Free Republic

What gall. A Saturday New York Times editorial actually managed to blamed the Republican Party for forcing Obama to violate the constitution: "A Court Upholds Republican Chicanery."

<p>NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. (AP) -- A doctor was fatally shot in an examination room of an Orange County medical office, and the man who police believe shot him was taken into custody in the same room without a struggle, authorities said.</p>

h/t Speedunque

I hate to criticize a fellow pilot, but when one engages in such sky-high hypocrisy, well . . . On Morning Joe today, former Obama car czar Steve Rattner, a very successful hedge fund manager, decried "climate-change denier[s]." This is the same Rattner who, at last report, owned a "15,000-square-foot mansion on Martha’s Vineyard, to which [he] flies regularly on a Dassault Falcon 2000 jet [see file photo] he pilots himself." Rattner wrung his hands over the fact that we're "putting millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere every day." But just earlier this week, the New York Times...

WND EXCLUSIVE Chicago murders top Afghanistan death toll City where no handgun purchases allowed sets pace for violence Published: 01/16/2013 at 1:48 PM by Michael Thompson Email | Archive Michael Thompson works in the marketing department for WND.com and WND Books and is the social media manager for WND. The death toll by murder in Chicago over the past decade is greater than the number of American forces who have died in Afghanistan since the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom, according to a police analysis. In addition, police reports in Chicago – where President Obama once worked as a community...

"Obama chose Kerry, 69, the son of a diplomat, decorated Vietnam veteran and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, to succeed Clinton, who is stepping down after four years. The senator had pined for the top diplomatic job that went to Clinton after Obama's 2008 election"

I think Megan McArdle is being naive about the tort system in this country when she writes So Junior Seau's family is suing the NFL over head injuries, which lead to chronic brain damage, and possibly his suicide. ... But this lawsuit strikes me as pretty out there.  Junior Seau can't possibly have been unaware that football caused head injuries.  Nor even that multiple concussions are probably bad for you.  Note how many people are still playing, even though we now know this all too well. Really?  I know of cases where people have successfully sued for drownings that occurred within feet of a no swimming...

New Technology Reveals More Genome Complexity by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D. * A new type of DNA sequencing technology has been developed and used to identify and characterize key regions of the genome called "enhancer" sequences.1 These are novel DNA features that were once thought to be a part of the so-called "junk DNA" regions of the genome. These key elements are now proven to be part of the indispensable and irreducibly complex design inherent to proper gene function for all types and categories of genes. The new technology described in this report is called STARR-seq, or "self-transcribing active regulatory region...

Last week I mentioned the effects that China's latest pollution emergency was having on Chinese citizens and foreigners living there. Here's a picture posted on Twitter just now from a friend in Beijing, showing the view from the 30th floor out toward our former neighborhood. Some related notes that have come in, about a problem increasingly recognized inside China as a national emergency. From a reader in the United States: I work in international adoption. One of the biggest changes in the last ten years is the precipitous drop in the number of infants with no identified medical needs available...

Sixteen North Koreans, including 14 technicians and two top military officers, are among those trapped after a Jan. 21 explosion destroyed much of Iran’s Fordow nuclear site, a source reveals. The source who provided the initial information on the explosion at one of Iran’s most important nuclear sites has now provided details about the degree of the destruction. The report, published exclusively by WND Jan. 24, is being covered internationally by major media, with independent intelligence sources confirming the explosion for the Times of London and the German Die Welt. But White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters Monday: “We...

Despite the Fed’s breathtaking increase of base money since the autumn of 2008, the money stock as measured by conventional concepts such as M2 has not increased greatly, and hence, as ordinary quantity-theory-of-money thinking would lead us to expect, inflation as measured by conventional concepts such as the consumer price index (CPI) has been fairly tame during the past five years. Between December 2007 and December 2012, the CPI for all items increased only 9.3 percent. As the chart shows, this increase represented a continuation of a slow-but-steady inflation trend that extends back to the early 1980s.This modest consumer-price inflation...

LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles County is planning a crackdown on makeshift maternity wards where mothers from other countries stay while giving birth so their children will be U.S. citizens. The county has received 60 complaints about such facilities in the past month, according to a report by the Planning Department submitted to the Board of Supervisors, the Los Angeles Times reported. That compared with just 15 complaints in the previous five years. The surge might be due to publicity over the closure of a house in Chino Hills that authorities contended had been used to house as many as...

The New Republic has quietly dropped at least five prominent Jewish writers from its masthead in a move that may signal the publication’s continued drift away from a staunchly pro-Israel standpoint. The magazine has launched an aggressive new editorial direction under the ownership of wealthy socialite Chris Hughes, who is best known for sharing a room with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard University. The names of several prominent Jewish writers from both the left and right of the political spectrum were dropped from TNR’s masthead in the latest issue. They include: Daily Beast reporter Eli Lake, longtime TNR columnist...

Senators Boxer and Menendez will introduce a 15th government mortgage modification program. This one won't cost banks any money if borrowers default, but taxpayers get stuck with the costs.

Breaking... Obama is tripling-down on gun control via executive orders. Sounds like the Class 03 FFL/C&R will be limited or abolished. Will seek to erase the limit on the EPA's regulating lead bullets. Here it comes, unless the Repubs do something.

Hours before President Obama is set to deliver a major immigration speech, a key Republican senator blasted the president for reportedly opposing a requirement to shore up border security before legalizing up to 11 million illegal immigrants. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., one of four Republican senators involved in a bipartisan effort to craft immigration reform legislation, warned the president Tuesday against taking such a position. It was the first sign since the senators unveiled their guidelines a day earlier of friction between the two efforts. "I think that would be a terrible mistake," Rubio told Fox News. "We have a...

As a group of senators unveil their bipartisan proposal for immigration reform today and President Obama heads west this week to rally support for his own ideas, a separate bipartisan group of lawmakers in the House of Representatives is on the verge of finalizing its own designs for comprehensive immigration reform. The discussions, which top aides close to the talks discussed on the condition that they not be identified, are described as “Washington’s best-kept secret.” Last week, House Speaker John Boehner spilled the beans on the secret group, revealing that the lawmakers had been “meeting for three or four years...

A key figure in Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi's government called the Holocaust a hoax cooked up by U.S. intelligence operatives and claimed the 6 million Jews who were killed by Nazis simply moved to the U.S. The outrageous claims, by Fathi Shihab-Eddim, a senior figure close to President Morsi who is now responsible for appointing the editors of all state-run Egyptian newspapers, came as the world marked Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, and also as the U.S. continues to assess its relationship with the increasingly radical Arab state. “The myth of the Holocaust is an industry that America invented,”...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is willing to agree to the creation of a Palestinian state in provisional borders, even before his conditions for a final-status agreement are met, former minister and veteran peace activist Yossi Beilin said. “I don’t think that Netanyahu, who is far from being a warmonger — he’s a very cautious person — [is ready to commit to] a permanent solution. Not because he doesn’t want it — all of us want it — but because he’s not ready to pay the price,” Beilin said Monday night. “But to speak about a provisional border with the Palestinians,...