Free Republic

I just filed this petition with the Obama White House but it needs 150 signatures before it will show up on the Open Petitions section of We the People. Those who want to have a little fun while educating Progressives may find it worth signing. We petition the obama administration to: Send to Congress an act to contain mass murder through common-sense media control. The act should have two sections: the first creates a federal board to license journalists and media companies. Prior licensing of a constitutional right is allowed under DC v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008). The second...

Maybe everyone else has figured this out already, but: 1: Donald Trump the Republican/Conservative/Tea Partier is not the Donald Trump we have known; neither is Donald Trump the politician. 2: Donald Trump the pitchman believes that a good salesman can sell anything. 3: About a year ago I speculated, very tongue-in-cheek, that if the mid-term election was as bad for the Democrats as it promised to be (it was worse), the Democratic Powers-That-Be might suddenly become the new 'birthers'. So now we have Trump the sudden Republican, raising the birth issue as an essential part of a campaign that's ostensibly...

There's not much that's definite in the one video we've been seeing about the 'mystery missile launch'. What's shown there could be an ordinary contrail, hyped by the station to draw traffic. But there must have been at least a few West Coast Freepers who saw the thing as it happened, if it happened, so why not chime in and tell us what you saw? Was it really moving as fast as it looks? Did the smoke/contrail cut off suddenly like rocket engines do? Any signs of 'staging'? Speak your piece and let's get the first-hand information together in one...

Snowe's vote isn't all that popular in Maine, assuming these are all Maine votes.

I've thought a lot about whether this is a good idea and concluded that it isn't; it's just better than the alternatives. It's obvious by now that responsibility goes out the door as soon as government players get a new dollar to spend. So, rather than hope in vain that the Republicans will discover both principles and spines and lead the Democrats out of error, I propose starting a popular movement to abrogate all new government debt, starting from now. The idea is to encourage young people of every persuasion - conservative, liberal, libertarian - to push candidates for office,...

The problem with voting third party (or not at all) instead of for McCain – and O, Lord! I am tempted – is that the Democrat may get in. The problem with voting for McCain as the lesser evil is that the RINOs will claim it's a vote for McCain and 'moderate' Republicans everywhere, declare a 'mandate' and go forth to govern like conservatives don't exist. What to do? Here's an idea: how about, instead of pulling the lever or punching the chad or filling in the arrow for McCain, we enter his name on our ballots as a write-in...

... did anyone else immediately flash on "Zippy the Pinhead" upon seeing Our Leaders in their Sunday-go-to-meetin' robes?

Summary: BLUE HILL - Margret Baldwin clenched a bundle of small white flags to her heart and closed her eyes. When it was her turn at the microphone, she read the names of 20 men and women who died in Iraq, one lost soldier for each flag she carried. As the... Bangor Daily News article

Road-Song of the Bandar-Log Here we go in a flung festoon, Half-way up to the jealous moon! Don't you envy our pranceful bands? Don't you wish you had extra hands? Wouldn't you like if your tails were--so-- Curved in the shape of a Cupid's bow? Now you're angry, but--never mind, Brother, thy tail hangs down behind! Here we sit in a branchy row, Thinking of beautiful things we know; Dreaming of deeds that we mean to do, All complete, in a minute or two-- Something noble and wise and good, Done by merely wishing we could. We've forgotten, but--never...

I have a feeling that what I'm proposing is so obvious that there must be something wrong with it that only I, in the whole wide world, have managed to miss. Still: why not impose a big fine for employing an illegal alien, say, $25,000? Then make the reward for turning in such an employer $25,000 plus, if the informant is the illegal alien in question, automatic permanent resident status. Then sit back and let market forces go to work. I don't think it would be very long before the demand for illegals dried up.

Collaterals are not counted / Saturday, March 26, 2005 - Bangor [Maine] Daily News "I think the job of the artist ... is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget." - Arthur Miller For the past few months, at the same time that I've been painting "Americans Who Tell the Truth" portraits, I've been working on a series of little portraits that I call "collaterals." They exist as a kind of dark star to the Truth Tellers. The name refers to collateral damage, the term given to civilian individuals killed in a military action who were not...

