Free Republic

Les Paul has died at age 94. His electric guitar designs and innovations were central to the development of rock guitar artistry beginning in the early 1950s and continuing to this day. He was playing to the very end, too, in small groups in New York clubs. So long to a great one...

Britain's National Health Service (NHS) is facing the biggest financial and organizational challenge in its 60-year history, with a 15 billion pound ($25 billion) shortfall looming after 2011, a report said on Wednesday. The NHS Confederation, which represents health service managers, said recession and rising costs will squeeze the NHS budget by 15 billion pounds in the five years from 2011.

Since lying her ass off to the American people, Nancy Pelosi has either been flying off to foreign countries (Iraq, China) or else cowering under her Speaker of the House super-duper desk, praying that no reporter is looking for her in order to ask her to once again remember and try to tell one of her three or seven stories about why she didn't know a thing about waterboarding and how the CIA lied to her and to Congress and that skizziks spelled backwards is skizziks. But she needn't have worried: no reporter is going to ask her any questions....

Henceforward, Notre Dame University should be known as Notre Shame University. I'm not a Catholic, nor am I religious at all, but I know that partial-birth abortions are one of the deepest of abominations, and that it is no part of the mission of a Catholic university to be giving honorary degrees (or honors of any sort) to champions of partial-birth abortion. I stand by my prediction: Notre Shame University will never again win a national title in any major college sport. And even that is much too small a price to pay for selling out one's moral principles and...

   

What Makes You Uniquely "You"? 01.16.2009Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman says your brain is one-of-a-kind in the history of the universe. by Susan Kruglinski Some of the most profound questions in science are also the least tangible. What does it mean to be sentient? What is the self? When issues become imponderable, many researchers demur, but neuro­scientist Gerald Edelman dives right in.A physician and cell biologist who won a 1972 Nobel Prize for his work describing the structure of antibodies, Edelman is now obsessed with the enigma of human consciousness—except that he does not see it as an enigma. In...

Arianna Huffington, an internet hate-site owner, and Eliot Spitzer, a whoremonger, liar and terminally arrogant prick, being given air-time on CNBC's "Squawk Box" this morning. I'm glad the mute button is working on my remote... Rick Santelli must be turning purple over there in the Chicgao trading pit.

CNBC's Squawk Box has a guest host named Michael Porter on this morning, a Harvard professor. In the last few minutes, he has said things like (not exact quotes) "We have to move to universal healthcare coverage, where nobody in the nation is without insurance" and "We will have to make health insurance mandatory, so that everybody will be required to have it, like car insurance." These statements seem to Porter to be every bit as obvious as mathematical axioms. They do not trouble his mind one bit. To Porter, the only issues seem to be how best and how...

The eyes of Obama are not upon me because Obama never, ever looks straight into the camera when he gives a speech. He looks to his left, he looks to his right, he looks to his left, he looks to his right, ... It's as if his breathless fans don't even exist...

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Barack Hussein Obama, this wet-behind-the-ears man without qualities, this lifelong consort of America-haters of stripes widely varying, this literary fraud who has published under his own name a memoir ghostwritten by a skulking terrorist bomber, this slippery Senator who has all-too-often voted "Present" rather than "Yea" or "Nay" during his brief years as an elected official—this Barack Hussein Obama has shown us who he is by flipping the bird at John McCain, a true American hero and man of honor. America deserves a President who is a far, far better man than this smirking load of unfounded arrogance.

Sometimes a title tells the story... Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and the Politics of Snippy Bitchiness

Earlier today, I started a thread that asked the question: Has Barack Obama ever done anything in his life to suggest that he genuinely loves America? I then had to go do some chores. While I was working, another question occurred to me, so I decided to make it the subject of a new thread: Who would be the first Lincoln Bedroom overnight guest in a White House occupied by the Obamas? A few names come to mind, but I'd prefer to hear what my fellow FReepers think. By the way, I'm fairly sure that 'occupied by' is just a...

I pose a question to all FReepers and lurkers: Has Barack Obama ever done anything in his life to suggest that he genuinely loves America? This is a question to which I don't have an answer. If there's something special or remarkable in Obama's record that demonstrates that he has a real love for America, I'd be interested in hearing about it. I take it to be clear that such a question need not be asked about John McCain. I take it also to be fairly clear what the answer would be if the question were asked about Michelle Obama...

April 24, 2008, 4:00 a.m. The Gender-Equity Hammer Comes OutTitle IX at the door. By Christina Hoff Sommers Women have surpassed men in most areas of education, but men continue to be more numerous in fields like math, physics and engineering. For more than a decade, feminist groups have been lobbying Congress to address the problem of gender “injustice” in the laboratory. Their efforts are finally bearing fruit. Federal agencies are now poised to begin aggressive gender-equity reviews of math, science, and engineering programs. Groups like the National Organization for Women must be celebrating — but American scientists should...

Solar system could go haywire before the Sun dies05:03 23 April 2008NewScientist.com news serviceDavid Shiga How will life on Earth end? The answer, of course, is unknown, but two new studies suggest a collision with Mercury or Mars could doom life long before the Sun swells into a red giant and bakes the planet to a crisp in about 5 billion years. The studies suggest that the solar system's planets will continue to orbit the Sun stably for at least 40 million years. But after that, they show there is a small but not insignificant chance that things could go...

THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity. What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot. Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously. [snip]

How a hunting ground became polygamous nightmare AP Enterprise: A prairie town, a polygamist sect, a temple: A recipe for trouble in Texas By TODD LEWAN The Associated Press ELDORADO, Texas The guy didn't look much like a hunter. He was beanpole tall — scarecrow-ish, some might say, with a high, collegiate forehead and a reluctant handshake. Even in a pearl-snap shirt and jeans, this cowboy somehow seemed better suited for a college lecture hall than a saddle. Still, he wanted land — lots of it — for a corporate hunting retreat. Said he might build a lodge, to...

About that 3 AM phone call to President Hillary... "Madam President? This is Agent Black from the First Gentleman's detail...sorry to bother you at 3 AM, ma'am, but your husband's down here at Scores getting private-room lap dances and he's insisting that he's never going back to the Whitehouse. He just won't listen to any of us. ... Sorry, ma'am, I didn't catch that question ... oh, is he high? Well, I wouldn't want to comment on that, ma'am, even though this is a secure line. You understand. ... Well, I suppose we could physically restrain him and carry him...