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BEAVER, Okla. - James Pratt has a chip on his shoulder -- a cow chip. The local fire chief is ready to defend his title Saturday at the World Champion Cow Chip Throwing Contest. About 150 people usually compete in the event, choosing from about 230 cow chips. Each contestant gets two throws, with the longest distance winning. Pratt throws with an overhand, baseball-like motion. "I've seen people throw like a discus and under their leg," he said. "They've tried everything." He says he doesn't practice but takes care selecting his chips, looking for those that are about 6 inches...

The Issue: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's ambitious plans to regain control of state spending and change the face of California public education by requiring merit pay for teachers. The Spin: Lefty lawmakers and pundits assailed Schwarzenegger for "myopia," gave him an "F" for critical thinking and said he had made defenseless children his main political punching bag. The Unspin: George F. Will and others have documented how so many "reactionary liberals" in Washington fight even the most incremental change in federal taxes and entitlements they have always championed. But here's a news flash: The problem is far worse in California. At...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

SACRAMENTO (AP) - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, aiming to defend California's 62 military bases during a new round of Pentagon base closures beginning next year, appointed an 18-member council of defense consultants, retired military chiefs and business people Tuesday to coordinate the state's base retention effort. The governor included 11 military and retired military officials in a panel to be co-chaired by Leon Panetta, former chief of staff to President Clinton, and Donna Tuttle, a former Commerce Department official in the Reagan administration. As the Pentagon's Base Realignment and Closure strategy considers closing up to 100 bases nationally, California will compete...

SACRAMENTO -- Accused of mismanaging a federal voting-rights program, Secretary of State Kevin Shelley disputed the allegations on Monday and blamed some problems on the Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The California Association of Clerks and Elections Officials says Shelley, a San Francisco Democrat, has failed miserably in administering California's Help America Vote Act program. HAVA was passed by Congress in 2002 in the hope of preventing a repeat of Florida's 2000 presidential election debacle. In a letter to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, Shelley disputed the charges, though he made no mention of the group or its specific allegations....

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is getting a taste of his own marketing. Two months ago the celebrity governor plastered his grinning face on billboards from Phoenix to Boston, hoping to entice employers to relocate to the West Coast with the slogan, "Arnold says, California wants your business (Actually he says 'Kah-li-fornia.')" Now the competition is getting up close and personal. Two of the targets of Schwarzenegger's sales pitch, Massachusetts and Nevada, are retaliating with rival advertisements in California cities, angling for jobs with the promise of lower taxes and a brighter future. They're also taking friendly shots...

A rally is planned by the Teaneck Peace and Justice Coalition (TPJC), to be held this Sunday, Aug. 29 from 9:30-10:30am by the flag pole on the Teaneck Town Green at the corner of Cedar Lane and Teaneck Rd. They will be gathering to board buses to go to an anti-Bush rally in NYC. We will hold a counter-rally to support the President, also from 9:30-10:30am at the same location in Teaneck. You can park in the municipal lot in front of the library. Many of you have never been to a political rally. If you have strong political convictions,...

"Audemus jura nostra defendere" has been translated as: "We Dare Maintain Our Rights" or "We Dare Defend Our Rights." This Latin phrase is on the state coat of arms completed in 1923.

John Kerry’s fatal conceit analysis by Roger Wm. Hughes Fredrich A. Hayek wrote a book titled “The Fatal Conceit” that is multi-layered in its many messages and lessons. However, the book reduces the flaws of socialism to one major fatal conceit that an individual or a group of individuals can know everything. This, of course, is necessary for social planning and therefore for socialism to be successful. Senator John Kerry’s fatal conceit is that he believes his service in Vietnam equates to our blind trust in his ability to protect America. Howard Dean on NBC’s Meet the Press stated...

Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse, a Greek Orthodox priest, scorches the National Council of Churches in a new article. A few of his points: Organizations like the NCC mask their political views in the vocabulary of the Christian tradition, making it appear that left wing politics is synonymous with Christian moral teaching. It's a well-crafted rhetorical ploy that allows the NCC to stake out the moral high ground and paint their conservative critics as uncaring and unsympathetic reactionaries who stand at the fringes - even outside - the Christian tradition. And he goes on, historically demonstrating how the NCC has consistently...

