Free Republic

A WOMAN who was bitten by a "dangerous" dog is warning other dog walkers to be on their guard after its owner drove off following the attack. Dr Angela Boggett, 35, was left shaken after the dog bit her leg in Preston Park as she walked five-month-old Labrador pup Hamish... ...She added: “I just want to warn others about the dog. It should have been on a lead. He told me the dog was a husky but it didn’t look like one to me. I’m pretty sure it was a Japanese Akita.

Tuesday September 14, 2010 Turning Sour Grapes into Wine: Vandalized Catholic Bookstore Ups Pro-Life Efforts By Patrick B. CraineHALIFAX, Nova Scotia, September 14, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A volunteer-run Catholic bookstore in downtown Halifax, Nova Scotia that has been subject to increasing vandalism due to its promotion of life and family has responded by raising its voice even louder in encouraging locals to get more involved in pro-life activities.On Saturday, the windows at Veritas Catholic Books & Gifts were pasted with pro-abortion posters advertising “underground abortions.”  The posters were posted so as to cover up an ad for the local 40...

I’m not sure which is more unsettling — the fact that a Supreme Court justice can get the First Amendment so wrong, or that it is so unclear that George Stephanopoulos thought to ask the question. Until now, I perhaps naïvely thought that everyone understood that the provocateurial pastor in Florida had the right to burn Korans, or any other book he legitimately owned, but that it was a really bad idea for many reasons, most of which Allahpundit argued in his excellent posts on the subject. Silly me: Last week we saw a Florida Pastor – with 30 members...

Today is the publication date of This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive, by James Robbins. ... I vividly remember following news of the Tet offensive in 1968 and subsequently fell for virtually every element of the myth of Tet that Robbins exposes in this lucid, important book. The book thus rings a bell with me, as I suspect it will for many readers of this site. Robbins argues that the myth of Tet has lived on to do much damage.

OXON HILL, Md. — The U.S. Air Force’s former top intelligence officer warned a roomful of generals this week that the U.S. has lost its air power advantages and is dangerously ill-prepared to stop the gap-closing efforts of China and Russia. Lt. Gen. David Deptula, a former F-15 pilot , challenged Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ fundamental belief that U.S. air power vastly overmatches any foreign military. “For the first time, our claim to air supremacy is in jeopardy,” Deptula told the Air Force Association’s national convention on Monday. At the same forum last year, Gates defended ordering a halt to...

Trouble may be brewing in cyberspace a year after the U.S. loosened its oversight over the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN manages the Web addressing system that enables computers to connect to each other as well as Web site domains. Ahead of the International Telecommunications Union’s Plenipotentiary Conference in Mexico next month, there’s concern that Geneva-based ITU may try to get more involved in Internet governance

About 50 people attended the funeral for Don Unsworth, a northwest Georgia businessman, father, grandfather and husband. Described by family as lively, humorous and politically conservative, Mr. Unsworth's newspaper obituary reflected all those qualities with the following request: "In lieu of flowers the family respectfully asks that donations be sent to the American Cancer Society, or to the campaign of anybody who is running against President Barack Obama in 2012." "He was not really a big Obama fan," said his daughter Donna Barnes. Barnes says the US Air Force veteran disliked the costly stimulus and worried about unemployment. The obituary,...

The "Fr. Werenfried" boat carrying the relics of numerous saints. Credit: ACN Volgograd, Russia, Sep 14, 2010 / 12:59 am (CNA).- A “chapel boat” containing relics of eight saints has begun a cruise along the Volga River. The relics are a gift from the Catholic Church to the Russian Orthodox Church and could have a deeply symbolic impact, one expert says.The relics are from Sts. John the Baptist, Anne, Bartholomew the Apostle, martyrs Stephen and Lawrence, George, John Chrysostom and Cyril. All the saints lived before the Great Schism split the eastern and western Churches.Aid to the Church in...

After blowing nearly a half-million dollars on a Spanish shopping spree, MICHELLE OBAMA has plans to spend a whopping $2 million in the coming year – while the nation struggles with its worst recession ever. Nearly 15 million people are un­employed, but that hasn’t stopped the first lady from “spending like Marie Antoinette” and appearing to live it up “like a lottery winner,” fume outraged critics. Worried White House advisers have told the president he quickly needs to get his wife “under control” because her reckless spending – on trips, shopping and redecorating – is sending an intensely negative mes­sage...

