate Barack Obama about policies inimical to business. Now we have Rep. Joe Wilson, who was excoriated for yelling "You lie!" as President Barack Obama stood at the lectern/teleprompter last week and lied about health-care "reform" to the American people and a joint session of Congress.* Wilson's "shocking breach of decorum and...

Last week when I first read Byron York's article titled "Health care reform means more power for the IRS," I felt like I was reading the script of a horror movie. I was in such disbelief that I spent hours looking for the specific section in H.R. 3200 that expanded the powers of the Internal Revenue Service. Unfortunately, I found it. It's Division A, Title IV on pages 167-215 called Amendments to IRS Code of 1986. The expanded powers of the IRS in H.R. 3200 would empower the IRS to require taxpayers to show proof of health insurance coverage, collect...