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AURORA, Colo. — Federal agents on Wednesday searched the home of a suburban Denver man identified by law enforcement as having a possible link to al-Qaida, carting away several boxes of evidence. FBI special agent Kathleen Wright confirmed that agents had a search warrant for the home of Najibullah Zazi. Residents of neighboring apartments were evacuated as a precaution, Wright said. Zazi denies that he's a central figure in a terrorism investigation that fed fears of a possible bomb plot and led to several police raids in New York City on Monday. Agents left Zazi's apartment with at least six...

September 17, 2009 Dismay In Europe As Obama Ditches Missile Defence Philippe Naughton and Tony Halpin in Moscow President Obama dismayed America's allies in Europe and angered his political opponents at home today when he formally ditched plans to set up a missile defence shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. The project had been close to the heart of Mr Obama's predecessor, President Bush, who had argued before leaving office in January that it was needed to defend against long-range ballistic missile attacks from rogue states such as Iran and North Korea. But it had hobbled relations with Russia,...

In the war on the czars, Glenn Beck and the GOP are picking up reinforcements from an unlikely source: the Democratic Party. The Fox News host and leading Republican lawmakers have been hammering President Barack Obama for weeks over a proliferation of policy “czars” — presidential appointees who don’t have to be confirmed by the Senate and aren’t easily held to account by Senate oversight committees. Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin joined the anti-czar chorus Wednesday, asking Obama to detail the roles and responsibilities of all of the czars in his administration and to explain why he believes the...

SpuriousLogic writes "After receiving injections of genes that produce color-detecting proteins, two color-blind monkeys have seen red and green for the first time. Except in its extreme forms, color blindness isn't a debilitating condition, but it's a convenient stand-in for other types of blindness that might be treated with gene therapy. The monkey success raises the possibility of reversing those diseases, in a manner that most scientists considered impossible. 'We said it was possible to give an adult monkey with a model of human red-green color blindness the retina of a person with normal color vision. Every single person I...

Hooker actually a 20-year-old FIU journalism studentShe was a down on her luck prostitute with a pimp, at least she pretended to be while working to uncover alleged wrongdoing within advocacy group ACORN, but it turns out the 20-year-old hooker is actually a South Florida pastor's daughter and an FIU undergrad. Hannah Giles quickly became the most famous journalism student at Florida International University after she stirred up quite a storm and become a conservative hero while spending her summer posing as a call girl to infiltrate the offices of ACORN. Giles became an internet sensation after hidden camera videos,...

Will regulation hobble capitalism? I think the opposite is true. Properly done – and I think most of the financial regulation that is envisioned fits into this camp – government regulation of the financial industry will move the industry closer to the capitalist ideal. By capitalism, I mean where those who take the risks and put up the money get the fruits of their labor. And, importantly, where those who take the risks and put up the money actually do take the risks, bearing the full costs of failure as well as success.

An Enlightened, Committed People Who Understand The Principles Of Our Constitution - The Most Effective Means Of Preserving Liberty "Although all men are born free, slavery has been the general lot of the human race. Ignorant - they have been cheated; asleep - they have been surprised; divided - the yoke has been forced upon them. But what is the lesson? ...the people ought to be enlightened, to be awakened, to be united, that after establishing a government they should watch over it.... It is universally admitted that a well-instructed people alone can be permanently free."- James Madison America's...

In a posting done without fanfare at www.whitehouse.gov, White House communications chief Anita Dunn responded Wednesday afternoon with a rebuttal to the attack on the Obama administration by some Republicans and commentators--Glenn Beck one of them--on the appointments of "czars"--high level advisors who did not face Senate confirmation. Beck just got the head of now former green jobs chief Van Jones. In a bit of coordinated messaging, the Demoratic National Committee on Thursday morning produced a web video, "Dancing with the Czars." Video at site

The student who alleged she was gang raped by five men inside a Hofstra University dormitory bathroom on Sunday has admitted to making the entire story up, the Nassau County District Attorney's office confirmed on Wednesday night. Charges against the four men arrested have since been dropped. Nassau County DA Kathleen Rice issued the following statement on Wednesday evening: Moments ago my office moved to dismiss all charges against four men accused of committing a sexual assault on the campus of Hofstra University. Late this evening, during the continuation of the Nassau County Police Department's investigation of the allegation, and...

