Free Republic

ABOARD USS CHOSIN AT SEA, Nov. 19, 2009 – USS Chosin, home-ported in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, has assumed the role as flagship for the counter-piracy efforts of Combined Task Force 151 after arriving in the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations as part of a regularly scheduled deployment. "We're extremely well equipped to support this mission," said Navy Capt. Timothy Smith, the ship’s commanding officer. "An Aegis-class cruiser has an awful lot of capabilities to search and identify, perform command and control operations, collect intelligence and maintain communications related to counter piracy." Early in the deployment, the Chosin crew sighted...

"The Iranian nuclear program crisis is currently presenting the greatest challenge to the national security strategy of the Bush Administration. Strategists, diplomats and policy makers are all hard at work trying to craft a course of action and an international coalition that will dissuade and/or prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons... So absent military action and the West’s acquiescence to a nuclear armed Iran, can Iran be deterred from proliferating nuclear weapons and associated technology? Can we be assured they won’t pass one to a proxy? The answer is no, at least as current US strategies are crafted..."

A potential borrowing campaign to fund new roads, schools and other public facilities in California drew a generally positive response on Wall Street on Monday, but with a caveat: Sacramento should get its budget balanced first, many investors say. --snip-- In 2004, many on Wall Street were critical of a $15-billion bond deal that California voters approved to cover the state's accumulated budget deficits. But analysts noted that the new borrowing proposal would be more in line with the accepted use of bond financing to pay for long-lasting investments such as highways, levees and other infrastructure projects. And as the...

Part 1 Watching the Presidential debates of October 1st, and the subsequent reactions to them, has left me once again with the sad realization that there are many millions of people who prefer a man who says the wrong things well over one who says the right things badly – and in the case of the first debates we are talking about saying very, very stupid things well and intelligent things very, very badly. Now I don’t mean stupid in a bad way. I fully credit John Kerry with the intelligence needed to analyze, dissect, and evaluate a position and...

Using data from U.S. Census Reports, a correlation between executions and homicide rate from 1930-2000 can be shown, says William Tucker. His data reveals falling murder rates when the death penalty is implemented and escalating murder rates when the courts prohibited capital punishment in the early 1960s. There is no way to contravene the logic of murder, he explains, except through the death penalty. No amount of victims' pleading or cajoling -- no promises that "I won't tell" -- will ever convince a robber or rapist that there isn't an advantage to escalating the crime to murder. The only plausible...