President Bush yesterday announced his support of a constitutional amendment to protect the sanctity of marriage by defining it has the union of one man and one woman. Apparently, the Washington Times and the Chicago Tribune are two of the few newspapers to get the memo, as reflected in their headlines on this major story -- the Times topped with "Bush Urges Amendment on Marriage; Pushes Passage to Protect Institution" and the Tribune had "Bush: Protect Marriage." What did most of the rest of the major papers in the United States report about the story in their headlines? That the...

GIVING THANKS FOR FREE SPEECHBy The Honorable Howard Kaloogian, Chairman, Defend Reagan Committee Hundreds of thousands of Americans recently exercised their right of free speech and persuaded CBS Television not to run a mean-spirited and false miniseries about President and Mrs. Ronald Reagan. Yet to listen to the howls emanating from the liberal left, one would think that such citizen action was crass censorship – dangerous and hostile to our civil liberties. The fury began after an October 21st New York Times article revealed that the CBS miniseries, “The Reagans,” would be a hatchet job on President Reagan, his...

Viacom & Showtime Shut Down E-Mail Systems !! TO: Supporters of the Defend Reagan Committee FROM: Howard Kaloogian Chairman, Defend Reagan Committeewww.DefendReagan.org November 20, 2003 – 5:35 P.M. PSTThank you very much to the thousands of you who joined in our latest efforts to protest Viacom-Showtime’s attack on President Reagan with their upcoming broadcast of the hitpiece, “The Reagans.”So many of you wrote to Viacom and Showtime to complain that they shut down their email systems. Apparently Viacom and Showtime want everyone to hear what they have to say about President Reagan (even though much of it is totally...

Defend Reagan Committee Achieves Remarkable Success in First 24 Hours! www.DefendReagan.org Thanks so much to everyone who has participated in the anti-CBS/pro-Reagan efforts. There are now 7 or 8 different committees working towards a common goal and it has been breathtaking to see the impact that is already being made. We were contacted by two of the first four "sponsors" we had chosen to focus on. The two were companies we got from a list here at FR. That list has some errors because the companies swore they would not air an ad during the miniseries and never had...

The FCC should leave a small, 10-watt community radio station alone -- instead of acting like a "thuggish enforcer for special interests" and threatening to put it out of business. So said the Vermont Libertarian Party on September 9, after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) notified Radio Free Brattleboro that it planned to seize the station's equipment and shut it down. "By seeking to quash local community broadcasting, the FCC has become a thuggish enforcer for special interests," said Vermont LP State Chair Brendan Kinney. "The airwaves should be freely available to all citizens as long as a citizen's use...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - If Sadiq's father knew his 19-year-old son was gay, he would kill his son and then himself, Sadiq believes. "My dad would shoot me and then commit suicide," said Sadiq, a quiet, neatly dressed Palestinian who is attending college in the northeast United States. Being gay in the United States has never been easy. But being gay and Muslim, especially after Sept. 11, 2001, is a unique act of defiance requiring homosexuals to defend their religious identity in the face of an increasingly suspicious U.S. government and sexual orientation amid hostility from the conservative Islamic community....

<p>This article is adapted from a talk I gave to the Workers' Liberty summer school in London on June 21 under the title "After the Holocaust: Mutual Indifference and Moral Solidarity." To be fair to those who invited me, I should point out that although the views I expressed in this part of the talk met with a perfectly civil reception, they plainly weren't shared by most of the audience.</p>

MY RESPONSE TO THOSE FREEPERS WHO OPPOSE HJR 56... First and foremost this is NOT petty... it is critical in this day and age that we RE-AFFIRM our MORAL foundation. I AGREE with those opponents who are concerned that the U.S. Constitution should not have to be this SPECIFIC, ....HOWEVER, our JUSTICE system has failed us miserably... by equating a union of two people of the same sex to MARIAGE.... this is a HUGE step in destroying the MORAL foundation of our laws. I believe that by NOT passing this ammendment the effect will be exactly what some opponenets fear...

<p>WASHINGTON -- California first lady Sharon Davis on Wednesday blasted the Republican effort to recall her husband, calling it a "hostile takeover of government" that is certain to fail if Democrats stick together by refusing to run a successor candidate.</p>

TEHRAN, April 16 (AFP) - Iran will not defend neighbouring Syria militarily against the United States, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami said Wednesday. "We support Syria which is on the front line against the Zionist regime and defends the Palestinian cause, but that does not mean we are going to enter a military phase" to defend Syria against an eventual attack, Khatami said after his weekly cabinet meeting. "I hope the US threats against Syria are bluffs,... I don't think the United States has the capacity to attack Syria, since the world situation does not allow a repetition of what happened...