Free Republic

As we get into the primary and general election season it is clear that U. S. citizens are a particularly ungrateful lot. Voters are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. They are angry that the economy remains sour, with unemployment persisting at more than 9 percent. Conditions are bad for businesses, and home values remain low, with many people owing more than their houses are worth. People don't like enormous federal deficits or a burgeoning national debt. The general attitude is to throw the rascals out and vote in replacements who will bring about economic prosperity,...

Obama: GOP 'Betting On Amnesia' in The November ElectionsFrom Yunji de Nies and Sunlen Miller August 02, 2010 3:41 PM Speaking at a fundraiser hauling in $500,000 for the Democratic party today, President Obama said that the Republican party is “betting on amnesia” going into the November election, as they have not had a “single, solitary” new idea. “It's not like they've engaged in some heavy reflection,” Obama said of the Republican party in Atlanta today. “They have not come up with a single, solitary new idea to address the challenges of the American people. They don't have a single...

A man who wandered out of Discovery Park three weeks ago suffering from apparent amnesia has been identified as former Tucsonan Edward F. Lighthart, according to friends who recognize him from his photograph published in The Seattle Times. Lighthart, 54, is a 1974 graduate of Sahuaro High School who also attended Pima Community College and the University of Arizona, according to Arizona Daily Star archives. He also attended New York’s Culinary Institute of America in the mid-1970s, with the hopes of opening a French catering service in Tucson after graduating, according to a 1976 article. Friends have e-mailed photographs of...

Norwegian Oyvind Aamot says his first memory in life was speaking Chinese on a train in China at age 27. He didn't realize he was on a train, that he was speaking Chinese or that he was a foreigner. He didn't know what any of these things meant. He also didn't remember who he was, where he came from or anything about his identity or past. "People would point to me and call me a waiguoren (foreigner), and I'd say, 'OK, I'm a waiguoren', but I didn't know what that concept meant," Aamot says in an articulate manner, which doesn't...

Help! The following two MP3s outline a song that I just cannot place. My son (Jimi Hendrix, II) was forcing me to play bass and it popped up - I cannot for the life of me come up with a song title. Any help would be appreciated - I figure it'll take about a minute for someone to name it. Starting stopwatch now! ;-) I did two takes so you get two takes (Dialups be warned - they're ~ 1MB each ... Mystery_Song_1.mp3 Mystery_Song_1a.mp3

The NY Daily News is reporting that Republican Senator John McCain' Daughter is suffering from some sort of amnesia. The poor girl's affliction was displayed in public at the White House Correspondents' Dinner Saturday night. She showed up at the door, with only two tickets but she was trying to squeeze herself and two friends into this sold out dinner. After trying to work things out with the guards“She muttered to her friends, ‘Does he even know who the f--- I am?’ ” You see, the poor woman doesn't know who she is, she needs to ask guards who are...

The Department of Defense and the National Nuclear Security Administration had to wait more than a year to refurbish aging nuclear warheads — partly because they had forgotten how to make a crucial component, a government report states. Regarding a classified material codenamed "Fogbank," a Government Accountability Office report released this month states that "NNSA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency." So the effort to refurbish...

A sports accident left Kayla Hutcheson with no memory of the holiday or anything else. At 18 years old, Kayla Hutcheson is looking forward to her first Christmas in memory. The more the Walla Walla Community College freshman learns about the traditions, decorations and general holiday hoopla, the more Christmas sounds like something she’ll like. The fact that Hutcheson lived through 17 Christmas seasons doesn’t really register, she said, leaning forward on a couch in her basketball coach’s office, her long fingers locked in loose embrace. For now, those years are lost for her. Nothing’s typical It’s almost exactly like...

He knew his name. That much he could remember. He knew that his father’s family came from Thibodaux, La., and his mother was from Ireland, and he knew about the 1929 stock market crash and World War II and life in the 1940s. But he could remember almost nothing after that. In 1953, he underwent an experimental brain operation in Hartford to correct a seizure disorder, only to emerge from it fundamentally and irreparably changed. He developed a syndrome neurologists call profound amnesia. He had lost the ability to form new memories. For the next 55 years, each time he...

ANAESTHETIC drugs could be used to numb a different sort of pain: flushing out harrowing memories before they take hold and post-traumatic stress disorder develops. Michael Alkire and Larry Cahill at the University of California in Irvine have discovered that anaesthetics can block the formation of memories associated with emotive images. "One popular misconception about anaesthesia is that unconsciousness occurs immediately," says Alkire. In fact, low doses of anaesthetic can leave patients conscious but impede memory, he says.

