Free Republic

A source who served in Iranian intelligence says the Iranian regime is preparing to down Western airliners in case of an attack on the Islamic Republic's nuclear program.

Anderson Cooper has some news to share. "The fact is, I'm gay, always have been, always will be, and I couldn't be any more happy, comfortable with myself, and proud," the CNN anchor wrote Monday in an open letter to his longtime friend Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Beast. The host of Anderson Cooper: 360, 45, also says that he has waited until now to announce the fact because, "As long as a journalist shows fairness and honesty in his or her work, their private life shouldn't matter." Cooper, who also hosts his own syndicated talk daytime show Anderson, addressed...

Chief Justice John Roberts last week did something that, in polarized Washington, may turn out to be more important than saving Obamacare. He showed that compromise can be consistent with principle. More than that: He showed that compromise, for someone who respects and knows how to use the democratic process, can be the best way to advance principle.

After a Google search, much to my surprise, there is very little reference to the video that starred Kato Kaelin as the jealous lover stalking and murdering his woman with a knife (a knife that closely fits the dimensions that were determined by the investigators to have been used by O.J. to almost decapitate Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown). From the best that I can find, there is but one blurry picture that was captured from that video. It was sometime in 1993 I believe, I was starting one of the earliest Karaoke shows in one of my towns local...

Anthony Daniels, who writes under the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, is a retired prison doctor and psychiatrist who tells of his experiences with his patients in "Life at the Bottom." It's an insightful book of essays about the self-destructive behavior and attitudes of the underclass. In one essay, "We Don't Want No Education," reprinted by City Journal (http://www.city-journal.org/html/5_1_oh_to_be.html), Dalrymple says that he cannot recall meeting a 16-year-old from the public housing project near his hospital who could perform simple multiplication operations, such as nine times seven. One 17-year-old told him, "We didn't get that far." This was after 12...

July 2012Over the past nine months I have been writing extensively about how the United States is on the verge of a major positive development.  Late last year, Goldman Sachs jumped on board with a special report to investors.  In the past few months, institutional finance magazines began reporting this major development.  In June, I noticed a handful of television journalists start to talk about it. Newspapers are beginning to write about it as well. What is it?   "It" is the United States becoming energy self-sufficient.  This means that the United States is very close to not needing energy,...

Drug dog's nose is good enough, judge rules in cocaine case The decision allows prosecutors to proceed with charges against a man arrested in 2011. By Laurence Hammack 981-3239 The nose of a drug-sniffing police dog is not so sharp, but it's good enough to support cocaine charges against Herbert Green. That was the opinion of federal Judge Glen Conrad, who denied a motion this week to suppress the drugs found in Green's sport utility vehicle with the help of a police dog named Bono. Green's lawyer had argued that Bono's track record — drugs were found just 22 times...

Anderson Cooper, who has been reluctant to talk about his personal life in public, revealed that he is gay in an essay posted online on Monday. The CNN journalist said he had kept his sexual orientation private for personal and professional reasons, but came to think that remaining silent had given some people a mistaken impression that he was ashamed. "The fact is, I'm gay, always have been, always will be, and I couldn't be any more happy, comfortable with myself and proud," he wrote in a letter to Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Beast. Cooper, the son of Gloria...

The U.S. manufacturing sector contracted in June for the first time since July 2009 as new demand crashed, according to data released Monday by the Institute for Supply Management

Oh oh! Lady M just read What Really Makes Us Fat in the NYT: From this perspective, the trial suggests that among the bad decisions we can make to maintain our weight is exactly what the government and medical organizations like the American Heart Association have been telling us to do: eat low-fat, carbohydrate-rich diets, even if those diets include whole grains and fruits and vegetables. Wow! This is huge: if it’s right it means that Lady M’s signature No Child’s Fat Behind program is on the wrong side of medical history... ...Anyway, on another front, have you heard our...

