Free Republic

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, whatever you think you know, you don't know how bad it is. You do not know. I did not know -- well, I suspected it. You don't know how incompetent Obama is. You really don't know don't know. This is breathtaking, what has been learned recently by me and others. As was the case yesterday, a lot of stuff popping. These hearings that are going on this morning with the contractors of the website. "Well, blame them. We did everything we could, blame them." This is the root. These hearings are the root of...

JUST WHAT THE HELL IS THE GOP UP TO? WHERE ARE YOU MICHAEL STEELE? WHAT ARE YOU DOING???? THIS MIGHT BE THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION CYCLE IN OUR LIFETIMES!!!

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano met with Muslim and Arab leaders on Thursday to discuss how to share more information with faith-based groups. The department did not specify which leaders she met with or what groups they represent. The meeting included leaders from South Asian and Sikh communities as well. They discussed how to use the Secure Community Network, a model intended to share information among community-based groups to “improve overall awareness in a crisis situation,” according to a readout from the department. Here’s the full statement: “Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano today met with leaders from...

A boy of 10 died from meningitis after doctors wrongly diagnosed a migraine and told his mother to give him calpol, an inquest was told yesterday. William Cressey saw five doctors in three days before finally suffering 'catastrophic' brain damage. His mother, Cheryl, 48, repeatedly told doctors that she suspected meningitis but each time was ignored, she said. Just hours before he died the schoolboy begged one of those doctors: 'Please help me. I'm going to die.' By then his face was so swollen that he could barely see and he was drifting in and out of consciousness. Wiping tears...

On the eve of the annual meeting here of world leaders, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon complained that he is perceived as "invisible" and that neither he nor his organization gets enough credit for efforts to reform and to alleviate global ills. The United Nations is "underappreciated" by governments and often the press, Mr. Ban said, in part because the world body doesn't trumpet its successes. Member states, he added, are often the root causes of the organization's all-too-frequent deadlocks. "There is unfair criticism," Mr. Ban told The Washington Times in an interview. "We are dependent on the resources given by...

Just days after his resignation, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is about to face more repercussions for his involvement in the troubled wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. New legal documents, to be filed next week with Germany’s top prosecutor, will seek a criminal investigation and prosecution of Rumsfeld, along with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet and other senior U.S. civilian and military officers, for their alleged roles in abuses committed at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba... ... Lawyers for the plaintiffs say that one of the witnesses...

Schools of education have gotten bad grades before. Yet there are some truly shocking statistics about teacher training in this week's report from the Education Schools Project. According to "Educating School Teachers," three-quarters of the country's 1,206 university-level schools of education don't have the capacity to produce excellent teachers. More than half of teachers are educated in programs with the lowest admission standards (often accepting 100% of applicants) and with "the least accomplished professors." When school principals were asked to rate the skills and preparedness of new teachers, only 40% on average thought education schools were doing even a moderately...

New Orleans -- Weeping and cursing in frustration at one point, jauntily announcing the city's comeback at another, Ray Nagin has pursued an erratic course as mayor of this woeful city over the past three weeks. Last week, for example, he announced plans to quickly reopen much of New Orleans without even consulting federal officials. On Monday, he was forced to backtrack as another storm approached the Gulf Coast and President Bush and other top officials warned he was rushing residents back too quickly. Earlier this month, as New Orleans was being swallowed by Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters, Nagin said the...

Placing blame and offering a plan for the future.

An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State Sep 02, 2005 by Robert Tracinski It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster. If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in...

He's going to reply to Bush's UN speech!