Free Republic

WASHINGTON (TND) - A rapper named Goonew, who was reportedly shot to death, attended his own memorial at a nightclub on Sunday. The sight apparently caused quite the controversy, even more so when pictures of the event were spread around online. Born Markelle Marrow, Goonew was killed on March 18 by an unknown assailant in District Heights, Maryland, according to police. He was 24 years old at the time of his death. His body was reportedly released to a funeral home following an autopsy, but fans were shocked to see him standing on stage at his own memorial event on...

UPDATE #2: Officials with Fort Bliss and the William Beaumont Army Medical Center said at a briefing late Friday afternoon that eleven hospitalized Fort Bliss soldiers were poisoned from drinking automotive antifreeze that they mistook for alcohol. All of the soldiers remained hospitalized, but the two critically injured showed significant improvement and were upgraded to serious condition in the hospital's ICU. One of the soldiers had to be intubated but no longer needs breathing assistance, officials said. Up to four of the soldiers were anticipated to be released from the hospital soon. The soldiers were diagnosed with ethylene glycol poisoning....

A husband's happiness is significantly related to how his wife feels about the union, according to researchers at Rutgers University and the University of Michigan, who say the happier the wife is with the marriage, the more content her husband will be with life in general. "I think it comes down to the fact that when a wife is satisfied with the marriage she tends to do a lot more for her husband, which has a positive effect on his life," noted Deborah Carr, a professor in the Department of Sociology, School of Arts and Science at RU. "Men tend...

A warning bulletin was issued Friday to federal law enforcement, intelligence and other sources on an imminent terror attack on the border.Breitbart.com obtained a copy of the leaked document. The document shows James O’Keefe crossing the border in a Osama bin Laden mask.(photo from Breitbart.com) El Paso, Texas media is reporting Fort Bliss announced enhanced security measures on Sunday. The announcement came after the conservative government watchdog group Judicial Watch issued an urgent report on Friday based on government sources who warned of possible Islamist terrorist attacks on the Texas-Mexico border. Included in the Judicial Watch report was word from...

Claims by Republi can Carl Paladino's campaign that he commanded 250 men at Fort Bliss, Texas, during six months of active Army service in 1971 are false, The Post has found. Paladino's campaign manager, Michael Caputo, admitted the contentions were wrong after The Post obtained military records showing the Buffalo builder was on active duty for only three months, and was at Fort Bliss for training as a newly commissioned officer in the late summer of 1971, while the Vietnam War was raging.

I reconfigured my settings a while back, and noticed a few days later that the Freeper Poll no longer showed up on the forum page. I went to the settings, moved the "opinion polls" section, and checked again. No polls ever show up. Of course, there is a chance that the "polls" category has nothing to do with the freeper polls, and is actually for posting of online polls. If that is the case, I'm not getting that, either. It's bad enough that I chose to put "GOP" on the end of my freeper name, long before I knew that...

Dr. Howard Dean’s fans come out for the big Democratic summer shindig As Tom Andrews, the director of the leading national antiwar coalition, began his speech at the Maine Democrats’ big outdoor summer shindig in Falmouth, John Baldacci signaled his bodyguard/driver to move the large, dark SUV up the driveway. The vehicle soon hid in the trees, its engine quietly humming. At first, the governor seemed to be paying attention as Andrews, the former First District congressman, launched into rousing tales of how the country, under President George W. Bush, had gone "from peace and prosperity to war and recession."...

FORT BLISS, Texas, March 3, 2008 – There’s a sense of loss here as soldiers of the 1st Cavalry Division’s 4th Brigade Combat Team prepare to close a chapter in the short history of the brigade they stood up from scratch, took to war, then returned home to reflag. Army Col. Stephen Twitty, commander of 4th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, leads more than 3,000 of his soldiers through the streets of downtown El Paso, Texas, during a Welcome Home Heroes Parade, Feb. 27, 2008. Photo by Staff Sgt. Paula Taylor, USA  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available....

True pleasure comes from finding things out. Acquiring knowledge is like a zero dollar investment that can pay its owner dividends for the rest of their life. If you’ve ever experienced the feeling of breaking new intellectual ground, you know it’s transcendent. Discovery is a form of renewal, more revolutionary than any war or politics. Having experienced epic revelation is like being born again; renewed through cognitive baptism. When you know you’ve learned something [so extremely] important, it consumes you, that’s Shangri-La! Learning has an extremely spiritual dimension to it which makes it deserving of its own religion. Learnianity, for...

No Nordic Bliss There’s no refuting the claim that same-sex partnerships harm marriage. Now that we've learned about the Swedish drive to abolish marriage and recognize polyamory (see "Fanatical Swedish Feminists"), and about the demise of marriage in the Netherlands (see "Standing Out"), let's take a look at an important attempt to refute my arguments on Scandinavian marriage. In 2004, Yale Law Professor William Eskridge, Attorney Darren Spedale, and Sweden's Ombudsman for Sexual Orientation Discrimination, Hans Ytterberg, published "Nordic Bliss? Scandinavian Registered Partnerships and the Same-Sex Marriage Debate." (For brevity, I'll refer only to first-author Eskridge.) Understanding Eskridge's criticisms will...