As only the most disconnected would not know, the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare last week. The plot twist was Chief Justice Roberts's swing vote, siding with the four leftists. Roberts's opinion that a tax can achieve what the 10th Amendment prohibits was a distinction without a difference in that statists do not care what language they use to control private lives. A tax or a mandate is equally useful to someone who does not care about and possibly never read The Constitution. Even though the decision took the breath away from anyone who cares about the survival of the US,...

Anderson Cooper has revealed ... he's gay and he's proud. Cooper made the announcement in a letter to Andrew Sullivan, who was doing a story for TheDailyBeast.com about the social impact of famous people who come out as gay. Sullivan reached out to Cooper for his thoughts, to which Anderson replied with a letter. "There continue to be far too many incidences of bullying of young people, as well as discrimination and violence against people of all ages, based on their sexual orientation, and I believe there is value in making clear where I stand," Cooper wrote. "The fact is,...

While Congressional Republicans have seized on the Supreme Court’s ruling that President Obama’s health care overhaul is constitutional as a tax, presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s top campaign strategist undercut that line of argument Monday, saying that the governor agrees with Mr. Obama that the law is not a tax. “The governor has consistently described the mandate in Massachusetts as a penalty,” Eric Fehrnstrom, Mr. Romney’s strategist, said on MSNBC. “The governor disagreed with the ruling of the court; he agreed with the dissent that was written by Justice Scalia, which clearly states the mandate was not a tax.”

Newt Gingrich issued a warning, based on the destructive storms that hit the Washington, D.C. area over the weekend, on Twitter:

We may be seeing the beginning of the end of the model for civilized governance that has dominated Western civilization since WWII. That model has been provision by the state of all or most of the needs of its people combined with the popular election of the government. Or, in other words, the welfare state plus democracy. What we are seeing in Europe is that that model is inherently unsustainable. The concept of individual rights is the only standard for government action that puts an objective limit on what the government can do. The post-war leaders of Europe were completely...

To grasp what's really motivating Cleaver, I apply what I call the "A Time to Kill" test.

A Connecticut man on death row for the killings of a mother and her two daughters in a 2007 home invasion says he came up with a bizarre plan to end his own life... ....he fabricated claims in letters last year that he killed 17 people and committed dozens of drugged date rapes. He had hoped prison authorities would notify police and that he could trade information for food, including oysters to which he is deathly allergic. "I planned to eat them and have them find me dead in my cell the next morning," he said. He also said he...

Rubert Murdoch has a lot of Thetans perturbed with him. That’s because the founder and chairman of News Corp., which owns Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, among other media properties, tweeted Sunday that there is “(s)omething creepy, maybe even evil, about these people.” Murdoch was referring to adherents of Scientology, like actor Tom Cruise, who prefer to think themselves as “Thetans” – a term coined by L. Ron Hubbard, the cult’s founder – rather than “people.” Murdoch followed up his original tweet with another reporting that his twitter account had been bombarded with “hundreds of attacks” from Thetans....

It was Father Vincent Miceli who warned that, "Once the liturgy is humanized, Christ the Center and Object of it becomes the humanist par excellence, the liberator, the revolutionary, the Marxist ushering in the millenium; he ceases to be the Divine Redeemer. We must be alerted to those who plan, by convincing us to abandon our sacred forms, at length to seduce us into denying our Christian faith altogether. The Churhc is attacked by these Sons of Satan, in and outside her fold, because she is a living form, the sacrament - sign and instrument - of communion with God...

She’s a prisoner in her own home. Katie Holmes fears she can’t take one step without a Scientology goon following her every move in a heavy- handed intimidation attempt, multiple sources close to the actress told The Post yesterday. The pretty actress last night was holed up in her Chelsea pad — terrified that soon-to-be-ex-hubby Tom Cruise might kidnap their little girl, law-enforcement sources said. Holmes told another building resident of her abduction fear — and that neighbor called police on Friday, sources said. But without Holmes phoning in the report herself — and Cruise known to be 2,600 miles...