Free Republic

A Macon man told police he was protecting his wife, three kids, and his home after he shot at an intruder. A Macon Police report says it happened at Hidden Lakes Apartment complex Sunday around 3 a.m. The man told officers he was asleep on his living room sofa, when he heard a noise. The man says he woke up to find a man coming through his window. He says he yelled at the intruder, but he kept coming through the window, according to the police report. The man says he sleeps with a gun, so he pulled it out...

President Obama, once considered as politically agile and deft as a gazelle, is now looking increasingly like a deer caught in the headlights. His poll numbers on everything from job approval to his handling of the economy, health care, taxes and bailouts are dropping faster than a cement shoe in the Hudson River. Perhaps even more worrisome, Rasmussen Reports shows that fewer Americans consider him “trustworthy.” His popular support is hemorrhaging because all of his major initiatives are either failing in execution or in the legislative process. According to a new USA Today/Gallup Poll, 57 percent of Americans say the...

President Obama is on the way to joining an exclusive club. It is the club of failed one-term presidents. During the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama sold himself as a pragmatic moderate. In fact, he is the very opposite. He is an internationalist socialist whose policies will lead to ruin at home and defeat abroad. They will also doom his re-election efforts. He is flirting with political disaster. Despite his many flaws, former President Bill Clinton established the model for successful Democratic administrations. Mr. Clinton governed as a liberal centrist. He realized that veering too far to the left early in...

New York Times book critic Dwight Garner on Wednesday enthused over a new biography of Friedrich Engels, cooing that Marxism is “back in vogue” and adding that the founding communist comes across as a “jovial man of outsize appetites” in Tristram Hunt’s new biography “Marx’s General.” Garner opened the review by insisting that decrying capitalism is now hip again: “Thanks to globalism’s discontents and the financial crisis that has spread across the planet, Karl Marx and his analysis of capitalism’s dark, wormy side are back in vogue.”

OKLAHOMA CITY, Aug. 19 (UPI) -- An Oklahoma judge struck down the state’s abortion law requiring ultrasounds, ruling it violated a requirement that legislation deal with a single subject. Oklahoma County District Judge Vicki Robertson ruled the 2008 abortion law was a compilation of five separate bills, but did not address other legal complaints on the law Tuesday, The Oklahoman reported Wednesday. The most controversial aspect of the law was a requirement that a doctor or medical technician performing an abortion give a pregnant woman an ultrasound before the procedure and display the images where the woman could see them,...

ARNOLD, Mo., Aug. 19 (UPI) -- A 79-year-old Missouri man who began keeping track of his miles at a church track in 2001 said he has logged 40,000 miles on the path. Bob Wery, 79, of Arnold, said he has walked a total 40,000 miles -- equal to more than 13 coast-to-coast U.S. trips -- on the indoor track and outdoor walking path at the First Baptist Church of Arnold since 2001, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Wednesday. Wery said none of the other walkers at the church have come close to his record. He said church volunteers keep track...

The popular photo sharing website Flickr has taken down the original version of the now famous Obama Joker poster that’s been sweeping the nation. Apparently, management is concerned about a copyright infringement issue due to the appearance of the Time magazine logo in Firas Alkhateeb’s parody that ended up being reprinted with the word “Socialism” at the bottom. Oddly, a quick search of Flickr identified a number of Bush parodies with Time’s logo present (vulgarity alert below the fold).

Numerous reasons to oppose the ludicrous Obama health care plan aside, Yael T. Abouhalkah of the Kansas City Star has cut through to the real reason for dissent - Americans are ignorant. While Abouhalkah will undoubtedly argue that the message was meant to apply merely to the aspect of health care knowledge, he is quite unsuccessful at holding back his overall disdain for the way American’s have responded to the plan. The title of his most recent blog post says it all. In referring to an NBC poll about the health care plan, one in which MSNBC titles Doubts About...

An Israeli official is linking President Obama’s actions with anti-Semitism. Science and Technology Minister Daniel Hershkowitz is especially critical of the president’s decision to award the Medal of Freedom to former U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson. Hershkowitz tells the Jerusalem Post: “I am disappointed in Obama’s policies. Some of the steps he has taken, like giving a medal to Mary Robinson, are borderline anti-Semitic... Relations with the U.S. are important, but relations must go both ways.” There is also said to be growing Israeli dissatisfaction with the president’s chief of staff. Rahm Emanuel is an observant Jew with deep...

Think last year’s $700 billion Wall Street rescue package was beaucoup bucks to spend bailing out the nation’s floundering financial system? That’s chump change compared to what the overall price tag could be, a government watchdog says. The inspector general in charge of overseeing the Treasury Department’s bank-bailout program says the massive endeavor could end up costing taxpayers almost $24 trillion in a worst-case scenario. That’s more than six times President Obama’s proposed $3.55 trillion budget for 2010. Much of the bailout’s attention has focused on the Treasury’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, which Congress hurriedly passed...