By Liz Sidoti, The Associated PressEuropean edition, Thursday, August 25, 2005 J. Scott Applewhite / AP With fate of the Navy submarine base at New London, Conn., at stake, Anthony J. Principi, center, chairman of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission, leads the vote to keep the Atlantic Coast sub facility, rejecting the Department of Defense recommendation for closure, during the BRAC hearing in Arlington, Va., Wednesday. The verdict ... Stars and StripesThe nine-member Base Realignment and Closure Commission voted Wednesday to shutter major Army bases in Georgia and Michigan, and to close nearly 400 Army Reserve and National Guard...

FORT HUACHUCA - With the screams of his fellow soldiers from Fort Huachuca, Nathaniel Hicks used of barrage of punches in the final round to claim a 25-18 decision over Paul Eghareva of Fort Drum, N.Y., on Saturday night at the All Army Boxing Championships at Barnes Field House. "It motivated me when they started to scream my name, and it gave me more power to go out there and do good," Hicks said. Hicks, however, won't be advancing to the Armed Forces Championship, Feb. 17-19 at Fort Huachuca in the 165-weight class, but he did walk away with the...

BRUSSELS — A mixture of dismay, despair — and in one case an unflattering assessment of the IQ of Americans who voted for President Bush — dominated European newspapers yesterday. "How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb?" asked British Daily Mirror in a front-page banner headlin

JOHN Kerry campaign insiders are blaming some of the high-profile people surrounding the candidate for helping President Bush win re-election. A prime target of the finger-pointers is Kerry's filmmaker daughter Alexandra, who made a splash at the Cannes Film Festival last spring when she appeared on the red carpet in a see-through dress. She then hired a pricey publicist at powerhouse agency PMK — on her dad's dime, sources say — and went on the campaign trail. But insiders snipe that all she did was rack up major expenses. "She had an entourage of five people with her everywhere...

Jailed Assassin 'Weds' Using Loophole Fri Sep 3,10:25 AM ET By Dan Williams JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Defying a life prison term in isolation, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassin has secretly married by proxy, his bride said Friday. Larisa Trimbobler said she hoped her in-absentia wedding to Yigal Amir last month would help overturn a court ban on conjugal visits for the ultranationalist who shot Rabin at a 1995 rally in a bid to block peace deals with the Palestinians. Jewish law requires that two men witness a bride receiving her ring and marriage contract from the groom. According to...

In the new novel Bliss by the Israeli writer Ronit Matalon (Metropolitan Books, trans. Jessica Cohen), there's a passage that stayed with me like a pesky tune. Sarah is a young woman with a small child who wants to divorce her husband; Inès is an older friend from a different generation: "Life's not good," Sarah says. "When is it, tell me? When was it ever good?" Inès loses her temper. "What's the problem -- does he drink?" Sarah shakes her head. "Does he go with other women?" "No," Sarah says. "Does he bring home money?" "That's not the problem, Inès."...

WACO, Texas -- A former Baylor University basketball player has filed a lawsuit claiming former coach Dave Bliss broke a promise to help the athlete get into law school and to pay for it. Chad Elsey is seeking more than $100,000 in damages -- including the cost of tuition and books for another law school -- from Bliss and Baylor. Elsey, who is representing himself, filed the breach of contract suit Monday in Waco. Elsey, a law student at the University of Tulsa, graduated from Baylor with a finance degree in December 2001, according to the team's media guide. A...

Forty years ago, a study called the Hammond Report analyzed the smoking habits of half a million people. Its conclusion: Smoking is dangerous to one's health. It was a warning that ended up on every pack of cigarettes sold. Ten years later, a researcher took another look at the Hammond Report and found something that had been overlooked -- something just as hazardous as a pack-a-day cigarette habit -- that is, divorce. As Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher write in their book, THE CASE FOR MARRIAGE, an enterprising Surgeon General might wish to slap a warning label on divorce decrees,...

Certainly, their grief cannot begin to compare with that of Patrick Dennehy's loved ones, but friends of disgraced former Baylor University basketball coach Dave Bliss are also coping with a sense of loss. There's the shock of watching his 34-year college coaching career vaporize – poof! – in a furnace of scandal in the weeks after Mr. Dennehy's slaying. There's the distress of seeing a man they've long known, or thought they knew, become a pariah, the new undisputed, nationally vilified example of all that is wrong with college athletics. Suddenly, the only Bliss portrait the public ever saw has...

Ex-aide: Bliss an 'angry man' She says complaints on his behavior, dealings at Baylor were ignored 07:13 AM CDT on Tuesday, August 19, 2003 By BARRY HORN / The Dallas Morning News Dave Bliss' former administrative assistant said Monday that her boss was an "angry man" who sometimes asked her to do things that she believed compromised her integrity. Laura Collins-Hays, who worked for the Baylor University basketball coach for three years before resigning in March 2002, characterized the office atmosphere as frightening and said she witnessed behavior and procedures she considered questionable. Among them: • Checks for the Sixth...