Free Republic

Each day in 2010, 13 workers on average were killed on the job—some 4,690 workers—and an estimated 50,000 died from occupational diseases, according to the AFL-CIO's annual report, “Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect.” Released today, the report shows the number of those who died in 2010 (the most recent year for which data are available) is up from the 4,551 people who perished in 2009. This trend that has continued since 2004, the first year in a decade that saw the number of deaths on the job increase.West Virginia, Wyoming, Alaska, South Dakota and North Dakota were among states with the...

Link only to EL Paso Times article. High School graduation rates for Hispanics are dismal. Along the Texas-Mexico border they are the worst in the state and nation.

U.S. sales of Diet Coke overtook those of Pepsi-Cola for the first time in 2010, making the diet soda the No. 2 carbonated soft drink in the country behind Coca-Cola, industry data are expected to confirm Thursday. Occupying the top two rankings would mark a historic win for Coca-Cola Co. (NYSE: KO - News) in its decades-old rivalry with PepsiCo Inc. (NYSE: PEP - News), which has seen its market share slip in recent years and is trying to retool its marketing.

Has the influence of cable news peaked? That's the conclusion of PEWs Project for Excellence in Journalism. According to their 2011 State of the News Media study all four cable networks saw their prime-time audiences fall in 2010. MSNBC, Fox, HLN, and CNN lost between 39,000 and 331,000 viewers as cable -- the fourth most popular platform for news -- showed signs of becoming less important. Fox News lost a whopping 11% of its prime time viewers (234,000 viewers), but that's not even the worst performance of the cablers. See who lost the most viewers >>

(CNSNews.com) – Automakers beware! Hybrid cars may dominate at the Detroit Auto Show, but fewer Americans said they purchased a hybrid car in 2010 than in 2009, according to a new Harris Interactive Poll.In fact, only 8 percent of those surveyed said they "purchased a hybrid or more fuel efficient car" in 2010. That compares with 13 percent who said they had in 2009.Only 1 percent of Americans said they bought a hybrid car -- down from 2 percent the year before.The poll, released on Monday,  also shows that fewer Americans overall are "going green," as compared to 2009. In addition to purchasing a...

The ImprobablesThere are a number of improbables, anomalies, paradoxes, ironies, absurdities — call them what you wish – on the national scene that simply defy reason. We usually fault an ignorant media as culpable for creating narratives that have no basis in fact and yet are rarely questioned. Here are some of the glaring examples and you decide how the unlikely became the gospel. 1. How did 20-minutes-of-fame Julian Assange construct the façade of an idealistic crusading electronic muckraker? He seems much more likely a part P.T. Barnum showman/part celebrity narcissist. While promising to embarrass a number of banks and...

Don't believe all the Washington talk that President Obama had a great lame duck session and goes into the new year and the new 112th congress with the whip hand. Utter nonsense. Let's review the lame duck session as it happened -- not as it has been instantly revised by the ever-obliging Washington press corps.

LOVE never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 1 Cor 13:8 What a year 2010 ended up being as the voice of the people was heard loud and clear on Nov 2nd. Well it was loud and clear to everyone outside the District of Corruption but they had to plug their ears and yell la la la la la at the top of their collectivist lungs. Last Christmas we were all getting the Obamacareless lump of coal and this year we...

The McLaughlin Group is still an easy place to identify Newsweek as a liberal rag. Over the weekend, Newsweek's Eleanor Clift offered several liberal howlers as the Group handed out year-end honors and dishonors. On "Worst Lie," Clift insisted: "The worst lie, that Obama’s policies didn’t work -- the recovery plan, the car, the auto-car bailout, and TARP, which began under President Bush – all worked quite well."

Sarah Palin and Oprah Winfrey are closely matched behind Clinton by Lydia Saad PRINCETON, NJ -- President Barack Obama is Americans' Most Admired Man of 2010, substantially ahead of the former presidents, iconic religious leaders, and others who fill out the top 10 list. Obama first became Americans' Most Admired Man in 2008, shortly after his election as the nation's 44th president, and has held the title since then.