SAN ANTONIO, Aug. 17 -- The trial of a Texas judge charged with refusing to hear a last-minute appeal in a death penalty case got under way Monday in San Antonio. The Texas Commission on Judicial Misconduct charged Chief Justice Sharon Keller of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in February with bringing “public discredit” on the Texas justice system in the case of Michael Wayne Richard. He was executed Sept. 25, 2007, after Keller refused to take the appeal and failed to refer his lawyers to the judge assigned to the case. Richard was executed the same day the...

The Pirate Party, a political group which hopes to legalise internet filesharing, has attracted a huge number of new members since announcing its plans to contest seats at the next election. Andrew Peter Robinson, the leader of the Pirate Party, said they had been flooded by enquiries from people who wanted to join the group. At its peak, he said, around 100 people an hour were signing up to become party members. "It has exceeded all expectations," he said. "Put it this way – donations have been coming in so fast that PayPal were concerned we were a fraudulent site."...

Beaumont police are looking for a man witnesses say has a gunshot wound to the arm after he robbed the Gulf Street Liquor Store in Beaumont. Beaumont Police Officer Crystal Holmes tells KBMT 12 news around 10:30 a.m. Friday patrolmen were called to the 3000 block of Gulf Street in Beaumont where a 9-1-1 caller reported an armed robbery. The store owner told police a man with wearing a black cap, long sleeve black shirt, black baggy jeans and an orange bandanna used a large-caliber handgun in the robbery. As the robber started to leave the clerk grabbed his own...

An 11-year-old girl has cheated death with a dive worthy a movie stuntman - jumping out of a car moments before it plunged off the side of a cliff. Paige Dean was listening to music in the car at a campsite in Kinmel Bay near Rhyl, Denbighshire, when she accidentally knocked the handbrake off. Frantically, she repeatedly tried to pull up the lever as the car veered towards the cliff face but she was unable to lock the wheels. As the vehicle came within a few feet of the edge she managed to dive out of the car and roll...

A Walker County man who authorities say shot up a bingo hall Saturday night during a robbery was shot and killed by a security guard, according to the Walker County sheriff. William G. Cantrell Jr., 43, was declared dead at the scene after he was shot multiple times by a security guard at It's Your Lucky Day Charity Bingo at 20 Pineywoods Sipsey Road, Walker County Sheriff John Mark Tirey said. According to Tirey, Cantrell entered through the front door around 11 p.m., fired his shotgun into the ceiling and yelled: "This is a robbery. Everybody get out of here."...

Hillary Clinton has risked more controversy on her Africa trip by comparing the disputed 2000 US presidential election to corruption in Nigeria's political system. Secretary of State Clinton stopped by to warn the continent's largest nation that vote-rigging was eroding its government's legitimacy and global aspirations. But while discussing the importance of free and fair elections at a town hall meeting, she likened the country's corruption problems to the disputed 2000 Florida recount that sealed George W. Bush's presidential victory. Mrs Clinton said: "In a democracy there have to be winners and losers. And part of creating a strong democratic...

Royal Bank of Scotland, which is 70% owned by the taxpayer, has reportedly offered a 'golden hello' worth more than £7m to hire a star banker. RBS has agreed to the package to lure bond trader Antonio Polverino away from Merrill Lynch, it is claimed.

Does the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger moonlight as a Code Pink operative? There has to be something that explains what I'll call his Iraqnaphobia. Last month (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), the AP reporter erroneously cited the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a "major factor" explaining why "the deficit has widened." In a quick review of the related June 2009 Monthly Treasury Statement, I cited three examples of higher spending in other areas of government that were larger than last year, both in dollar and percentage terms, than the $33 billion, 7% increase in total defense spending....

This may be closer to reality than you think You’re sound asleep when you hear a thump outside your bedroom door. Half-awake, and nearly paralyzed with fear, you hear muffled whispers. At least two people have broken into your house and are moving your way. With your heart pumping, you reach down beside your bed and pick up your shotgun. You rack a shell into the chamber, then inch toward the door and open it. In the darkness, you make out two shadows. One holds something that looks like a crowbar. When the intruder brandishes it as if to strike,...

Only one crime was solved by each 1,000 CCTV cameras in London last year, a report into the city’s surveillance network has claimed. The internal police report found the million-plus cameras in London rarely help catch criminals. In one month CCTV helped capture just eight out of 269 suspected robbers. David Davis MP, the former shadow home secretary, said: “It should provoke a long overdue rethink on where the crime prevention budget is being spent.” He added: “CCTV leads to massive expense and minimum effectiveness. “It creates a huge intrusion on privacy, yet provides little or no improvement in security.