Free Republic

**SNIP** Baker quite likely started to sense that maybe his time was up in Cincinnati. Maybe that’s why he said what he said. “The last couple weeks, I’ve been getting a rash of hate mail, racial mail,” he said. “Maybe it is time to go.” “This is really ugly,” he said. “There are all sorts of references to Barack Obama. So now I know where they are coming from. I don’t know, maybe people are mad at him, so they don’t like the idea of blacks in authority.”

Meet Dusty, a slightly pear-shaped, fawn-colored house cat, whose nightly theft raids have earned him the criminal alias of “Klepto.” His San Mateo, Calif. owners figured the cat has stolen 600 items from the neighborhood in the past three years, amassing a growing pile of loot at home, ABCNews reported.He’s not choosy. Stolen goods include towels, stuffed animals, gloves, socks, shoes, spongy footballs. He stole a Converse sneaker and returned later for the other one, the station said. He lifted a neighbor’s bikini bottom drying outside, and came back for the top a few minutes later. He stole someone’s tighty...

Dusty Rhodes, a light-hitting, hard-drinking outfielder who was at his best on baseball's biggest stage, died of cardiopulmonary arrest Wednesday at a Las Vegas hospital. He was 82. Rhodes, whose left-handed swing was tailor-made for the short right-field porch at the New York Giants' home in the Polo Grounds, never batted more than 244 times in seven big-league seasons and had a career average of just .253. But in his only World Series, in 1954, he delivered a game-winning pinch-hit home run in the 10th inning of Game 1, a game-tying pinch-hit single in Game 2 and a two-run pinch...

Raleigh "Dusty" Rhodes, an early leader of the Blue Angels flight demonstration team who flew combat missions in two wars and was a prisoner of war, has died. He was 89. Rhodes died Nov. 26 of lung cancer in San Jose, his daughter Debra Rhodes said on Tuesday. The elder Rhodes flew fighters off of the USS Enterprise during World War II. In the Battle of Santa Cruz Islands near Guadalcanal in October 1942, he was shot down and captured by the Japanese. He spent the next three years in a prisoner camp, where he was beaten and starved, his...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Planet-building is dusty work, and now two space telescopes have captured images of cosmic construction materials: disks of dust circling stars about the same size as our sun. Pictures released on Thursday from NASA (news - web sites)'s Hubble and Spitzer telescopes give the clearest look yet at the early and late phases of the planetary construction process. Most astronomers believe planets are created from the disks of dust and gas that form around young stars, and the younger the star, the bigger the dusty disk. Big gas giant planets like Jupiter form first, then smaller rocky...