Free Republic

President Obama on Tuesday will for the first time insist that any future housing system in the United States makes 30-year mortgages widely available to borrowers, senior administration officials said, preserving a linchpin of the American economy but also continuing to expose taxpayers to risk from another housing meltdown. (Snip) That will require, officials said, some form of government guarantee that means lenders will be reimbursed by taxpayers in the event of a housing catastrophe like the one that occurred several years ago. Traveling to Phoenix on Tuesday, Obama is planning to call for a new

International outcry - and the pleas of a devoted son - seem to have saved an Iranian woman from being stoned to death for adultery. But while Sakineh Mohammedie Ashitani has been granted a reprieve, she is not the only woman sentenced to be stoned for adultery in Iran. There have been at least six sentences carried out since 2006, says Ann Harrison, an Iran expert at Amnesty International in London. Adultery is the only crime that carries such a penalty in Iranian law, she said. Only a handful of countries have laws calling for stoning, and Iran is the...

Musharraf insists: I'm not George Bush's poodle · General says US air strikes infringe sovereignty· President denies running military dictatorship Declan Walsh and Simon Tisdall in Rawalpindi Friday April 28, 2006 The Guardian (UK) General Pervez Musharraf, facing a surge of anti-American sentiment, yesterday warned that covert US air strikes against al-Qaida inside Pakistan were an infringement of national sovereignty. Admitting that his popularity was waning, the Pakistani president insisted he was "not a poodle" of George Bush and rejected accusations he was running a military dictatorship. Speaking to the Guardian at Army House in Rawalpindi weeks after a tense...

There's no helping you. This site is now just a diversion -- like a train wreck. This site is inherently for and about raving egomaniacs, and Jim's site policies -- which amount to excluding reality and actual dialogue in favor of political/militaristic pornography -- is conducive to cognitive dissonance, which at the times your worldview is threatened leads you into psychotic breaks (on the political cognitive plane, that is, and just maybe in other realms too). Not to mention that your baseline politics is based in mythology about American demographics, science, economics, ethics etc. You spoonfeed each other in the...

NO POLITICAL BIAS--none at all.Is CBS wise to insist that there was no political bias involved? So says the independent panel that CBS News asked to find out what went wrong with its infamous Sixty Minutes Wednesday broadcast concerning George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard. "The panel," says its 224-page report, "cannot conclude that a political agenda at 60 Minutes drove the . . . segment." Why not? Certainly the panel could have drawn that conclusion had it uncovered "smoking gun" evidence--such as an anti-Bush or pro-John Kerry email written by, say, the producer, Mary Mapes....