Free Republic

.... gay activists remain up in arms over the star-studded Sundance Film Festival's involvement with supporters of California's Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage. The film festival is held every year in January in Park City, Utah, a Mormon stronghold whose elders "organized its followers to support the amendment banning same-sex marriage . . . and encouraged them to give generously to the cause." Sundance screens many films in Cinemark Theaters, owned by Alan Stock, who made a personal donation of $9,900 to support Prop 8. Openly gay actor Alan Cumming, whose "Dare" is a Sundance selection, is skipping the festival...

WASHINGTON — U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's NASA transition team is asking U.S. space agency officials to quantify how much money could be saved by canceling the Ares 1 rocket and scaling back the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle next year. Obama pledged during his campaign to inject an additional $2 billion into NASA aimed in part at narrowing the gap between the space shuttle's retirement and the introduction of a successor system. While NASA Administrator Mike Griffin and his senior managers are adamant that Ares and Orion are the right vehicles to fill that role, Obama did not endorse either system...

President-elect Barack Obama is not planning to implement a windfall profit tax on oil companies because prices have dropped below $80 a barrel, an aide said on Tuesday. "President-elect Obama announced the policy during the campaign because oil prices were above $80 per barrel," an aide on Obama's transition team said. "They are currently below that now and expected to stay below that." Oil prices have fallen from a record $147 a barrel in July to under $50 this week. Obama, who signaled early in his campaign for the White House that he would take an active approach to oil...

The Democrats have bleated for years about the detention of illegal combatants at Guantanamo, while the Left and the "international community" have demanded that captured terrorists be treated as prisoners of war. We read in the November 22-23 Wall Street Journal (page A13) that Barack Obama's selected Attorney General, Eric Holder, agrees with us that terrorists are not uniformed combatants who are entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention. Per an interview on CNN in January 2002, One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them and find...

President-elect Barack Obama may consider delaying a campaign promise - to roll back tax cuts on high-income Americans - as part of his economic recovery strategy, two aides said on Sunday. David Axelrod, the Obama campaign strategist who was chosen to be a senior White House adviser, was asked if the tax cuts could be allowed to expire on schedule after tax year 2010 rather than being rolled back by legislation earlier. "Those considerations will be made," he said on "Fox News Sunday." Bill Daley, an adviser to Obama and commerce secretary under former President Bill Clinton, said on NBC's...