WASHINGTON -- The nation's health system can't be transformed by rationing medical care, President Barack Obama's new Medicare chief said Monday in his first major speech. Dr. Donald Berwick's appointment earlier this summer without Senate confirmation was contentious because some Republicans accused him of being willing to deny care to save on costs. Since then, the administration has kept Berwick out of the limelight, turning the otherwise well-known medical innovation guru into something of a mystery man in Washington. Berwick broke his silence Monday, telling an audience of health insurance industry representatives that pushing back against unsustainable costs cannot and...

Secret's out.For more than a decade, Prudential Financial Inc. has had a confidential arrangement with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to withhold lump-sum payments of life-insurance benefits to the family of dead soldiers, so that Prudential could invest that money and keep whatever cash it made it itself, Bloomberg News reported.The VA failed to inform soldiers and their families of the agreement. Prudential, the second-largest U.S. life insurer is the only provider of life insurance for 6 million U.S. military personnel. The arrangement began in 1999 and was kept confidential until it was put into writing in 2009."Every veteran...

Apparently even Sen. Chuck Schumer isn't immune to the pitfalls of the new voting system. What the hElmo is going on with these voting machines? A party insider told me Schumer showed up at his polling place, P.S. 321 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, at 5:55 a.m. "They don't open the polling place until 6:10... They can't figure out how to open the machine and he is, like, screaming at the staff that he wants to vote," the insider said.

If you were as excited as I to hear of the FCC postponing net neutrality decisions, heed Glen O. Robinson’s caution for us to rein ourselves in. Robinson, a professor of Law Emeritus at UVA and Commissioner of the FCC from 1974-1976, deciphers their recent decisions in his article The Middle Way to Internet Freedom. Robinson describes the FCC’s preference towards what it calls the ‘third way.’ “Under this way,” says Robinson, “the FCC will declare that the full array of Title II regulations and requirements applies to broadband, but it will simultaneously invoke its forbearance authority (under Section 10...

Running back Reggie Bush has decided to hand over the Heisman. Under pressure since his award winning 2005 campaign at Southern California was vacated, Bush said in a statement on Tuesday that he will forfeit the Heisman Trophy. "One of the greatest honors of my life was winning the Heisman Trophy in 2005," the statement released by the New Orleans Saints reads. "For me, it was a dream come true. But I know that the Heisman is not mine alone. Far from it. I know that my victory was made possible by the discipline and hard work of my teammates,...

In a surprise and significant move, Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid today announced plans for a vote on the Defense Department Re-authorization bill early next week that will include the DREAM Act, according to the National Immigration Forum. The DREAM Act, legislation that has been lingering in Congress for years, would provide a path to legalization for some young people who were brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents or others. It offers legalization to young people who attend college or join the military. Pro-immigrant groups have in recent months pressed aggressively -- in light of the impasse on...

Jared Bernstein, chief economic adviser to VP Biden, says the administration's plan will build on the momentum of the growing economy. "Anyone who thinks that these tax cuts for our millionaires and billionaires costing $700 billion over 10 years -- we we're just talking about the importance of that long-term budget under control. This is a great way to lose control of that and if you think an extension of one or two years is going to hold, I think that is very misguided political thinking," Bernstein said on FOX News.

It didn’t take much to convince Ken Casey, frontman for the Dropkick Murphys, to jump into one of the state’s most pitched labor battles. “It seems like the right thing to do,” Casey said yesterday about the Boston band’s work with 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, a controversial labor group that represents 35,000 Massachusetts nurses, nursing home assistants and at-home health aides. Labor organizers say The Dropkicks’ shoutout to a Service Employees International Union local is the first time a music group has used a union campaign as a central theme in a video. “It seems like a cruel...

Democrats across the country are running against their own party, when they bother to mention their party affiliation at all. To hear their ads and speeches, they are all fiscal conservatives angry at the arrogance of power in Washington … even when they’ve been a part of it. Don’t fall for it, says Henry Waxman. If we leave Democrats in charge of Congress, they will pursue cap-and-trade and the rest of the current agenda: The campaign to pass climate legislation will continue on Capitol Hill in 2011 – if Democrats are still in charge, that is. That’s the word Tuesday...

This violence, reported for Monday, September 13, adds to the eleven dead or wounded American soldiers already killed since President Obama's "End of Iraqi Freedom" speech. And there will be more. And more. And more.

Report reveals all bar one of party's 48 mid-term election candidates are sceptical about climate changeAll but one of the 48 Republican hopefuls for the Senate mid-term elections in November deny the existence of climate change or oppose action on global warming, according to a report released today.The strong Republican front against established science includes entrenched Senate leaders as well as the new wave of radical conservatives endorsed by the Tea Party activists, says a report by the Centre for American Progress.