Free Republic

Is or is not Patrick Kennedy, son of the esteemed Senator Ted Kennedy, a homosexual? Just wondering if anyone has noticed this little situation. Also, was there ever someone named Barney Franks? Thanks for the help. MS

Thomas E. Creek (1950-1969) was a United States Marine who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for heroism during February 1969 in Vietnam. Creek was born on 7 April 1950, in Joplin, Missouri. He grew up in Amarillo, Texas, and attended Forest Hill Elementary School, Horace Mann Jr. High School, and Palo Duro High School. He enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps on 16 January 1968. He completed recruit training with the 1st Recruit Training Battalion, Recruit Training Regiment, Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego, California, in March 1968. He received individual combat training with Company A, 1st Battalion,...

How did George Bush go on a good will tour and manage to get on the bad side of everybody wherever he went? It is one thing to take abuse, another to make house calls to take it. Environmentalists have changed their minds about it so often that climatologists are beginning to call it global wobbling. John Kerry was mulling over another run for the Presidency – but, happily, he ran out of mull. Has anyone besides me noticed what a hatchet-faced gnome, Sean Penn, is? The son of a blacklisted director, Leo Penn, Sean confirms the axiom that the...

Generic drugs law plans threaten makers Big pharmaceutical companies are facing a barrage of legislative proposals that could have a dramatic impact on the industry's future earnings power and open doors to one of its biggest threats: generic drug manufacturers. A proposal set to be unveiled on Wednesday by Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential hopeful, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers would allow generic drugmakers to manufacture cheaper versions of biotechnology drugs produced by companies such as Amgen and Genentech.

Just ran across an article on Drudge from The American Prospect. Who or what IS this publication? HILLARY RAISES BIG BUCKS IN TEXAS BUSH COUNTRY. Senator Clinton did a great deal of fundraising around the country in March, and her private fundraising schedule -- which was passed along by a source -- shows that she raked in big bucks in that most impenetrable of red-state strongholds: Texas. The schedule lists a dozen events in four states, in the space of just two months, March and April. This is very significant, because all the activity shows just how determined Hillary's advisers...

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday accused Republicans of "playing the fear card" of terrorism to win elections and said Democrats cannot keep quiet if they want to win in November. The New York Democrat, facing re-election this year and considered a potential White House candidate in 2008, said Republicans won the past two elections on the issue of national security and "they're doing it to us again." She said a speech by presidential adviser Karl Rove two weeks ago showed the GOP election message is: "All we've got is fear and we're going to keep playing the fear card."...

I just heard on the news that Mrs. Coretta King has died. Just my personal opinion, but she was a dignified, classy woman who served her country and her late husband's memory quite well.

Just askin’: Now that Hillary is advocating that convicted felons be given the right to vote, does it mean in Chicago dead felons get to vote twice? And if these felons are bused to the polling place, will they have to take cabs back to the cemetery? Just askin’: Has there ever been any other rock ‘n’ roller around as boring as Bono? Just askin’: Will history designate Bill Clinton as the first full-blown President? Just askin’: Is Helen Thomas’ countenance a complexion or a collision? Did she always look like that, or did the doctors just take the bandages...

A child's clubhouse, built about 25 years ago by a civil engineer for his son, provides another clue pointing to possible design or construction flaws in the structural failures that breached two canal floodwalls and inundated the city during Hurricane Katrina. Engineer Gus Cantrell, 60, and son Daniel Cantrell, 33 &150; now a structural engineer himself &150; returned to the family's Pratt Drive house last week for the first time since Katrina struck. They discovered the old clubhouse sitting a few feet from its original location next to the London Avenue canal levee &150; on top of a pile of...

WASHINGTON -- Accuracy in Media (AIM) said today that Judith Miller's release from jail in the CIA leak investigation demonstrates that her claim about protecting sources was fraudulent from the start. "Miller has decided to cooperate with a grand jury investigation of possible criminal activity in the CIA leak case," said AIM Editor Cliff Kincaid. "This proves that her decision to go to jail, rather than testify, was a ploy all along."

DALLAS -- All of a sudden the poor have emerged from the shadows of invisibility, lifted onto a temporary pedestal by natural disaster. Whether it is because of guilt, pity or the nation's generosity in times of crisis, those who lost everything -- many of whom had little to begin with -- find themselves in a strange wonderland of recognition. The destitute people sent fleeing by Katrina have been offered free housing, free clothing, free cars, free toys, special admission to universities and preferential job treatment. Athletes come to them , bestowing jerseys and autographs. Entertainers sing for them, and...