I notice that Zone Alarm sometimes takes forever starting on my computer (running Windows 2000 Pro) and causes long delays (up to 45 seconds) when I shut down. Disabling ZA makes the problems go away. This doesn't always happen and usually only slows things down, but every so often it hangs up solidly, either coming on or going off. This has happened on two different computers running W2K. On one of these computers, Zone Alarm worked fine under NT4 (and yes, when I changed over to W2K I downloaded the W2K version of ZA). The only advice I've seen so...

On Mt. Hope Avenue in Bangor, Maine, there is a 'measured mile' which, for reasons that probably seemed good at the time, is marked off in two-sixths of a mile intervals; i.e., with signs reading "2/6"ths and "4/6"ths mile. This roused a vague memory that some of my father's cars, fifty years ago, had odometers which read in eighths of a mile. These were mostly Ford products. But childhood memories are notoriously unreliable; does any other Freeper remember odometers calibrated in eighths?

Now what do we do in Iraq? October 14, 2002 BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST Now that Congress has droned through a week of largely desultory debate to authorize the use of force against Iraq, how will it be exercised? That is properly a military secret, unknown even to members of Congress. More questionable, it is also unknown to senior military officers. If there is a precise plan for action to remove Saddam Hussein from power, general officers at the Pentagon tell members of Congress that they are in the dark. This may be another example of Secretary of Defense...

Smith and Jones are neighbors in Washington, DC. Smith is a retired Special Forces Sergeant-Major currently teaching children in an inner-city school. Jones is a violent felon with multiple convictions for arson, who is presently on parole. Smith detests Jones as a waste of space; Jones detests Smith as a goody-two-shoes and is given to mocking him with jeering smiles and a chant of “burn, baby, burn!” as he suggestively lights twists of paper while staring intently across the street at him. One day, Smith sees Jones unloading what he knows to be parts of a flame thrower (remember his...

Title 18, Part I, Chapter 13, Sec. 242. - Deprivation of rights under color of law USC Title 18 Sec. 242 has something interesting to say in regards to the ongoing Freeper debate about whether non-citizens have rights under the Constitution. Here's a copy of it, edited for clarity: "Whoever, under color of any [law] willfully subjects any person in any [US place] to the deprivation of any [right] protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or to different [punishments] on account of such person being an alien... shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not...

Listening to Rush (or at least, the Rush o' the Day), I get so tired of all the Dem bashing. TOM DASCHEL IS A DEMOCRAT AND HE ACTS LIKE A DEMOCRAT! He is not going to change because the Right whines about it. Is it too much to ask that Rush etc. say something, once in a great while, about all the spineless 'Pubbies who make being a Democrat such an effortless romp?

FBI failed to get Lindh's statement in writing BY LENNY SAVINO AND FRANK DAVIES fdavies@herald.com WASHINGTON - The FBI may have violated its own rules in questioning John Walker Lindh by not taping or transcribing his statements, and that could determine the outcome of the case against him, experts said Thursday. The FBI's only record of its two-day interrogation of the accused Taliban fighter is a summary form written by the agent who questioned him. Lindh did not sign the form. `WHERE'S THE PROOF?' ''Everything turns on the confession. If it's thrown out, where's the proof?'' said former federal prosecutor ...

A while back the fan on my computer's power supply got very noisy so I pulled the PS and replaced the fan. No problem. But I'd been having trouble with IE 5.5, namely that it kept forgetting my preferences and coming on in not-full-screen mode and sometimes with the IE window collapsed rather than full size. I noticed after changing the fan that these problems disappeared. This gave me another idea; I'd also had trouble running Norton Utilities 'Speed Disk' application in 'thorough' mode. It'd run fine for a while and then the execution would slow down until there was ...

Everybody knows Christopher Hitchins, the British journalist who, from his vantage point at The Nation, gets up practically everybody's nose. While he's been useful in the past with his scathing criticisms of the Clinton Administration, lately he's been equally vituperative about President Bush and the War on Terrorism. He recently had the temerity to refer to "Attorney General Ashcroft's megalomaniacal plan to turn the United States into a national-security garrison", which ought to give you some idea where he's coming from. Rather than continuing to tolerate this resident British carper, why don't we show him we respect the written word ...