Phoenix - Sheriff Joe Arpaio has been given a deadline of October 15 to sign a new agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to allow him to continue to arrest illegals. The deadline could be extended. Sheriff Joe has problems with the new arrangement since it attempts to limit public disclosure of illegal alien arrests. He vows to continue to talk to the media regarding raids and crime sweeps. (http://phoenix.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/2009/09/14/daily35.html) Arpaio said he is optimistic a new accord can be signed but added that if not, he plans to continue enforcing the state’s employer sanctions law — the...

Wolf Blitzer interviews GOP Chairman Michael Steele on the Jimmy Carter comment “the protestors are racists” line. Steele is justifiably outraged. And when Wolf pushes back … he levels the charge that has needed to be leveled for decades.

Since the people at Powerline have made a big public announcement about it, I’ll just say that I’m not the least surprised that they’ve delinked LGF. Powerline has been going in a very bad direction recently; the “all Obama-hatred, all the time” focus is bad enough, but worse are their articles supporting European extremists like Geert Wilders (who wants to deprive Muslims of the freedom of religion and ban books) and outright fascists like the Belgian Vlaams Belang party. I’ve been considering removing them from my links for quite some time because of this kind of disturbing stuff, but I...

This news is breaking. Barack Obama has abandoned the controversial Pentagon plan to build a missile defence system in Europe. The move has prompted angry accusations of betrayal from Washington's eastern European allies but delighted the Kremlin. In one of the sharpest breaks yet with the policies of the Bush administration, Obama phoned the leaders of Poland and the Czech Republic last night to tell them that he had dropped plans to site missile interceptors and a radar station in their respective countries. Russia had furiously opposed the project, claiming it targeted Moscow's nuclear arsenal.

It never stops, does it? Last night brought the news that Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary had become, at age 72, yet another beloved entertainer gone too soon. Not a complete surprise — Travers was diagnosed with leukemia in 2004 — but very sad nonetheless. Peter, Paul and Mary played a crucial role in helping the folk-music scene become a mass popular movement in the early 1960s. They couldn’t have done it without Mary Travers’ clear, expressive vocals. A gifted interpreter of others’ songs, she was the principal reason why the trio’s covers of Pete Seeger’s “If I...

Today a federal judge down in Columbus dismissed yet another suit by a military officer seeking to duck service in Iraq by claiming that Barack Obama is not a citizen. Just for grins, I went and read the order. It’s pretty good stuff. Here’s a taste from the acid pen of Judge Clay Land: First, Plaintiff’s challenge to her deployment order is frivolous. She has presented no credible evidence and has made no reliable factual allegations to support her unsubstantiated, conclusory allegations and conjecture that President Obama is ineligible to serve as President of the United States. Instead, she uses...

Pelosi Punts on ACORN: A Few Bad Apples? At her Capitol Hill press conference today, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said of the growing ACORN scandal that "a few individuals at ACORN did what I think is--what would be the appropriate word? Some have said despicable, but in any event totally unacceptable and in my view inexcusable." Later she repeated that "a few people have embarrassed ACORN," observing that ACORN was conducting its own review of the matter. "We have to have our own scrutiny," she said. Any decision to keep language (passed 83 to 7 by the Senate) in the final...

Mary Travers, a striking figure of power and glamour in the early-1960s folk music movement, died Wednesday at Danbury Hospital in Connecticut after suffering from leukemia for several years. She was 72. She was best known as the blond with the bangs who commanded the middle microphone with Peter, Paul and Mary, a trio that brought folk music from coffeehouses to top-40 radio. They also gave much of America its first taste of the young Bob Dylan by helping to turn his "Blowin' in the Wind" into a national anthem. The group reunited several years ago to begin touring, and...

AP story link only.

Sept 17, 2009 — Readers of this headline may say it is not news to say that intelligent design has been found in DNA. Others may be ready for a fight on that issue. But in this case, the design has been verified beyond any shadow of doubt. The designers are not who you may be suspecting. They are...

Reporting from Washington - President Obama's appointment of "czars," or policy coordinators, is drawing new fire from lawmakers in both parties. The most prominent complaint is that Obama, by using his own authority to name people to these policy jobs, is circumventing the role of the Senate in considering and confirming important nominations to the president's administration. In a letter to the president this week, Sen. Susan Collins (R- Maine) and five other Republican lawmakers criticized the administration for encroaching on Congress' authority in establishing what it said were too many far-reaching czars. Collins identified 18 positions created by Obama...