Free Republic

Rex Tillerson's speech to assembled employees at the US State Department. He noted that his wife said in urging him to accept the nomination that "Your career until now has been a 41 year training program for this job." https://www.facebook.com/newshour/videos/10155043859978675/

There will be a circus, but Allred will not be the ringmaster Reports from inside the courtroom in Boston at which The Boston Globe is seeking access to Mitt Romney’s testimony in the divorce case of the founder of Staples indicate that the Judge will authorize the release of the transcript to The Globe, but will not lift the gag order on the parties to the divorce, including Gloria Allred’s Mormon-hating client, Maureen Sulivan. Presumably that means that the Mormon-hating client’s representative also cannot speak on behalf of her Mormon-hating client to put the “context” on it. It will be...

“One omission by one state–you wouldn’t think it would be a big deal, but in this case it drove the number down by 10%,” said analyst Stephen Stanley with Pierpont Securities. Economists are speculating the state could be California, the most populous state in the nation. “It was likely a state with a large population and we suspect that it was California based on the occasional massive swings that have occurred in its claims data in the past,” said Daniel Silver, an economist with JPMorgan, in a note. “In short, this reading is worthless in terms of informing on the...

“One omission by one state–you wouldn’t think it would be a big deal, but in this case it drove the number down by 10%,” said analyst Stephen Stanley with Pierpont Securities. Economists are speculating the state could be California, the most populous state in the nation. “It was likely a state with a large population and we suspect that it was California based on the occasional massive swings that have occurred in its claims data in the past,” said Daniel Silver, an economist with JPMorgan, in a note. “In short, this reading is worthless in terms of informing on the...

But for at least six straight years during Warren’s tenure, Harvard University reported in federally mandated diversity statistics that it had a Native American woman in its senior ranks at the law school. According to both Harvard officials and federal guidelines, those statistics are almost always based on the way employees describe themselves. ... The administrator responsible for Harvard Law School’s faculty diversity statistics from 1996 to 2004, the period in question, was Alan Ray, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation who, like Warren, has fair skin, blue eyes, and Oklahoma roots. But Ray, now president of Elmhurst College in...

How do you feel about the way Scott Walker is handling his job as governor? Total Romney Santorum Approve 79% 50% 37% Disapprove 21% 19% 36%

I have had it with Yahoo. It continuously spins stories in a decidedly liberal direction. Is there a better, more objective aggregation site out there that offers mail, etc.

"So if observations of what happens when it’s hot outside don’t verify AGW, and if predictions of what might happen given AGW were true do not verify AGW, what does? "

European politicians appear to be more willing to confront the elephant in the room of public sector and government pensions than US politicians. Ours seem to be more willing to let the problems grow and grow and grow.

Examples of errors covertly corrected by the I.P.C.C. after publication Of its 2007 Summary for Policymakers on the science of climate change Error 1: A 10-fold exaggeration in the effect of melting ice-sheets on sea-level rise Error 2: A 20-fold exaggeration of the climatic effects of rising CO2 concentrations

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (Reuters) - A group of U.S. tourists, including a former Marine, killed a Costa Rican mugger by breaking his neck after he pulled a gun on them in a Caribbean port, a local police official said on Thursday. ...

Headline reads: Humans' beef with livestock: a warmer planet American meat eaters are responsible for 1.5 more tons of carbon dioxide per person than vegetarians every year.

655,000 War Dead?After doing survey research in Iraq for nearly two years, I was surprised to read that a study by a group from Johns Hopkins University claims that 655,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war. Don't get me wrong, there have been far too many deaths in Iraq by anyone's measure; some of them have been friends of mine. But the Johns Hopkins tally is wildly at odds with any numbers I have seen in that country. Survey results frequently have a margin of error of plus or minus 3% or 5% -- not 1200%. ......

John Kerry's Skimmer Scam By Thomas Lipscomb As the Kate Zernike front page Memorial Day weekend New York Times story indicates, a number of Kerry supporters were disappointed that Kerry had not vigorously defended himself against the charges of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth during the 2004 Presidential campaign. According to Zernike some "are compiling a dossier that they say will expose every one of the Swift boat group's charges as a lie and put to rest any question about Mr. Kerry's valor in combat." That might not only be a difficult task but it could backfire badly. As...

http://www.worldmag.com/articles/11908 One interesting bon mot: These days he is talking mostly about Iran and Mr. Ahmadinejad, whose statements he describes as "principally the ravings of an unwashed taxi driver."/ And he obvioulsy has some equally nice things to say about Maureen Dowd: "It wouldn't have made any difference if he wasn't a friend, because here is the religious dictator of a foreign state offering money in his own name for the murder of a writer of fiction, who is not even an Iranian living in exile. This is the most frontal assault on all the values of free expression that...

Cheney 'cabal' hijacked US foreign policy Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday. In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: gWhat I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld,...

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Arianna Judges Judy Could Judy Miller have been the White House’s source? Here's a sentence I never thought I'd write: Arianna Huffington has a point. She reports in the July 27 edition of "The Huffington Post" that in the halls of the New York Times, among the colleagues of imprisoned reporter Judy Miller, a theory is being debated. It boils down to this: Perhaps after Joseph Wilson's notorious op-ed appeared in the Times, Judy called a source (or two) in the intelligence community to find out how and why Wilson was sent by the CIA to Niger to investigate whether...

It is truly amazing how fast this story disappeared. Like a weatherman's forecast and an economist's dire prediction, the Downing Street Memos seem to have completely disappeared. Has anyone seen a retraction from the bile spewers and chicken littles?

Can anyone explain why so much attention is placed on poll questions that ask whether the country is going in the right direction or wrong direction. Anybody concerned with social issues and bias in the media will clearly say that the country is going in the wrong direction. Good survey questions should lead to minimally ambiguous conclusions. Right direction, wrong direction - is clearly bizarre.