An interesting recent claim about al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) says it is a totally homegrown and separate entity from the al Qaeda (AQ) that Osama bin Laden heads. Sen. Chuck Schumer, on Tuesday’s “Larry King Live” said, "The al Qaeda the president is talking about is different than the al Qaeda of Mesopotamia, which is the al Qaeda that's in Iraq. The al Qaeda that bin Laden is in charge of is a totally separate organization." And AP’s Jennifer Loven, in an article on the same day, claimed that AQI “"is mostly homegrown ... ". She further claims that,...

One in four Britons don't believe wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill existed, according to a recent survey. Churchill is compared to Florence Nightingale and Sir Walter Raleigh, seen by many survey respondents as a mythical person, the London Daily Mail reported Monday. The survey, conducted with 3,000 respondents to test their general knowledge, reported other historical figures such as Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi, Cleopatra and the Duke of Wellington were made up for books and films, the Mail reported. The survey, by UKTV Gold, also found that Sherlock Holmes was a real person.

It's funny how two people can read the same thing and come away with two strikingly different conclusions of it. Like veteran columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, I, too, read the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine with its 40-year-old memo about Vietnam, which the editors suggest contains lessons about our current quagmire in Iraq. But, unlike Geyer, I have not allowed revisionist historians to impose their version of Vietnam on me. In her most recent nationally syndicated column, she writes this about Vietnam: "After the Americans withdrew, in momentary humiliation, from the coasts of Vietnam by ship and helicopter, there...

Tuesday, May 22, 2007 Nothing is more common than political "solutions" to immediate problems which create much bigger problems down the road. The current immigration bill in the Senate is a classic example. The big talking point of those who want to legalize the illegal immigrants currently in the United States is to say that it is "unrealistic" to round up and deport 12 million people. Back in 1986 it was "unrealistic" to round up and deport the 3 million illegal immigrants in the United States then. So they were given amnesty -- honestly labeled, back then -- which is...

Al Parish, a prominent economics professor at Charleston Southern University and a flamboyant fixture in the local business community, was accused Thursday of securities fraud by the federal government, which said perhaps tens of millions of dollars are missing. Parish and his Parish Economics LLC, a company owned by Parish and his wife that has invested on behalf of an estimated 300 individuals and companies, were sued for five counts of civil fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The beautiful and deeply religious Madame de Tourvel is so distraught after cheating on her husband in the 1782 novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” that she blacks out the betrayal altogether, arriving at a convent with no idea of what had brought her there. Soon the horror of the infidelity rushes back, in all its incriminating force. More than two centuries later, she has become part of a longstanding debate about whether the brain can block access to painful memories, like betrayals and childhood sexual abuse, and suddenly release them later on. In a paper posted online in the current issue...

Amnesia victim wandered for 25 days JAMIE STENGLE, Associated Press Writer Jan 26, 2007 DALLAS - Joe Bieger walked out his front door with his two dogs one morning last fall a beloved husband, father, grandfather and assistant high school athletic director. Minutes later, all of that, indeed, his very identity, would seemingly be wiped from his brain's hard drive. For 25 days, he wandered the streets of Dallas and its environs a lost soul, unable to remember his name, what he did for a living, or where he lived, until, finally, a contractor who was building a new house...

Windsurfing to Guantánamo Who knew that protesting American oppression could be such fun? By Clifford D. May Five years ago this month, an American facility was opened in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba to house the most dangerous combatants captured in the global war against Militant Islamism. To commemorate the anniversary, anti-Guantánamo demonstrations have been staged in more than 20 countries. In Washington last week, more than 80 protesters were arrested after they refused to leave a federal courthouse. But it is Amnesty International that has come up with the most original way to display outrage, enthusiastically (if not quite grammatically) urging...

A HUMILIATING accident. An apparent memory lapse. A sudden, emotional confession. Representative Patrick Kennedy's car crash on Capitol Hill early Thursday and a news conference a day later had a familiar rhythm, especially for those who study addiction or know it firsthand. Mr. Kennedy, a six-term Democrat from Rhode Island, said that his addiction was to prescription medication and that he planned to seek treatment at an addiction clinic, as he had done before. "I struggle every day with this disease, as do millions of Americans," said Mr. Kennedy, who is 38. But will a cure that apparently didn't take...

On the morning of July 3, 2003, a former stockbroker named Doug Bruce walked into a police station in Coney Island and told the cops that he didn't know his name. Without a wallet or identification, he'd awoken a few minutes earlier on a subway train, befuddled but unharmed, with a case of what doctors call total retrograde amnesia. He could form sentences without a problem, but remembered nothing of his past and only patchy facts about the world. He was checked into a nearby hospital, and a call was made to the only number that Bruce, then 35, had...