Free Republic

On Tuesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Situation Room,” Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) responded to a question on whether the Gaza aid pier constructed by the Biden administration has failed due to numerous setbacks combined with the small amount of aid that has come in by stating that “I don’t think people understand just how complicated this is.” And “it’s just more complicated than we would have liked.” Host Wolf Blitzer asked, “I want to get, first, to this story we’ve just been reporting, this U.S. pier off the coast of Gaza has suffered setback after setback and has only delivered a...

Police arrested a congressional staffer to Democratic Rep. Sander Levin Oct. 8 following a bizarre altercation where he attacked a lover with a shovel. According to a police report, Tim Foster assaulted a black man described as his boyfriend with a small red and black shovel, leaving the man so badly injured that he was hospitalized with scrapes and bruises across his neck and torso, Roll Call reported Tuesday. The dispute began at about 12:30 a.m., with the two getting into an argument at a house in Baltimore which soon escalated to physical violence on Foster’s part, according to Roll...

The New Horizons probe has sent back the latest images from its historic July 14 flyby of Pluto. While the first close-up photos of the dwarf planet, taken from 7800 miles above the surface, had the New Horizons team—and people around the world—giddy with excitement about intriguing features like 11,000-foot-tall ice mountains, the latest, downlinked over Labor Day weekend, have left them scratching their heads. "If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top—but that’s what is actually there," said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research...

West Virginia Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller, one of the towering architects of Obamacare, on Tuesday openly criticized program managers for not moving quickly enough to build the system, warning that if it gets off to a bumpy start it will just get worse. Decrying the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as way too complex, he warned the acting Medicare director that Obamacare is "so complicated and if it isn't done right the first time, it will just simply get worse."The retiring senator also told Marilyn Tavenner at her Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing to be administrator of the Centers...

At an event on Monday night, HHS Secretary Sebelius acknowledged some of the messiness of the ongoing ObamaCare implementation, but of course had at least one readily available excuse as to why the administration is so very unreasonably put-upon at the moment:

Folks, I just went to have my oil changed(5 qts pennzoil) and get an inspection at the Kwik Lube. I also had them put on two wiper blades. The sum was $77 The place was empty other than one fellow getting a company truck done. At anyrate we got to discussing the near doubling of prices and it appears that the patronage of the service station is so low that they are about to go out of business. The other place in town is in the same position. How's that Hope and "Change" working out for everyone? In this town...

DALLAS - Hillary Rodham Clinton has been waiting to get to Texas to begin her comeback against a surging Barack Obama. She might be more careful about what she wishes for. Clinton has been banking on the state's large Hispanic population — typically about a quarter of the turnout in Democratic primaries — to give her a victory on March 4. But the Democratic Party in President Bush's home state has a complicated, hybrid primary-caucus that might just be better suited for Obama. "I had no idea how bizarre it is," Clinton told reporters this week. "We have grown men...

JERUSALEM - When the fighting is over, both Israel and Hezbollah are likely to declare victory. But the truth will be far more complicated. Hezbollah looks certain to be pushed back from Israel's border, but its standing in the Arab world will remain high. Israel appears set to achieve its goal of getting Hezbollah off its doorstep, but the guerrillas can say they stood up to Israel and lived to tell the tale. Because of each side's deep-seated need to appear victorious, a thunderous show of force is not unlikely in the time before a cease-fire deal is arranged —...

WASHINGTON, July 19, 2006 – Evacuating thousands of Americans from Lebanon is an extremely complicated undertaking, but one that servicemembers train to accomplish, Defense Department officials said here today. American servicemembers have been involved in getting U.S. citizens out of danger since the founding of the republic. Before the current non-combatant evacuation order - or NEO - for Lebanon, U.S. servicemembers helped evacuate people from Liberia in 1993, Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, Indonesia after the tsunami in 2005, Liberia again in 2004, Panama in 1989 and Saigon in 1975. Each of these NEO evacuations had different causes and different...

Microsoft Vista: Not 'People Ready' Daniel Lyons, 03.22.06, 11:45 AM ET Steve Ballmer Boston - The new version of Microsoft Windows, called Vista, has slipped again. It was originally going to ship in 2003. Then 2005. Then 2006. Now in early 2007. I'm not surprised, having seen a demo of Microsoft's new programs at an "event" for tech buyers in New York last week. The new programs are phenomenally complex, with scores of buttons and pull-down menus and myriad connections among various applications. A Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) VP zipped through a demo, moving information from...

Iraq war casualties often complicated Nathan Seppa From San Francisco, at a meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America Hundreds of injured soldiers returning from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan harbor an unusual bacterium that complicates their wound healing and may be spreading to other patients in hospitals where the soldiers are treated, a new study shows. Moreover, the microbe seems to be lingering in soldiers, cropping up during rehabilitation care received months after they have returned to the United States. Paul M. Scott, a physician at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Md.,...

"Congress shall create a Tax Code weighing more than the combined poundage of the largest member of the House and the largest member of the Senate, plus a standard musk ox." Article I, Section VI of the Constitution of the United States (according to "Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway") It's that time of year again. Dig out the receipts showing every possible legal deduction. Find all those canceled checks proving that you paid all those doctor bills last year. Add up the mileage for all those business-related trips you took. Put it all into a shoebox, take it down...

In the aftermath of Election 2000, angry partisan Democrats vowed to do everything in their power to make the Bush presidency a failure and to defeat him in 2004 "by whatever means necessary." In the process, they've managed to undermine voter confidence in our election system to the degree that the State Department has asked the Europeans to monitor this election for fairness. They've managed to convince voters that the election isn't fair because the voting machines are suddenly too complicated for old people and minorities. There have been endless stories about Florida this year and how to avoid a...

Last week, Juliet Eilperin reported in the Washington Post(1) that "House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) would like to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and replace the current tax system with either a flat tax, a national sales tax or a value-added tax." As reported, Hastert suggests that a new tax system would increase productivity and "double the economy" over the next 15 years. "All of a sudden, the problem of what future generations owe in Social Security and Medicare won't seem so daunting anymore," The Post reports Hastert wrote. "People ask me if I'm really calling for the elimination...

I have a hard time keeping up with what happens with this thing.It seems to me there is some loop hole by which any candidate can operate in, but I'm not that good at understanding (nor remembering) what.One syllable words work best.