Free Republic

It has been an open secret for several decades that the writing is on the wall for most historically black colleges and universities. Since 1989, eight HBCUs have closed because of lost accreditation or bankruptcy. The reasons are myriad, but principally because HBCUs no longer command a monopoly on attendees created by de jure segregation. For the past half-century, HBCUs have had to compete for students among mainstream public and private institutions, as well as for-profit educational institutions. But the changing market dynamics do not tell the entire story, especially because some HBCUs such as Howard University, Morehouse College, and...

President Trump is making an announcement now or in moments regarding the government shutdown and wall funding. Use your favorite link. Me, I'm using XM Radio.

A deal has been reached on a $1 trillion-plus bill to fund the government for the final five months of this fiscal year, an agreement that is likely to avert a government shutdown. Congressional negotiators had been working through the weekend to hash out the last remaining complications in a bill to fund the government before the agreement was announced Sunday night. After President Donald Trump backed down on funding for the construction of a border wall, some additional sticking points remained, including health benefits for coal miners, funding for Puerto Rico and an additional $30 billion for defense, delaying...

In 2004, Vice-Presidential candidate John Edwards promised that if John Kerry won, people would rise out of their wheelchairs and walk. In the 2006 election, actor Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson’s, made a commercial for Democratic Senate candidates in which he urged voters to support those candidates who opposed restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and stood in the way of imminent miracles. Private funding, it should be noted, was never restricted. The only thing that stood in the way of miracle cures from embryonic stem cell research miracle cures, we were told, was the...

In this era of a big-spending Republican administration, the differences between conservatives and liberals have shrunk so much, it's hard to tell who's who. Take embryonic stem-cell research. President Bush has limited taxpayer funding of this research on right-to-life, not fiscal-conservative, grounds. He's not against all federal financing of the research, but he doesn't want to expand what's already being done. Conservatives generally support him. Liberals oppose Bush's stance because they like funding what they favor, and they favor stem-cell research. They often describe Bush's policy as a ban on research. That's not true. Researchers at Harvard, Vanderbilt, and other...

E-mail AuthorAuthor ArchiveSend to a FriendPrint Version May 24, 2005, 8:07 a.m.Where’s the Leave-My-Money Alone Coalition?Government has no business funding embryonic-stem-cell research.Before the House of Representatives votes today on embryonic-stem-cell research, every member of the Republican majority should sit down on a hard chair and ask himself: “Why should taxpayers finance this activity?”Embryonic-stem-cell research is fraught with controversy. If it were not, Republicans still might argue that government money should steer clear of this new area, to say nothing of stashing the federal checkbook, just for once.As it happens, the private sector already is busy funding this research: Just...

LiveScience.com - Office workers who share music via Apple Computer's iTunes software track their coworkers' comings and goings and form opinions about them based on their playlists. The opinions are not always what the sharer intended, a new study finds. The sharing phenomenon can nonetheless create a community of sorts among coworkers who otherwise barely know each other. The study, of an unnamed mid-sized U.S. company, was funded in part by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). "People sharing music in our study were aware of the comings and goings of others in the office because they noticed...

Five years ago I would talk about a New World Order, a global government, an international criminal court, a world taxation system, a pan-American union. About half the callers to my radio show didn’t believe me and said that I was making it all up. Now we don’t get those callers and my show is conservatively a hundred times larger. Along with a massive expansion of affiliates that cover 35 states, I also have one of the biggest Internet listening audiences out there. Now that the show has grown, you don’t hear people calling in and saying ‘the UN isn’t...

<p>Eight thousand years before workers began casting two gigantic sections of a dam on the banks of the Ohio River in Leetsdale, people were wading out from shore to the same spot, then a sandbar, and camping for short periods.</p>

Group's bonds to bear county name Reading aloud from Planned Parenthood's "Teen Time" safe-sex manual, Don Kazimir urged county commissioners to scuttle financing that would help the family planning group buy a new office. Then he used a vulgar term to describe a sex act -- turning off County Commission Chairman Warren Newell, who cut Kazimir off. "We just don't need it," Newell said Tuesday. Led by Kazimir, a chorus of Planned Parenthood opponents in the commission chambers shouted back that the elected officials "need to know who these people are." Newell threatened to clear the room if the crowd...

<p>MANCHESTER, England -- Sitting in a drug counseling center's waiting room, Elizabeth Forrest giggles as she scans a comic book explaining "how to roll a perfect joint" in nine easy steps.</p> <p>"This is hilarious," the 25-year-old heroin addict says, pointing to a cartoon warning that smoking too much marijuana can be fattening. The sketch shows an overweight man eating from a dog-food bowl as his pet barks in disapproval.</p>