It's that time of the year when numerous organizations and news outlets publish or announce their "Best of..." or "Worst of..." or "Most important of..." or "Most popular of..." lists. Not to be outdone by the so-called elite media, below is a list from an industrious public-interest group whose sole mission is to investigate and prosecute government corruption wherever it is discovered. On Thursday, Judicial Watch released its 2010 list of Washington's “Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians.” While there may be some surprises, readers will note that neither political party has a monopoly on political corruption. Special thanks to Judicial...

Andy Xie's latest sees the liquidity war getting worse in 2011. America will continue to pump the financial system with liquidity via tax cuts and quantitative easing. China will keep the yuan cheap and avoid clamping down on inflation. The tense equilibrium can't last for long, as either sovereign debt or inflation gets too heavy to bear. Whoever lasts longer, wins. Caixin: The most likely candidates to trigger the next global crisis are the U.S.'s sovereign debt or China's inflation. When one goes down first, the other can prolong its economic cycle. China may have won the last race. To...

This is the third annual year for this “prestigious” award. The first year we selected who the winner was. Last year contributors to this blog nominated conservatives whom they have felt have made an impact in the conservative movement over the past year and readers voted for their favorite.. Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin won in 2008 and again in 2009. Below are our nominees that our readers can vote on. Voting will remain open until 11:00p on 12/30/10 and the winner will be announced on 12/31.

When the CNN cameras started rolling, Rick Perry turned on his Texas tough-guy. In a dark suit and sharp red tie, the perpetually TV-ready governor launched his states' rights spiel, repeating to America why he's fed up with the federal government.

She wasn't running for anything in 2010, but Sarah Palin sure got plenty of attention. Two years after her failed GOP vice presidential bid and just a year after quitting as governor of Alaska at mid term, Palin remained in the spotlight. She worked as an analyst for Fox News, made political pronouncements on a weekly basis (at least) and appeared on her television series "Sarah Palin's Alaska" on The Learning Channel. The latter half of the year even brought plenty of attention to Palin's family, though not all of that attention could be considered positive. The New Oxford American...

FORT LEWIS, Wa. — Mark Zuckerberg is a name I grew quite familiar with even through my year in Kandahar. Facebook was the novelty through which I interacted with most of the world back home. Though it was accessible only on our trips to the forward operating base — no connectivity on our stranded outpost in the Zhari District. Despite all that Facebook meant to me while at war, I was less than thrilled to find that Mr. Zuckerberg had been named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. The distinguished title goes to the man or woman deemed to have...

WaPo, NYT Name Julian Assange “Person of the Year?” Posted by Dana Loesch Dec 13th 2010 Andrea Mitchell named the tea party movement as her pick for “person” of the year: They’ve changed the debate on deficit reduction. They’ve got, you’ve got Ron Paul now in charge of monetary policy from the House. They have changed politics for now in Washington. David Ignatius of the Washington Post and Helene Cooper of the New York Times chose Assange: It’s painful to say this but I would say Julian Assange the head of WikiLeaks.

Meet the second-youngest individual ever to be named TIME magazine’s Person of the Year: Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of the omnipresent social-networking site Facebook. You may feel as though you already know the 26-year-old. If you regularly use a computer, you probably interact with Zuckerberg’s Facebook empire on at least some level.

For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is TIME's 2010 Person of the Year.

— Texas juries sentenced eight convicted killers to death in 2010, the fewest since 1976 in the nation's most active death penalty state. The figures were released Monday by the Austin-based Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and were characterized as an "astonishing development" by the group's executive director, Kristin Houle. Executions also were down in 2010. Seventeen people were put to death, the lowest total since 2001. Houle told the Houston Chronicle that the figures indicate "Texas and the rest of the country are moving away from the death penalty." Harris County, which typically leads the nation in...