Free Republic

WASHINGTON -- The Hooters restaurant chain is looking for FEMA's address. Company Chairman Bob Brooks said Thursday that he wants to reimburse the agency for the $200 bottle of Dom Perignon Champagne that was purchased with a government credit card issued to Hurricane Katrina victims. The champagne, purchased in San Antonio, was among numerous examples of improper spending of hurricane relief money cited earlier this week by Congress' Government Accountability Office. The bogus spending could be as high as $1.4 billion, the GAO said. In an announcement in Atlanta, Brooks said: "It bothers me as an American that resources that...

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy belongs to a social club for Harvard students and alumni that was evicted from campus nearly 20 years ago after refusing to allow female members. According to the online membership directory of the Owl Club, the Massachusetts Democrat updated his personal information -- including the address of his home that is in his wife's name -- on Sept. 7. The club has long been reviled on campus as "sexist" and "elitist" and, in 1984, was booted from the university for violating federal anti-discrimination laws, authored by Mr. Kennedy. Mr. Kennedy has spent much of this week's...

Forget Sam Alito's tenuous ties, two decades ago, to the Concerned Alumni of Princeton. Where's the outrage about Sen. Edward Kennedy's continuing membership in the Owl Club? Kennedy relentlessly badgered Judge Alito for listing the Princeton group on a job application in 1985, but The Washington Times reported Thursday that the Massachusetts senator remains active with the Owl - one of nine males-only fraternities that in 1984 Harvard "booted from the university for violating federal anti-discrimination laws, authored by Mr. Kennedy." TheNew York Times examined the records of CAP and found no evidence Alito was an active member. Yet the...

They might have been congratulated for their "green" efforts in an area of heavy air pollution. Instead a group of French cleaning ladies who organised a car-sharing scheme to get to work are being taken to court by a coach company which accuses them of "an act of unfair and parasitical competition". The women, who live in Moselle and work five days a week at EU offices in Luxembourg, are being taken to court by Transports Schiocchet Excursions, which runs a service along the route. It wants the women to be fined and their cars confiscated. Two years ago a...