"Be prepared" is the Boy Scout motto. "Be prepared for what?" someone once asked the Scouts' founder, Robert Baden-Powell. "Why, for any old thing," he replied. For a people raised on that motto, Americans do remarkably little preparation. This is a nation of grasshoppers, not ants. As the fable goes: All summer, the ants worked hard, busily storing grain. The grasshopper just played. Come winter, the grasshopper begged the ants for some of their corn. The ants asked him why he hadn't gotten ready for winter. He responded, "I was so busy singing that I hadn't the time." When it...

THIS JUST IN: Democrat politicians are taking political advantage of the looting by their minority constituents, which has made Hurricane Katrina an equal opportunity disaster. THIS JUST IN: Unable to prove charges of murder or rape against Joran Van Der Sloot, Aruban officials considered a charge of “Conspiracy to Do Whatever”, but were afraid they couldn’t make it stand up in court. THIS JUST IN: The same people who anointed Bill Clinton as the first black President are now claiming that The Toccata and Fugue in D Minor was actually written in the year 1726 by a black composer named...

NEW YORK -- In what may be a first for the U.S. housing market, banks are being encouraged to return the most recent mortgage loan payments from people displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Freddie Mac, one of two government housing agencies, said Thursday it has asked banks to return September mortgage payments already made by anyone in the stricken areas. Also, the housing agency has asked lenders to return any September mortgage payments if borrowers ask for their money back. "It is unprecedented," said Nicolas Retsinas, at Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies. "It is one more option for people...

The raging debate over what happened after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast has provided Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) an opportunity to emerge as a national spokeswoman for the Democratic Party, stirring Republican criticism that she and other Democrats are seeking political gain at a moment of national crisis. Clinton has long maintained that she is focused solely on serving the interests of her New York constituents. But she was on all three network morning shows yesterday to promote her call for returning the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to independent status, and for creating an...

"It is reported that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive.” This blood-curdling news came from self-described social-justice advocate Randall Robinson, former chief of TransAfrica, an architect of the anti-apartheid sanctions movement, and author of The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, an impassioned plea for slavery reparations. Robinson continued: Four days after the storm, thousands of blacks in New Orleans are dying like dogs. No-one has come to help them. I am a sixty-four year old African-American. New Orleans marks the end of the America I strove for. I am hopeless. I am sad....

The former chairman of Air America Radio, Evan Montvel Cohen - who former colleagues said engineered transfers of more than $800,000 to the liberal radio network from a boys and girls club in the Bronx - is missing, according to a lawyer who is trying to have him served with legal papers. At least two people have said Mr. Cohen is in Hawaii. He has not responded to a series of e-mail messages in recent weeks from The New York Sun asking him about his role. Mr. Cohen, 39, helped lead the launch of Air America in March 2004. Less...

The CIA's former Bin Laden desk chief revealed Thursday night that Clinton administration lawyers warned counterterrorism agents that Osama bin Laden had to be kept as comfortable as possible if they captured him during planned raids into Afghanistan. "The lawyers were more concerned with bin Laden`s safety and his comfort than they were with the officers charged with capturing him," former Bin Laden desk chief Michael Scheuer told MSNBC's "Hardball. "We had to build an ergonomically designed chair to put him in, [for] special comfort in terms of how he was shackled into the chair," Scheuer explained. "They even worried...

How could President Bush be cavorting around on a long vacation with American troops struggling with a spiraling crisis in Iraq? Wasn't he worried that his vacation activities might send a frivolous signal at a time when he had put so many young Americans in harm's way? "I'm determined that life goes on," Mr. Bush said stubbornly. That wasn't the son, believe it or not. It was the father - 15 years ago. I was in Kennebunkport then to cover the first President Bush's frenetic attempts to relax while reporters were pressing him about how he could be taking a...

Up for re-election after a successful first term, with overwhelming popular approval, the candidate is a prohibitive favorite to win again. Sporting a Presidential name and a stunning capacity to attract campaign money, the candidate can pull in a million dollars or more simply by showing up for dinner, not only locally but anywhere in the country. While the candidate insists that winning a second term is the only priority, the nation’s political elites and pundits openly speculate that plans are being laid for a White House bid. Everywhere the candidate goes—and the candidate goes everywhere, both to address the...